How to nail a job interview

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Evancet the job ad, just got the email back. The recruiter writes that you're through to the next round. But now you're feeling a bit sick in the tummy. Enter the dreaded job interview. Hello, Lisa Liang here for this working life, helping to make your work life better. Job interviews can be terrifying, but there are ways to prepare yourself ahead of time so that you have the best possible chance of landing that job. If you have any tips, stories or questions about job interviews, you can email this working life at abc.net.au. So you've been given a date, time and location for the job interview. It's face to face. It's a three person panel and you have a week to prepare. Time to get some help. We have Dave Vulaski, who's a career coach at Effort-wise Consulting and he has a background in neuroscience. Get a Dave. Hello, Lisa. And Nick Teschney is a careers counsellor based in Melbourne and is here in the studio with me. Hello, Annick. Good morning, Lisa. Before we get into this, Sharon responded with her job interview, horror story when I posted about this on my LinkedIn. I once had an interview for a job as an orchestra manager. I didn't have a music degree and unknown to me the first stage of the interview was to do a test and this test was on the composer Stravinsky. I should probably have walked out then and there, but that actually flown me into the interview. So I felt obliged to stay. Then the actual interview consisted of a series of really technical musical questions like about violin string tensions. I am absolutely certain it was excruciating for everyone and no surprises. I did not get the job. Oh no, poor Sharon, but thanks for sharing Sharon. So Dave, what's the lesson for all of us from Sharon's story? Oh, that's, I mean, that is definitely the worst case scenario. And I think everyone's worst fear is like, well, I think I'm qualified for this job. But then you realize somehow you didn't, you didn't know all of the qualifications needed. I mean, you know, I don't know what in that case what she could have done differently except maybe read the job description a little bit more closely or something like that. I mean, I've had situations sort of like that, but one time I was, I basically failed the job interview in like 10 minutes because I forgot. And I think this is pretty common. You know, people are applying to like a hundred jobs nowadays, you know, in one search. And so if you're not keeping track of everything, then the recruiters get back to you and they're like, you know, well, like, you know, congratulations, you've got an interview. And they might not even tell you what the job is or something they kind of just, you know, expect you to know. And so I didn't, I didn't remember the job description. And their first question to me was, what did you like about the job description? And I tried to like, worm my way out of it. I was like, well, what do you mean? You know, I was trying to throw it back at them. And they really didn't let me go. And I was like, you know, I don't, I think I haven't looked at it in a little while. And they were like, all right, thanks for your time. And Dave, that's a good point because very often when we're applying online now, I hear that the job descriptions can actually disappear. Yeah, of course. I mean, and so like, you know, there's no shame, I think, if you, you know, if you're really organized and that's great, you want to copy and paste the job description in your, whatever, if you spreadsheet or doc or something. But if you don't remember what it is, you know, you can say like to the recruiter, you can reach out and be like, you know, usually I have all the job descriptions in one place, but I seem to have misplaced this one. Would you be able to send me it again? You know, if they took the link down and it's no longer up. And Nick, where do you think Sean might have missed the mark? What have you got to add here? Look, it really is an unfortunate situation. Don't be afraid to actually say, I don't think this is the role that I anticipated that I thought I was applying for. Thank you for your time. And, you know, take it as a lesson, take it as a win in a way that you confidently articulated that it's not what yourself or the employer is looking for. And at that point, so try and just cut it early. I think so. Move on. Don't waste anyone's time. And it shows a level of maturity. Now, and you do say that the first step in preparing for a job interview is know your why. What do you mean by this? The reason why I always start with your why, self-awareness is so important. We take for granted being able to introduce ourselves. Individuals that I work with stumble over pronouncing their name clearly and confidently. And when it comes to introducing yourself, it's really important that you state your values, your interests, your skills and experiences. And if you feel comfortable enough, you might even add in a little interest or an odd fact about yourself. For an interesting fact about yourself to really relate to the panel or the employer. Dave, you emphasised prepping for the tell me about yourself question. Can you explain how you use a professional headline in quotation marks to answer that one? Yeah. And yes, that question, there's research on that question being, you know, more