Job Interview Preparation – so you nail it!

I coached a girl called Sara three or four years ago, she was moving from the Pacific islands back to Australia, and she was wondering what she was going to do with her life and career.

They’ve since moved successfully, established a house, had a family, and now she’s got the opportunity to take her career in a new direction. She’s applied for a position for which she’ll have to do a job interview and she hasn’t done one for a long time and she rang me in a panic and said “What should I prepare?”

I talked her through this three part model of what you should prepare for a job interview. I’m sharing it so that if you’re going for a role you can use what Sara used to help her be successful.

A job interview can open doors because if you get it right, it opens you to the next door in the process and if you get a job interview wrong, it can close the doors.

Depending on whether this job is important to you or not we want a way to open doors rather than close them, right?

This is what I said to Sara – there’s really three ways you can keep the doors open through the interview process.

The three doors are these – Experience, Ways of Working and Aspiration.

The first thing I would prepare to make sure the first door opens is around experience – your experience. Do some research on the organisation’s goals. In this case I spoke to Sara and said “Tell me a bit about the organisation and what’s changing.” This was a government agency, and one of the things she knew was that it was going digital. So they’re an aid organisation, but they were changing the way they were delivering and they were doing a lot of stuff online. I knew she had a bit of a media and a production background and I told her to prepare some experiences that relate to the goals of the company, about how they’re going digital and how you’ve helped other organisations.

But prepare them as a series of stories. Alright? Don’t just say “You know what? I can sort of do digital stuff, yeah man, I’m cool.” I want you to prepare three stories where you literally set out (and this is now going to sound like an interview)
*There was a situation
*What action did you take? &
*What outcome did you get?
What was the situation, what action did you take, and what outcome did you get? And you prepare three of those.
At some point in that interview, you’ll open a door for yourself because someone will be sitting there thinking, “Hey, this is someone I could use in a project I’ve got.”

So experience is your first door.

Your second door is sort of “Ways of working”. Any organisation is trying to protect two things: One is their reputation, especially if it’s a government agency, and the second is their culture. They don’t want some rogue individual coming in and behaving like a twit and that being a risk to them and damaging their reputation externally or taking away from their culture. So the second door is that the way that you like to work aligns with how people work in the organisation. So prepare a couple of descriptions of your preferences for the way you want to work and the way you like to work. A good example of this is from me: I like to be led in a way where someone talks about the outcome of the work I’m working on, the thing I’m doing, and then I be left alone to deliver it. If you can describe that really well they can work out fit. That’s a GOOD thing! Because sometimes you want this door closed! If your way of working is not the way they like to work, close that door. Find another door! But if it is, you’ll know that you’re a good fit.

The third door is aspiration.
They will be thinking: “What’s this person want?”
“Where are they headed?”
“What’s their future look like?”
And if you can answer this really articulately, you’ll open a door for yourself because not only can you have the experience to deliver something now and you work the way they do, but their future and your future align.

Now, what I wouldn’t prepare is some sort of basic corporate statement of – “I need to be X, Y in three or four years”, but I would think about – if they did choose you, if they open the door to you in this organisation – what contribution could you make to this organisation in the future and what might that mean for your life?

Remember the situation was that I got a call – Sara had not been for a job interview for ages and she said to me “How do I prepare?” “How do I open these doors to this role?” and there’s three doors you want to open in a job interview.

The first one is the door of experience and if you open that, people can go “You know what? This person can really deliver something to our organisation because they’ve had the experience and they’ve taken some action that’s got some outcomes in the past.”

The second door is the door of ways of working, which is the cultural fit. I would think about your preference for that way of working and check if it’s a fit.

And the third is the door of the future – if you open this, there’s a fit between where they’re going and where you’re going.

In a follow-up video, I’ll let you know whether she got the job or not, and Sara if you’re watching can you please give me a call and let me know?! Because I haven’t followed up since we spoke last week.

The point of this is to say – if you’re going for a job interview, try to open the three doors of experience, ways of working and aspiration, and you’re going to be more likely to be successful.

See you next time on The Reason and the Road.