Tips for taking your job interview skills to the next level

To walk us through what you should do to make yourself stand out during the interview process is Michelle Shafer.

Your resume got you in the door and you now have a job interview lined up. What’s next?

Career coach and author Michelle Schafer joined CTV Your Morning Ottawa to offer some advice for job seekers on how to take your interview skills to the next level and land the job you’re seeking.

“The interview is the time to show that they actually can do the job. Give that proof and evidence that shows they can meet the job requirements because the past predicts the future. If you can demonstrate that you’ve done something really well in your career past, it shows that you’re a really good fit for the job that you’re interviewing for,” she said.

What are interviewers looking for?

Schafer says interviewers are looking for specifics about your experience.

“It’s not good enough to just say, ‘high-level of managed projects,’ or, ‘I’ve led teams,’” she said. “You need to give a specific example that backs up all of the specific things that the job is asking for.”

Schafer says you should prepare some specific examples of instances when you were successful in the past at tasks the new job might have so that you’re prepared for questions about how you performed in the past.

What to do before the interview

“What I hear people do is they decide they’re going to wing the interview. Never wing the interview. There’s so much you can do in advance,” says Schafer.

First, she says, start by looking at the job posting and seeing what it is expecting from you.

“You can actually forecast all of the different questions that you might be asked in the interview. Questions like, tell me about yourself, obviously, and why you would want to work for us, but also a series of knowledge questions, behaviour questions, those specific examples to bring forward and hypothetical and situational questions,” she said.

“What you want to do is line up those specific examples of times where you’ve actually demonstrated those requirements, using what I call the STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result.”

Take a situation that occurred at a previous job that, through your actions on the task you were assigned or undertook, resulted in a positive outcome.

Research the company ahead of time to know how best to answer the question, “Why do you want to work for us?”

What to do the day of the interview

“So many people are nervous and anxious. The first thing I say is just breathe. Do something on the day of that gives you some kind of relaxation,” Schafer says.

Be early, either in-person or online. When it’s a virtual interview, you want to make sure your technology is working so that there are no hiccups when interviewing.

This is also the time to go over the STAR examples you prepared in advance.

“Make sure that you take a look at all of those examples, refresh your memory about the job posting, about all of your examples, and then just be prepared to talk about all of those things,” she said.

After the interview

You want to make sure you send a thank you, Schafer says.

“This is a great time to be able to share with the interviewer something they shared with you that was really of interest to you. You want to be able to say thank you, and connect with them on LinkedIn,” she said.

This is the time to do a self-assessment, so you can look at what really worked well in the interview, what would you do differently the next time, and ask yourself if there were any red flags that came up in the interview.

You can also get a head start on the next round, if there is one, by thinking about any follow-up questions you might have about the company.

“Think about all those questions that you might still need to ask them. At the end of the interview, it’s a good time to be able to assess the company as much as you’re assessing them, so making notes about those extra questions you might want to ask them if you move on to the next level,” she said.

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