Interview Tips & Tricks
Introduction
When it comes to getting ready for your interview, it can be an overwhelming endeavor - which is why you need some interview tips and tricks to help! Your overall in-person (or Zoom!) impression will be one of the most important decision factors in the hiring process. Conveying your personality, skills, and expertise in 45 minutes can seem daunting, but as you do more interviews it will feel more natural.
In this post, we will be going over four areas of interview tips and tricks that a hiring manager will be mindful of during an interview. Everything from the way you dress to the questions you answer is under review - so it’s important to make sure you are polished on all sides.
We’ll start with your professional image and the kind of clothing that is considered appropriate to wear to an interview. Then, we’ll go over the ways in which you can bring direct experience and related skills into your interview. This will transition into an overview of the important information that a business will want you to know about how they operate and the culture they embody. Finally, with this knowledge, we will apply it to sample questions to see how it could play out in the interview.
Prologue to Interview Tips & Tricks: The Screening Interview
Nowadays there are so many online tools to submit resumes. Most businesses screen you as a candidate before you can get your foot in the door. Typically, an HR representative will phone you with standardized questions that help see if you fit competency areas and show an interest in the role. This conversation termed a “screening call” is your opportunity to learn from the company regarding what areas they may be focussing on in the interview and what the job is really about.
The preparation for your in-person interview starts at this screening call, as you can glean critical information about your session as well as show your interest in the position. You should always begin spending some time learning about the organization, and how your department fits into the overall picture and learn a bit about the company culture by taking a deep dive into their social media and websites.
If it’s a public organization, look to see if they’ve published any briefings for the community and give them a read to see current initiatives and strategies. When you’re on the call, use the opportunity to ask questions about the structure of your interview and what information they want to know from you. Ask for a more detailed breakdown of the job description, and ask what areas of the position were most valued, so you showcase the most important skills.
To conclude this section of our interview tips & tricks, make sure you take plenty of notes! Phone interviews can seem overwhelming as they break down a lot of information in a short time. Take the time to go over your notes and organize them in a way that makes sense to you before you do further research and prep your responses. This will give you a competitive edge in answering questions thoughtfully and completely during your in-person session.
Now with this information in mind, we can go into the next section of our interview tips & tricks; interview preparation.
Professional Image:
Your professional image is your first impression and it’s important to wear clothing that reflects who you will be as a future employee. Get a sense of how formal the dress wear is by dropping by the neighbourhood and doing some people watching.
When in doubt, lean-to dressing more conservatively rather than boldly. The next step is making sure your clothing fits you properly and is tailored if you’re able to. If you’re interviewing online, make sure your outfit looks right on camera, as sometimes the lighting can change the shade or pattern of your clothing, making it look odd. Investing in this first impression will be noticed by hiring managers, and you’ll feel more confident too!
A professional image also goes beyond clothing. Take a little extra time getting ready, and ensure your nails are trimmed, your hair is presentable, and your face is clean! If you feel like you need a haircut, now’s the time to get it styled.
Make sure you’re clean-shaven, or that your facial hair is trimmed. Consider visiting your barber for maintenance the day before to groom any stray hairs. Going the extra mile for a job you’re passionate about will show, and making the effort in every area will help you to be an outstanding candidate!
Displaying Your Skills
When you applied for the position, you read over the job description. You combed through your experiences and memories in order to determine if you were qualified to send in your resume. But what you came up with doesn’t always end up on your resume, so it’s critical to give a holistic view of what you can offer.
For example, one aspect of the job description may state “is able to handle the different and regularly changing priorities of the portfolio”. You then want to take this point and try to match it with a specific instance you were able to do so - for example:
During the pandemic, did you have to drop a project in favour of something completely different under your scope?
Was there a major crisis that took priority over something you were working on?
How did you manage the stakeholders involved in both areas?
You might be wondering what happens when you don’t have direct experience in a certain area. In support positions, you may do similar tasks but in widely different fields. For example, in a government position you may play a support role for policy-related work, but want to move to a similar job where the department works more with the community. When this happens, you have indirect experience - and that’s still important!
How do you incorporate this information?
How you word your response is important. Make sure that you take the time to acknowledge you don’t have direct experience while still emphasizing how you developed the skills for the job. This can help offset the fact that you haven’t entered the field yet.
Here are a few examples of responses to areas where you’re lacking direct experience:
1 - Show off how resourceful you are
With indirect experience, an employer wants to make sure you’re up to a steep learning curve.
Have you tackled a project that wasn’t clear to you, or required significant research?
Were you given a task outside of your scope?
What strategies did you lean on to make sure your work was done well?
Speaking to these experiences will go far when an employer is unsure whether you are ready to take on their role.
2 - Soft Skills are Important Too
Oftentimes, the focus is on a certification or a hard skill. However, when you’re seeking a new position, good employers prefer an optimal fit with the company over someone with a Masters Degree or years in the field (when at comparable levels).
