Interview Preparation

Service Description

The consultation I hold with clients to discover the right information for CVs and supporting documents also serves as excellent interview preparation. You can have this service both alongside a CV or separate. Just call or email me and we'll devise a plan. Due to people rarely speaking with friends and family about the intricacies of our jobs, clients usually have limited experience in articulating certain facets of their roles and outcomes. I study your existing CV, provide a safe and relaxed yet structured environment, and ask you the questions I believe an interviewer will. These questions often lead to the 'gold' you maybe haven't thought of before. With my support and guidance, people find that this is the perfect environment to find the right words, the right points to concentrate on and the right ways to tackle interview questions. Interviewers can ask you to lay these scenarios out in the STAR format: Situation, Task, Action and Result. As a seasoned career consultant, I follow this pattern in my questioning in general: I seek to understand the background, what you (or someone else) identified needed to happen, what you did, and what the outcomes were. We establish the ideal scenarios (experiences from your roles) to demonstrate your best self to employers - and how to express them – before you get to the interview. The work includes establishing achievements, understanding the ‘hows’ and the outcomes (statistics), and also the challenges you experienced and how you overcame them - demonstrating just how capable you are. I always seek quantitative data (e.g., increased customer satisfaction by 30%) but it’s not always quantifiable and clients may not know the answer – and this is fine. I gently probe until hearing that that’s not possible and am more than happy with the answer that you’re capable of giving. Sometimes it might mean going away and doing some digging! I then can write the CV and/or provide you a set of interview answers to study prior to interviews. You will have these scenarios safely and confidently in your ‘back pocket’. Having achievements / outcomes detailed accurately and pleasingly on CVs often helps clients feel far happier and more positive about the future. This all leads, of course, to increased success in interviews. I can also provide a highly useful interview prep sheet with details on how to maximise the event. It includes likely questions from employers and that you can ask them (and when).