Here's what you need to know when you get to an interview or assessment.
What do you need to know about an interview or assessment?
The next stage will be one or more of the following:
A face-to-face interview;
A panel interview;
A scenario;
A group exercise;
Personality testing or
Numeric and verbal reasoning tests.
You'll normally get a few days' notice of what you'll face, so here's how to prepare for each type of assessment. I had a weekend to prepare for the interview day I had for my current job, which felt tough but doable.
Any face-to-face assessment
When you're meeting face-to-face, ensure you follow this advice:
Pre-interview
If you can, visit the offices to time the commute and observe what employees wear. Visiting will help you understand the culture, environment, and commute if successful;
Try the commute at the same time as your interview. Traffic and trains can be very variable at different times of the day, so don't assume they will be the same;
Find a local coffee shop that will be your office before the interview;
Aim to arrive on interview day slightly smarter than the people you see there;
Ensure you research the role, the organization, and the main challenges. If it's a large company, download its annual report. If it's a small company, download its accounts from Companies House (UK) or the local government website;
View some of the employees already at the company on LinkedIn. What do they say?
Check the job websites in your country that review employers, such as Glassdoor;
Read their website and, in particular, the press releases. If they're excited about something, you need to be, too.
Create a note for your interview with job description headers, questions, etc;
Try to find out who is interviewing you and look them up on LinkedIn so you can recognize them and know a bit about them and
Know the values of the organization.
Interview day
Get to your temporary office at least an hour before the interview;
Buy a drink and do your last-minute preparation — rehearsing answers, your presentation, reading the news, etc, and
Relax.
At reception
Arrive ten minutes before the interview unless asked to arrive earlier;
Sign in and ask to go to the toilet. It doesn't matter if you've been; use it as an excuse to check you're smart and as an opportunity to look around and soak in the environment;
Be back quickly and wait for your host to arrive;
Remember that many organizations ask receptionists what they think of you. The interview has already started.
Meeting your host and interviewers
Smile;
Be polite;
Be confident, but not too confident;
Show interest;
When going to the interview room, notice everything. How are people interacting? Are there noticeboards? What do they say? What does that tell you about the organization?
If offered a drink, always accept. It will allow you to gain composure and assess the room and the people present and
Breathe.
In the interview/assessment
No matter how much experience to draw on, it is dangerous to overplay it right now. Less experienced staff members want to learn with you, not be parented;
Nobody likes to be lectured or told how they should do things, so keep that to yourself.
Nobody wants you to tell them that you've solved their problems before, and here's the answer. You can almost guarantee you're wrong, and it's a turn-off;
Don't rely on experience over five years old — the world was different then and will be different in another five years. You need to show you're adaptable by showing you've already adapted.
Now, let's look at some typical assessments you're likely to face and how to deal with them.
Face-to-face interview
My preparation for interviews was the strongest of all my preparations. I bought Why You? 101 Interview Questions You'll Never Fear Again and practised, practised, practised. Whether in the shower, walking to work, in the loo, or on the train, I rehearsed the questions and my answers based on the stories I had prepared earlier.
In the actual interviews, I could always select a story that answered the question, which interviewers expect to hear. It's never too early to start practising, and the more you do it, the more natural it will all become.
One important reason for starting to prepare early is that you might have to do something to provide missing examples or to plug gaps in your knowledge.
In terms of the interview itself, here are some best practices:
Always remember that the interviewer is asking, 'Can I work with this person, and will they make me look good'? An interview is as much about the interviewer as it is about you.
Always try to answer in the interviewer's language, using their terminology where possible. If you have to use jargon at all, make sure you explain it clearly. If you can't, they will have no confidence in your ability to do it as an employee.
Use examples to illustrate your answers, and don't forget that the interviewer wants to know your role in the example. I have lost count of the times I have had to clarify someone's role in their examples. One particularly memorable interviewee eventually confessed that they had no role but was reciting what a colleague had done to solve a problem.
Be prepared for the "ice core" test. Your interviewer may dig deeper and deeper into a story to test your complete understanding of a problem. If this happens, don't panic - it's perfectly normal.
Use plenty of eye contact, and sit facing the interviewer.
Prepare specific questions for the interviewer, but don't ask about pay and benefits unless they ask first.
Panel interview
All the advice above applies to panel interviews, which are much more formal. If selected for a panel interview, make sure you:
Find out or work out who the decision maker is.
Spend sufficient time on them so they are confident about employing you without losing focus on the other panel members.
Make eye contact with everyone as you answer, rather than staring at a pencil or a single panel member exclusively.
Treat everyone with the same respect, irrespective of their role on the panel.
Scenarios
Scenarios are often used to test your ability to absorb lots of information quickly, present back a question, or answer a series of questions. They are a good test of your ability to work under pressure and to see how you perform when you haven't had time to prepare. Expect your job to be like this when faced with interviews using scenarios.
My advice is simple: if you have to do a scenario in your assessment:
Read and answer the question asked, not the question you want to answer.
