Page 47 - You're Hired! Interview Answers
P. 47
You’Re hiRed! inteRview anSweRS n What do I consider were my main successes in that role/situation?
n What helped or hindered me?
n What were the key skills/knowledge I brought to the situation?
n What did I learn?
This is an important aspect of preparation because the interviewer will use your
answers to assess things such as your objectivity, your self-awareness, your
willingness to self-evaluate and your learning style. These are usually quite
hard questions to answer ‘off the cuff’ because, even for the most quick-witted,
they need some reflection time: so do your reflecting in advance. See Chapter
7 for more advice on answering non-competency-based questions.
Researching yourself: assets and risks
The final element of preparation that we will cover here is the time you should
give to weighing yourself, your style and your assets/risks in relation to both
the interview situation and the job. The details of how to make sure that your
assets come across in terms of task, thought and people will be dealt with in
detail in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, so here we will focus on other elements of self-
awareness that are relevant to you as an interviewee.
Despite having conducted hundreds of interviews, it still surprises us how
unaware people often are of their impact during the interview. So, how well
do you know yourself? What do your friends/family/colleagues say about your
impact when you are not around? Probably the only way you will find out is by
asking them!
Your impact at interview
Part of your preparation should include a long, hard look in the mirror
(metaphorically speaking), so as to make as objective an assessment as
possible of people’s likely first impression of you. Here are some questions you
can ask of yourself – or of others – to help build self-awareness of your impact.
“How confident do I sound when talking about myself?”
Research shows that interviews often overemphasise – and thus tend to put
too much weight on – social confidence and verbal fluency. Good interviewers
36