To be clear - this is applicable when your experience is comparable. You won’t be able to advertise your leadership skills if you have the experience of an entry-level employee and are applying to be a Director!
Some examples of soft skills are:
Communication
Leadership
Critical Thinking and;
Adaptability.
Compare your strengths to the job description and see where they line up, then give specific examples of how you used these skills in a professional setting.
3 - Be Brief and Be Positive
The hiring manager sees you as an important candidate - this is why you’re in the interview. Don’t apologize for your lack of direct experience and instead ensure that your responses are worded positively. The best way to ensure your responses are thoughtful is by being prepared and prepping thoroughly for your interview.
Summing up by going through the job description and interview structure (if you get this information before your screening call) will give you the opportunity to match important focusses to specific experiences you’ve had over your professional career.
If you’re changing fields or moving departments, you may need to go further and describe your indirect experiences and soft skills in order to show how you can adapt to the new role if offered the position. Forbes has a great article that goes over indirect experience in further detail if you want to explore this topic further.
Proving You Did Your Research
As explained in the prologue section of our interview tips & tricks, your research begins when you submit your resume! Often hiring managers will screen a candidate at a random time, rather than setting a specific appointment. If you put the time in to write a solid cover letter, you can put the time in to make sure you are ready for these sessions with a potential future employer.
Begin with a general overview of the organization including:
1 - The “About Us” section or anything that goes over the culture of the product, service, or organization
2 - Their news page or newsletters
3 - History of the organization, if an overview is available
4 - Social media pages
Try to get a sense of where your position will fit in with the organization as well and balance the different priorities of the position with the products and services the company offers. Thinking about the position you’re applying for while you’re researching will help you glean information more efficiently, and retain what matters.
Once you’re scheduled for an interview, go even deeper. Use the information you gain from your screening call to research the business management strategies that they employ, and read up more thoroughly on the area you’ll be working in.
If they’ve published policy papers, pull out a highlighter and go in-depth - but only if it’s directly related to your position or department. Being armed with this knowledge will be important in the long run and show a genuine interest in the position.
Sample Interview Tips & Tricks Questions
You’ve chosen your outfit, aced your phone interview, and you’ve thought up some experiences that will match with the position you’ve applied for. Now what?
Interview questions are the final stage in interview prep. If you’ve done a number of interviews, you know that interviewers ask questions that fall into a few broad categories. If you don’t know the structure of your interview or the type of questions they may ask, preparing responses to the following categories will help you feel more comfortable when the hiring manager starts asking questions.
1 - Tell Me About Yourself
This question seems to be asked in every interview and is the opportunity to give a general overview of who you are. It’s important to list some of the big, more important positions you’ve worked - as well as some of your outside interests (especially if they’re related) so you come off as more well-rounded.
Some of your hobbies even have important transferable skills that can be related! For example, if you enjoy coaching a sport you have leadership as well as mentoring skills that you honed by being in an area of expertise and building your experience in a less formal setting.
In this post, we are only broadly going over the questions as part of the interview preparation experience. However, theMuse has an article that describes some of the most commonly used interview questions that can help narrow your focus to specific areas.
2 - Strengths
Strengths is a broad category and could include your soft skills, certifications, or projects where you were able to excel. Consider your strengths from all of these categories in order to ensure you touch on everything you have to offer. Try to think of a couple of different examples of successes in different positions, volunteer roles, or certifications - to ensure you can offer a variety of responses.
3 - Weaknesses
“What is your weakness? Where have you had a conflict and how did you resolve it?”
These are tough questions - as an interviewee, you want to sound flawless but everyone makes mistakes! If they ask about a weakness, choose a weakness that you’re working on improving. If your weakness is that you need to work on your technical writing skills, highlight the work you’ve done to improve it. Have you done a certification? Gotten your work reviewed by an industry professional? Make sure to specify how it helped you build your skills.
If your question surrounds conflict, try to choose an experience that is meaningful to you, rather than something that seems small or trivial. An example could be discussing how you were able to rebuild a relationship with a colleague or rescue a project that became delayed or over budget. The most important portion of the conflict question is what actions you took to overcome the conflict and how you learned from it.
4 - Company Knowledge
Sometimes employers will simply ask “What can you tell us about our company?”, so ensure you have an overview of the organization in your head so you can answer this question thoroughly.
To Summarise
In this blog post on interview tips and tricks, we went through a lot of information surrounding the interview process including how to dress, research, and prepare yourself for the meeting.
However, the most important advice any hiring manager can give you is to simply take the time to do the work. If you’re unsure of where to start - including researching and honing your experiences to match the position applied for, we can help! We offer 1-on-1 interview coaching where we take our experiences as hiring managers to help you optimize your interview to get you your dream job.