important having an outsized impact because it's the first impression. And first impressions, like you probably know about the confirmation bias, which is, you know, we try to we find evidence of things we already believe and we ignore evidence of things we don't believe. So if you make a good first impression, people are going to try to find evidence that you are, you know, good. They're going to find positive things about you. So I do think it's it is really important to spend, you know, a good amount of time on that. And I've, and actually also what what Anik just said was, I agree with that. I think like I have this kind of formula for answering, tell me about yourself or your professional headline. And one of the parts of it is to share something, a detail about your childhood. And I'll explain more. But basically the formula, I know it sounds a little weird. The formula is, so you start with basically labeling yourself. You say like, I'm really passionate about this, you know, whatever it is. And it's probably because when I was a kid, this happened. And the reason why that that's kind of a really skillful way to do it is because everyone is going to label you immediately. Right? Like if you've been on a hiring team before, you know when you're talking about candidates, that you have shortcuts for talking about people. So you'd be like, oh, you know, the person from that place, if it's a weird, you know, that woman from Hawaii, you remember her? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Or oh, the sweater guy or whatever it is. So your labels are just going to, they're going to come up. So you can choose what people label you as or you can let them do it. And so if you, if you give them something a little bit vulnerable or just like personal, then that's going to be your label. And so you get to control that. So anyway, the first one is to label yourself. The second one is you say what you've learned in the last, you know, X years that you've been working. Some, whatever the most impressive skill you've learned, three is you give the most impressive examples. You like, you know, for example, and my role at such and such, we achieved these results. And then four is you talk about your future. Like now I'm excited to help an industry leader or whatever this company, however they would describe themselves. You want to have done a little research on that. And then I'm excited to help an industry leader do, you know, whatever they want to do for their customers. So that's kind of the headline idea. And just sorry to go back one little thing about the childhood piece is, like I recently I had a client who used this. And he's a technical guy. He does technical work coding and stuff. I'm really passionate about this probably because one of my first memories was seeing a big pile of Legos in front of me and being excited about making new shapes with them. And so then he became Lego guy to this hiring. And he recently got a couple offers from and he came back to me. He was like, they really vibed with Lego guy. You'll listen to ABC Radio Nationals this working life at Lisa Leon with experts Dave Walloski, career coach and Anik Tessney, careers counselor. And you're finding out how to nail a job interview. If you have any tips, stories or questions about job interviews, please share. Email this working life at abc.net.au. And he has written to say, his top tip is, put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer. They're trying to solve a problem. What research can you do prior to understand the problem they're trying to solve? Every role has responsibilities and indicators of performance. They clear from the job ad. Good one, Andy. Sarah has written to say, if you can do the interview in person, do that. Also, always follow up an interview with a thank you note. So good tips there. Keep them coming. Dave, you've run through the professional headline. You do also have the power of the pause. So after you've done your spiel, you say, pause, can you go into this for us? Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest things, one of the biggest reasons why qualified people failed the interviews is because they ramble. They answer too long and somewhat go into irrelevant things. So it's very powerful to practice and memorize a line that you can use at the end of not all of your answers, but at least some of them in the line I like is, I'm happy to say more, but I'll pause here for your thoughts. I love it. And I think I love the fact that you have a tagline that you can rely on as well. Now, I do want to move to the body of it. So behavioral questions. They often get shot at us during an interview. You do have an approach to answering these Dave. Do you want to talk through the stories and how you prepare for it with your stories? Yeah. So, I mean, you can't anticipate every single question. Right? I mean, you can practice a lot and that helps. I think really just memorizing four to five short stories. And I'm not saying memorize the story because it's your life. Like you'll remember it. But just remember these big bullet points of the stories helps a lot. And there's a few stories that cover 80, 90% of the questions you're going to ask. You're going to be asked. And so it pays to just memorize a few of them. And these are things like a time that you grew from failure or sort of made a mistake, change