It's easy to get off track. You will typically have 20 minutes or so to provide a presentation, so build it up quickly and logically, telling a story as you go. Start at the end of the story and work towards the beginning—there's nothing worse than running out of time, and at least this way, you have a conclusion.
Typically, you're being assessed for your ability to tell a clear and simple story, so don't cram too much onto a page or slide—keep it short and simple.
A simple structure of how to present back is:
Replaying your understanding of the scenario;
A concise summary of the question or problem;
A series of steps to solve the problem;
Your view of what the full solution is;
How the solution relates to the original question, and
How the solution fits with the organization's values.
This way, you won't go off track, and even if your answer isn't what they're looking for, they can ask questions about how you got there, and you may still do well if you have a justification.
Luckily, when I had a scenario in my interview, I knew the industry and understood that the factory making a loss was irrelevant when people were being injured at work. I passed the questioning with flying colours.
Group exercise
The group exercise is the most difficult of all the assessments to master because unless you know the culture, you won't understand what the assessors are judging and what 'good' looks like. So, if you have one, you must know the organization's culture and values. If you're informed that you have a group exercise, ask your recruiter about cultures and values.
If you do get information on the culture, perhaps in the assessment pack, interview guide or through talking to the recruiter, you can work out what type of culture the organization has using these four core themes. Every organization is a mix of these but tends to dominate in one of them:
Top-down: often driven by a clear personality, this type of organization prizes the ability to take charge of a situation. So, politely take charge and organize the team.
Process: driven by procedures and roles, this type of organization prizes the ability to see the role you play and for you to show you understand the importance of roles. So, allocate jobs and ensure that everyone plays by the rules.
Achievement: Driven by the self-organizing team, focused on and contributing to the task. Play the team servant/leader role, focusing on the blockers to achieve the task and helping people find the right work to do.
Support: Togetherness drives this type of organization, so you need to show that you are trying to achieve consensus in the team, and even if you don't finish the task, you don't finish it together.
By role-playing one of these four themes, you can develop a style that resembles the organization's culture and score better marks. However, you may not like that culture, so use the opportunity to assess your preferences.
Personality testing
Personality testing is a technique where you answer questions or statements so that behind-the-scenes models analyze your answers and provide the assessor with information on how you might react in certain situations or your preferred way of working.
Typically, there's no right or wrong answer, but companies prefer some traits over others. For example, a trait of 'risk-taking' is liked by a sales organization but not by an engineering one.
Personality tests are falling out of favour, and rightly so, in my view. In my last job search, I didn't encounter a single one, although I have encountered them often. I suspect there might be some reasons for this:
Organizations increasingly appreciate diversity; standardized tests don't help get that mix right.
If you understand how companies construct them, you can game them, so your ability to game the test is often being tested.
There are so many different tests that they all can't be right!
Having said all that, if you receive one, try to answer honestly. If several answers might be right, favour the answer that best suits the cultural theme as you understand it (as you would in a group exercise).
Numeric and verbal reasoning tests
I completely and utterly failed the first set of tests I tried when I re-entered the job market. They gave me an online test to do, in which I had 20 minutes to do 18 maths questions.
It wasn't that I didn't know what 20% of £100 discounted by 15% would grow to in 4 years at 5% interest—it was that I wasn't drilled to do that in 60 seconds instead of carefully working it out using Excel.
After that experience and saying goodbye to a job I was otherwise well able to do (I'm pretty sure in the role, I wouldn't have to do that in 60 seconds), I went onto a Job Test Preparation website and invested some money in their practice tests. You can search 'job test preparation' or 'job aptitude testing' to find plenty of websites.
The format and style were similar across all the tests, and spending a few days doing them prepared me for the next set of tests I faced, which I hen sailed through.
If you're in a situation where you're likely to get some tests like this, you must practice. It's unlikely you will learn anything at all, but what you will do is understand the format of questions and be used to getting to the answer in 60 seconds.
The same principle applies to coding tests. I doubt they will make you a better developer, but if the company likes them, get used to them.
Summary
You can practice most tests and scenarios with just a bit of planning and patience, but don't leave it to the last minute — the more you rehearse in your head or with others, the better you'll be prepared.
At the end of every assessment, note the questions you were asked, the scenarios you had to play out, and how you think you did.
Assume you didn't get the job and return to your preparation to see where you can improve. If you didn't get the role, don't pass up an opportunity to get feedback. Use that feedback to prepare for the next opportunity, to improve your CV, and to screen for the next role.
Use your notes to capture the answers to these questions:
What went well?
What didn't go so well?
When did you feel relaxed and stressed?
What questions did you get asked, and how did you answer?
How do you feel now it's over?
Could you work with these people?
Would you take the job?
How would you rate yourself?
What lessons can you apply to the next interview?
Make notes and add actions to your action list.
Finally, email your recruiter and thank them for the opportunity. Reiterate your interest and follow up with any information they might still find helpful. Most importantly, if the interview has made you decide the job isn't for you, tell the interviewer as soon as possible. Not only is it polite, but there may be a day when you want a different role with them.
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