Nailing Your Next Interview: My Top Interview Preparation Technique

In this week's newsletter, let me walk you through one of my favourite interview preparation techniques.

Congratulations! You've put in the effort and secured yourself an interview.

Now, there's just one final hurdle standing before you: the interview itself!

The most common mistake I observe is that people tend to focus on typical interview questions they might be asked. They then brainstorm examples of their notable achievements throughout their career so far.

However, they often overlook a crucial step – putting themselves in the shoes of the interviewer.

You see, the interviewer isn't solely interested in your accomplishments. Rather, they're eager to understand how your achievements can contribute to their business's success.

But here's the challenge: How can you be aware of the specific issues they're dealing with? How do you prepare in a way that allows you to connect your current skills and past successes to the organization's requirements that you aspire to join?

The fantastic news is that there exists a proven framework you can easily follow.

Here's my favourite 4-step interview preparation technique that helped me anticipate potential interview questions in industries that I knew nothing about.

Step 1: Head over to the job description for your target role

I want you to have the job description to hand, either print it out or have it ready to go on your phone or desktop. 

Step 2: Highlight the key requirements in the job description

There are two ways you can do this.

My preferred way, print the job description out and do it the old-fashioned way.

Grab a highlighter pen, and highlight the key skills and desired requirements.

Or the more tech-savvy way, copy and paste the requirements into a Word or note document to create a bullet point list of requirements.

Here’s an example from a job description I was looking at with a client:

Step 3. For each of these requirements, add “tell me about a time you…” at the beginning.

In steps 3 and 4 we’re going to start crafting interview questions based on these requirements.

To start with I just want you to add "tell me about a time" to the start of each of your job requirements. 

Step 4. And at the end of each requirement add “…what did you do and what was the result?”

Each sentence is going to begin with “tell me about a time”

And end with “what did you do and what was the result?”.

So for example using the job description previously.

There was “developing others”.

This could look like this.

Tell me about a time you developed another person/team, what did you do and what was the result?

Get it?

We’re now generating potential interview questions you could get asked to evidence how you meet the key requirements of the role.

Examples

For example, one of the requirements could be “coaching and developing the team”.

So using the above framework it could read.

“Tell me about a time you coached and developed your team, what did you do and what was the result?”

Another requirement could be “delivering operational budgets”.

This could read.

“Tell me about a time you delivered an operational budget, what did you do and what was the result?”

Bonus Step: Leverage AI

I want to end on one bonus step that I’ve found extremely useful.

If you’ve read some of my posts then I love using AI (notably ChatGpt) to speed up my career change processes.

In this case, you can generate a list of interview questions using the following prompt:

And here's a little taster of what it generated for the job description that we used earlier...

Conclusion

Voila!

You've just compiled a list of potential interview questions tailored to your desired job.

Now all you need to do is draft compelling examples for each prepared question.

Then you're all set to showcase you're the perfect fit for the role!

Happy job hunting and good luck!

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Whenever you're ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. The Job Offer Blueprint: This affordable and comprehensive course will teach you the proven system I used to transform my failed job search. Go from facing online application rejection to securing 1-2 interviews per week with exciting companies. Achieve a better work-life balance without having to compromise your salary. Gain everything you need to start generating results in just 2+ hours.

Click here to check it out.

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