to habit, that kind of thing. A time when you collaborated with a team and like what your role was in the team, any conflicts you managed. A time when you persuaded a coworker or your boss to do something, you know, to take an action to show that you can kind of sell ideas to people. And another one that's good is just like a time when you overcame a really difficult challenge with whether it's, you know, tight deadline or low resources or something like that. So these are just some examples that cover a good amount of those sort of questions. And those questions will start with can you tell me a time about, you know, when you experienced. Dave, I mean, that's a lot of potential content to having your head. So do you have any tips for how you memorize these stories? It's a good question. So I would, you know, you write them out. And then you really just, you want to have, I think you got to trust yourself ultimately, obviously, that you have a title for each story for yourself, you know, like, oh, the time at that place or with that person. And you kind of trust yourself to after having practice, you got to just kind of be present. And so, yeah, just remembering the title and maybe a couple bullet points for these things. And, and you really say practice, practice, practice. So give us some tips for this pivotal part of the job interview, please. Practice is so important. And now we're technology to our fingertips. You can practice if it's an online interview with a colleague, a manager, family, and get some feedback from them. Utilize AI. It's here for us. A great tool. So as an example, you can upload the job description and ask the platform to come up with some behavioral interview questions. Give that to whoever you're practicing with. And the other thing that you can do is utilize your mobile phone. Record yourself. Look not only at your body language, because when we nervous, we can swivel on our chair or use our hands too much. It is that awareness. So turn the volume off and have a look at your body language, but also whether you're saying, "Um, too much," or those types of things. So it's, it's, look, it's tough, but preparation is key as it has been mentioned. And if you mentioned the AI component, and I had heard that not only can you train the AI to ask you some fake questions and get you prepared, but if you know who's in your panel, then you can actually do it in the style of. And I have been a person who's been on an interview panel. And so you could easily sort of upload all this working life and come up with a series of questions that I could possibly ask you. So I thought that was frightening and very interesting. There is a question for you on the text line. So Rebecca is putting this one to you, Annick. What advice would you give to a new university graduate trying to get that first job? It's in engineering. It's very hard to get a job with no experience. Oh, I see this so often. And one thing I would say is draw on your experiences. So we can't take for granted university projects. That demonstrates collaboration, teamwork. Another thing demonstrate your interest in in the field. So use your research skills. The other thing I'd say is if you have worked part time, bring in what you have done, you may have worked at in a fast food service industry and you've worked under pressure, demonstrate how you do that or would do that in. Fast paced environment in an engineering setting. So you've got this. You're listening to ABC Radio Nationals. This working life with Lisa Leong. We've got expert Dave Oloski, career coach and Anick Tessney careers counselor, where funny out how to nail a job interview. And you've been giving in your questions to us with the email this working life at ABC.net.au. I had a really bad case of anxiety rights this text. In front of a panel of interviewers and for every question I went completely blank, even though I had answers for every question possible and was very prepared. All I could say was my name for slides that I couldn't for the life of me even former sentence. It was horrifying. Sometimes being prepared doesn't even matter if you get a case of the jitters. Dave, what can be done here? Yeah. So I think ultimately sometimes that just happens. Ultimately when you're in the seat and you know it can happen. So one thing that I practice personally and recommend for people to do is it's really hard to do this but it goes a really long way, which is when you get nervous for an interview. Like before you actually sit down and click on the zoom link or you know go into the office, you're going to get nervous the same way every time. You're very likely going to feel physically the same sort of symptoms. So your heart's going to raise, your chest is going to feel a certain way, your throat might get tight or something like that. And when you start to notice all of them, this is mindfulness when you say I'm going to notice these and like today in this interview, let's say you have one today, I'm going to go into this interview and I'm just going to say I'm going to notice these symptoms and say hey these are probably going to be here next time anyway. So I might as well just get to know them and almost try to be friends them like hey, you know, hey old friends. Here you are. We're about to do a heart thing together. Beautiful and and so I'm going to you now. So we've talked