Our pick of the week:
Final interviews allow for you to have a better understanding of the organization’s culture, goals, and people. You should never forget that you are interviewing them as much as they are evaluating you. You get to showcase your experiences, hard work, discuss what you want for your career AND evaluate if this company provides this opportunity. Here are FIVE ways to rock your final interview like a pro (Blavity, 2017).
Lifehacker While facing a row of people all tasked with analyzing your every word can be stressful, Hannah Morgan, job search strategist and founder of CareerSherpa.net, focuses on the shared goal between you and the panelists: “Don’t let the feeling of being outnumbered scare you. Everyone is there for the same reason – to determine whether you are a fit for the role. This is true for the interviewee as well.” As with any job interview, you should use that time and access to the people who have an inside view of the company to figure out if you would be successful there (Heather Yamada-Hosley, 2017).
Behavioral interview questions require you to pull a specific moment from your work history to explain and expand on, and they can be one of the hardest ones to tackle — interview questions are tough enough, but coming up with an example on the spot makes it all the more difficult. To give you a head start, we pulled out a handful of behavioral interview questions from our list of the top 50 most common interview questions. Get ahead of the game by learning how to answer them and preparing anecdotes in advance (Emily Moore, 2017)!
When interviewers ask this question, they’re not just paying attention to the content of your response — they also want to see how well you’re keeping your cool, says career counselor and executive coach Roy Cohen. “Bear in mind that the interviewer is not your therapist,” he tells Bustle. “These sorts of questions are asked typically to determine that you act appropriately in stressful situations, that you exercise good judgement and know how much and how little to share, and that there are no obvious reasons to disqualify you.” (Suzannah Weiss, 2017).
The Muse We all know that we should tailor our cover letter to each company, show our enthusiasm for the role, include real-life examples of our accomplishments, and double (or triple) check everything we write for spelling and grammar mistakes. But what else are we missing as we’re going to craft this important piece of our application? And the question many of us are probably asking ourselves: Why aren’t we still landing jobs if we’re covering all our bases (Young Entrepreneur Council, 2017)?
The Muse Finalizing your resume is a bit of a process, and, as such, it’s a huge relief when you’re done. However, if you’re being meticulous (which you definitely should be) it can take so much longer than you thought possible, what with all the formatting, detail-gathering, and, of course, job-specific tailoring. But there’s no way around it if your goal is to create polished, typo-free, and compelling document (Semczuk, 2017).
The Muse For weeks you’ve been actively sending your resume out and applying for job openings when (finally!) you get a call from a company who wants you to come in for an interview—today! Because you still have to do your current job today, you have exactly an hour to prep. How do you get ready for this (Vann, 2017)?
Business Insider When you do get to an interview, hiring managers want to see if you can explain how your expertise aligns with the company’s values and goals. In the moment it may feel easier to sweep work experiences up into a tidy pile. But if you sum up your work history as a “bit of everything,” the competency you derived from all of that work may get lost in translation (de Haaf, 2016).
Fast Company During the interview process, ask questions that confirm the company’s values align with your own, and seek to understand the degree of corporate transparency and whether there will be frequent feedback from the management team. If not, your new startup job may fail to meet your expectations and become an environment of frustration instead of the incubator for growth you are seeking (Barnych, 2014).
What we really like – and remember – is when you follow up based on something we discussed. Maybe we talked about data collection techniques so you send information about a set of tools you strongly recommend. Maybe we talked about quality so you send a process checklist you developed that we could adapt to use in our company (Haden, 2014).
