Acing Your Next Job Interview

After you have done the hard work of landing a job interview you cannot rely on luck to get you through it. Acing your job interview takes a lot of preparation. If you are prepared you will not get as nervous and your confidence will be high.

Many companies these days use Competency Interviewing to determine their next new hire. Competency interviewing is simply asking the applicant situational questions that require a detailed response. It is not simply a yes or no answer. The worst thing you can do is say "I don't Know" or "I cannot remember".

Prepare and memorize at least five different responses and use the STAR technique to help keep you on track. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. These are the points you will need to hit when answering the interview questions. It is very easy to get off track while responding and then as you try to recover you start to babble on. This is frustrating and debilitating for some people. Being prepared will make your interview less stressful.

First, pick out a few competency questions and make up index cards with your responses.

One popular question that is often used during an interview is "Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an irate client. What was the situation? What did you do? And how did it turn out?"

Using the STAR technique makes answering a breeze. Start out with something like this:

I did have a situation similar to that recently. I received a call from an important client who could not get his software to load correctly. He was frustrated and irate which was out of the norm for him. My task was to rectify the situation as quickly as possible while making him feel assured that my company was empathetic and responsive. I took the action to remote into his computer system and quickly identified and fixed the problem. I was even able to up sell him to some advanced software. The result was that we retained a satisfied client and increased our bottom line.

Remember that the employer will most likely not be able to verify what you tell them, unless of course, you mention situations or events that they are familiar with. If it is a generic story then you will have no problems.

The employer is looking to see how well you tell a story and if you can keep on task with all the parts of the question. They are watching you, if the interview is in person, to see how well you handle the pressure of the interview. If your interview is over the phone then it will be much less stressful for you. Before you start the phone interview you should put all your scenarios out in front of you on the table. Do not stack them and look through them while on the call. You do not want them to hear you shuffling papers around. You want your answer to sound as if you are speaking from memory.

Do not be afraid to ask them to repeat the question if you need more time. This way you can adjust one of your pre-planned responses to the question being asked. For the example above you can alter that to respond to many different questions. They might ask you "have you ever had to deal with a problem employee or co-worker, what the problem was, and how you dealt with it." In your head you can quickly change the scenario over to a situation with an irate co-worker. Just follow the order of the STAR technique and you cannot go wrong.