The secret of job interview preparation is no secret
at all: The more you prepare, the more you know about
the position and the company, the better you will
perform in the interview. The best way to visualize
the advantage that company knowledge can give you is
to imagine that for some reason there is some kind of
mistake in HR, and you are asked to interview for your
current job at your company. Think for a few minutes
about how well that interview would go. You know what
the duties of the job are, and have been performing
exactly those for some time. You know what results the
management desires, and have examples of those results
to talk about. You know what the corporate culture is,
and have contributed to that culture for some time
already. In short, on the strength of your job
interview, you would be a lock for your own position.
That kind of knowledge and confidence should be the
goal of your job interview preparation for any other
job you interview for. Though it’s difficult to get
the intimate knowledge of a company without the day to
day interaction of working there, at the very least
you can get a clear understanding of the position that
you are interviewing for. Through printed materials
such as job descriptions, combined with informal
research among people familiar with the job, company
and industry, you should be able to determine what the
job duties are, and what kinds of results are
considered success by the company. In addition, you
should be able to find out what attributes or
characteristics the company believes will contribute
to success, and what additional duties and
responsibilities a successful employee would take on
over time.
More Job Preparation Secrets
Your job preparation strategy is to integrate these
factors -- the job’s duties, desired results, desired
characteristics, future responsibilities -- into the
answers that you give the interviewer about yourself.
Like the hypothetical interview for your own job, you
would ideally like to give the impression that you are
already doing exactly what the company is looking for,
that you are already producing exactly the results
that the company desires, that you are displaying
exactly the characteristics and attributes that the
company values.
Part of your job preparation will be folding that
information into the answers in a convincing and
natural-sounding way. The most effective way to do
this is to give these answers in the forms of quick
narratives and examples of your performances and
results. Simply saying that you are the kind of person
who displays leadership isn’t enough. Everyone would
say that, even if it were true or not. But if you have
a great story about an instance when you showed your
leadership to achieve a positive result, that means
much more than a simple assertion. The story is even
more powerful if the situation, the actions and the
results are similar or identical to the situations,
actions and results that you would encounter at the
target job.
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