The interview is a standard part of securing employment in the modern job market. Whether you are seeking a job in higher ed or as a day laborer (and I use these examples only because I have experience in both), you will need to interview, and interview strongly, to get the job. You will spend more time with new co-workers than your friends and family. Now, whether you really want to work with these folks is a different story, improtant or you to find out on the interview. Below are key points I keep in mind when interviewing. The goal is to get the job offer. All decisions follow from that.

Why am I writing this? I have conducted nearly 100 interviews in the last four years with college students seeking on-campus student employment and engaged in a dozen interviews myself in the last ten years. I am not a job counselor and have no qualifications other than the aforementioned experiences.

Interviewing is basically a timed oral essay. The nice thing is that you can prepare for it. You are intimately familiar with the subject matter: you, and are better qualified to speak to your strengths, skills, knowledge, and goals than any other living thing. Identify your goals. Know what you want. Understand that you are marketing yourself. Keep your marketing message in mind.

We all learn how to write essays in high school. Here are the three steps to creating your interview essay:

1. Have a thesis. Your thesis is, “I am the best person for this job”.
2. Support your thesis. A week before you start interviewing, write down the three strongest reasons that you are the best person for the job. Use positive examples of contributions you would make.
3. Present a strong conclusion. Just like that high school essay, a concluding sentence or two that summarizes your thesis and supporting points is crucial. These should be the last words out of your mouth, and it should end with something along the lines of, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to interview with you.”

Other key things to remember are:

• Take notes. My mind races during an interview. I will often say things that I want to emphasize again later on, or think of something unrelated to the interview that I absolutely need to follow up on. By jotting it down, you appear to be ready for the professional world, and you can address the topic later.
• Neatness counts. Clip your fingernails, tie your shoelaces, etc.
• Dress for the job you ultimately want. Interviewing to clean stables but want to be a jockey? Dress like a jockey. Interviewing to work in the mail room but want to be the CEO? Dress like a CEO.
• Interviewing is like sex, voting, and retiring. Do it early and do it often. Very few people care about your motives. You don’t have to accept every job offer, but do accept every interview offer. (I do not suggest that you accept every offer of sex! Use discretion. Protect yourself. Do accept every offer to vote or retire.)
• Practice, practice, practice. Try out new approaches in interviews you don’t need. Have a great joke about nervous interviewees? Don’t try it when up for your dream job! Do unleash it when interviewing for the burger-flipping position.
• Be nervous. Its okay, really, to be nervous. If you can channel that nervousness into positive energy, do it. Remember to breathe evenly, and visualize something that makes you happy, whether its a coral reef or an image of the first pay-check.

Other good hits on this topic: “A glimpse and a hook“. This fellow has some good advice. I disagree with his thoughts on cover letters. Even if no one ever reads your cover letter, writing a clear, concise cover letter is one of the best ways to prepare for an interview. Write it, rewrite it. I suggest that you should spend twice as much time on your cover letter as you CV. Questions to ask yourself during the process are:

1. How well does my CV reflect what I am saying in my cover letter?
2. Can I excise verbage from the cover letter. (Translation: Write a draft, take a red pen and cross out any and all extra words!)
3. Keep it brief. In “A glimpse and a hook”, the writer emphasizes that his opinions are formed within 30 seconds. I don’t want to read the gory details. I want those later.
4. Provide just enough detail to allow me to formulate good questions. A cover letter is a balancing act. When I interview, I need something to get the conversation going. If your cover letter and CV answer every question, I might not even bring you in for an interview!
5. Conform to standards. Read and internalize Strunk & White. (This is advice I should follow.)

In a future post, I will discuss being the interviewer, and the techniques that I have found effective for identifying candidates I would be happy to work with and who would contribute substantially to core mission.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 9:33 am and is filed under Notes from a commute. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.