about one thing, which is the can't say anything what happens if you're rambling in 60 seconds. How would you? What's the antidote? Oh, is that one look, you come back to the question, if you are rambling, you can ask the panel and interview or recognize that you are rambling and and come back to them and say, right, I may have gone off track. Can you remind me what the question was? Don't be afraid to make it like a conversation. And as David said as well, do that beautiful pause. Thank you so much to you both. That was Dave Veloski, a career coach. You can follow him on LinkedIn for more job interview tips and a Nick Tessney, a careers counselor. If you'd like a copy of Dave Veloski, tell me about yourself. Cheat sheet. You can email me at this working life at ABC dot net dot a you and I'll send it to you. And if you share why you love the show, you get extra points, of course. Now coming up, it's report back time. You tried the Pomodoro technique. How did you go? That's up next on this working life. Since last week, did you have a go at the Pomodoro technique for try this? His help works. You set your timer and work on a task for a focus 25 minute interval followed by a short 5 minute break. It got its name because it's in Italian inventor, used a tomato shaped kitchen timer. Let's hear how some of you are using it. Hello, I'm Penelope. I carry my tomato with me at all times. It's a real game changer for me. I work in two Pomodoro births and then I take a break. I only ever do four Pomodoro's on the same task though and then I stop. And I'm actually delighted to encounter another Pomodoro's. I love that. That's from fellow Pomodoro's Penelope and Christine has been using the Pomodoro technique too. I have been doing this for a couple of years and it works for me. In the morning, I start my day by roughly breaking down all my task into 25 minute trunks. I have become better at estimating how long I should spend on different types of tasks as I have learned over the years. I sometimes take longer breaks depending on my energy levels, picking myself a cup of tea, stretching, or my favorite is to play with my cat. Using the Pomodoro technique has taught Christopher that he was actually under estimating how long things take to do so he's how he adapted. Now, instead of changing the timer, I use it as a cue to check in. Am I making progress or stuck in a rabbit hole? When the timer goes off, I do one of three things. Break the task into smaller chunks, move on, or give myself one more focus sprint. This simple shift has maybe more focused, intentional, and productive. And here's Sam. She has ADHD and practices the Pomodoro technique, but the tomato timer doesn't work for her. She uses a visual timer instead. I'm finding that it's helping me to manage the potential for getting lost in a hyperfocus and all of a sudden it's two hours later. And it also helps me to get started on something if I'm avoiding it. And it's also easier for my brain to process the visual of the pie getting smaller on a clock rather than numbers reducing on a timer. And Luke also has ADHD and he has his own variation of the Pomodoro technique. I actually just log what task I'm doing at any given time and find between the 45 minute and 60 minute mark, I'll need a break, usually of 10 to 15 minutes. And I just log it and fill my page with tasks. I take about four or five breaks per day, excluding lunch this way. So now I've got an accurate log of where I'm spending my time. And what I've noticed is when I'm looking at the log and drifting or jumping away from the task, that's a pretty good signal that I need to take a break. Thanks so much for sharing how you were going with the Pomodoro technique. It was actually really fascinating to hear all the different ways you came and approached it. So in the end I did end up going with 45 minutes for my Pomodoro technique and then the 15 minute rest. I just struggled a lot with what to do on the break. It gave me a lot of ideas and also a lot of motivation to perhaps go back to the 25 and 10. Thanks again, we will do more tried this next week as well. And thanks for listening to this working life with me, Lisa Liang. It was produced by Michelle Weeks and engineered by Carrie Dell. We're on the lands of the Warrundry people in Nam Melbourne. And meet me here again next Friday, live from 11 o'clock Eastern daylight savings time. If you'd like a copy of Dave Veloski's, tell me about yourself cheat sheet. You can email me at this working life at abc.net.au and I'll send a copy to you. And if you share why you love the show, you get extra points. If you haven't already, search for this working life on the ABC Listen app. Tap the heart to follow all of the stories. And we'll put up another question on LinkedIn next week for you to ponder as well. Until then, love your work. Hold on a tick. I've got a recommendation for you. It's an episode of a sister program on radio national soul search hosted by Meredith Lake. It's all about rest. And it's that principle that sacred traditions have emphasized for centuries. But sometimes we forget, especially when we're working. It's on the ABC Listen app now, so you just look for soul search and you scroll to the episode title, which is, "His Rest, The Lost Secret to a Good Life." Enjoy! Let me know how you go. [Music] You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.