How To Guide

GETTING YOURSELF INTERVIEW FIT

Prepared by:

The specialist recruitment

consultants at [axr]

Recruitment & Search

GETTING YOURSELF INTERVIEW FIT

As recruiters, we interview a lot of people and have seen it all! There’s the average candidates who interview well and the great candidates who interview poorly. Our purpose at [axr] is to help you make great career decisions, to get the most out of your career journey. But, if you’re not prepared to have a career conversation and how to land your narrative authentically, then you’re leaving too much up to chance. Being “interview fit” means you can focus on making a great decision about a business and a role and not having to worry about how well you’ve interviewed. This [axr] guide will give you the toolkit you need to get yourself interview fit

THE INTERVIEW STRUCTURE

THE INTRO

The ‘intro’ is where you create the right platform for the rest of the interview. Once you’ve had a little bit of small-talk, you will normally be asked an “easy” opener to kick things off, such as: Tell me about yourself? Walk me through your resume… Give me a summary of your career… The Intro While they might sound like simple enough questions, almost everyone struggles with this part. Where do you start? Where do you stop? How much do you need to say? Is it a chance to pitch yourself? The most common mistake people make is to get lost in a long monologue. Use the intro as an opportunity to land your 5-minute career narrative.

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:



• It’s an authentic story about you and the decisions you’ve made in your career to get to where you are today.
• Don’t talk about your roles in detail or your achievements, you’ll have time to do that
• later.
• Focus on the bits in-between, every career is a mix of planned steps, reactive decisions, mistakes and opportunities;
• what’s your journey? Your career and your life are intermingled, weave in the “life-stuff” that has influenced your decisions. That makes it personal and memorable, it creates social capital with the interviewer. 
• Finish on your future career goals and why this role fits with your plan.
  

YOUR STRENGTHS & DEVELOPMENT AREAS

This section also seems easy, however it’s multi layered and many struggle to accurately articulate their own strengths and weaknesses.

This is known as the ‘self awareness’ part of the interview. How well do you know yourself? Are you open to feedback? Are you prepared to show some vulnerability? Do you demonstrate empathy?

In an interview, these questions can be asked in many different ways. Examples include:

• Describe what you’ll bring to the role.
• Summarise your strengths and development areas.
• What do you show up with every day?

STRENGTHS

These can be a combination of both technical and leadership skills. If you’re in a leadership role, be prepared to talk to both. It’s always good to clarify with the interviewer if they’d like examples of each.

1. Limit yourself to 3 strengths.
2. Describe them as features and benefits, that gives context to what you bring in terms that the interviewer will remember.
3. Use super-mini examples as benefits, it makes them real.

WEAKNESSES

This is one of the most important sections of any interview! Ideally, you should be able to describe both a technical development area that you can address with more experience or training, along with a leadership /personal development area.

Don’t fall in the trap of picking a meaningless example that you think will deflect the conversation back to your strengths – you need to show some courage and vulnerability interviewers will see straight through your attempt to slide in a strength as a weakness. We suggest the following structure:

Describe the development area.



1. Explain how you know about it (how and when you’ve received feedback).
2. Why is it relevant to the performance in your role (if left unmitigated, how is your performance impacted)?
3. What are you doing about it (how do you mitigate impact – it can be hard to “fix” a natural weakness, but you need to demonstrate how you are working to address it). 
   

COMPETENCIES: WHERE EXPERIENCE & SKILL COME TOGETHER

We all have experience which enables us to develop skills. Competence determines how capable you are at bringing your experience and skills together. Competency questions let the interviewer assess how capable you are relative to other candidates by comparing actual examples of what you’ve done in your career. They’re common at all levels in recruitment, sometimes called behavioural or situational questions. The more senior the role, the higher the expectation on the quality, depth and impact of your answer, but each will follow the same flow. It’s important that you

CAN RECOGNISE WHEN A COMPETENCY QUESTION IS BEING ASKED

Some interviews are clearly structured, while some are chaotic, however, most will be somewhere in the middle. You will need to be able to recognise the trigger for a competency questions, such as: tell me about a time, describe a situation, give me an example of, demonstrate your experience in…

UNDERSTAND WHAT COMPETENCY IS BEING ASSESSED

Sometimes the interview will clearly signpost a competence, (Stakeholder Alignment, Innovation, People Development, etc.), and describe the importance to the role, and sometimes it’ll be asked randomly, without definition. If in any doubt, pause and clarify what the interviewer is asking. This is important, it will be seen positively, and it will stop you answering the wrong question, even unwittingly.

CAN COMPETENTLY ANSWER THE QUESTION

You have probably heard of STAR questions: Situation, Task, Action, Result. An even easier flow is CAR: Context, Action, Result. Both of these techniques will help you to build a structure to your examples/answers. Allow 3-5 minutes for each answer.

• Context – describe the problem or challenge you were faced with. Give detail, cover the complexity, stakeholders, KPIs and issues.
• Action – step through the detail of the 3 most important things you did and why you chose these actions.
• Result – this is the least important part so don’t jump here too quickly, but layer it all back to context and any KPIs, then finish with your learnings.

PREPARE AND PRACTISE YOUR RESPONSES PRIOR TO THE INTERVIEW

Reflect on your achievements over the past few years, build out the detail of each against CAR and have a group of 4-6 pre-prepared answers in your back pocket, ready to go. If you have CAR locked in, you’ll then be able to mould your examples to any question. Life is not as boxed off as achievement A = competency 1, you will have to think a little on your feet, but with preparation and practice, you’ll nail it!

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

At the end of most interviews, you will be asked if you have any questions. This not out of politeness, it’s another part of the interview that you need to be prepared for. A candidate who has no questions is a big disappointment for any interviewer. Remember to give context to your question to demonstrate to the interviewer the depth of preparation you’ve done and how seriously you're considering the business.

Research and preparation 

Organisation

Remember, you are joining an organisation, not a job. Do you know the journey of the company, where it’s come from and going to? Look at the ownership structure, results, annual report, strategic goals. What sort of culture does the company have? Who do you know who works there? Does the recruiter/HR have a Candidate Pack or Briefing document? Are you looking for organisational familiarity, or a new experience? How much change do you want? Given the similarities amongst multinational companies, big change generally comes from size and ownership structure not necessarily product or service.

Leadership

Who will your boss be? Are you meeting them? What is the structure, where does this role fit? Can your new boss articulate the purpose of the business in a way that that is appealing to you?

Role & Career

Ensure you know the role you’re interviewing for. Have you been given a position description? Don’t be afraid to ask for one. Make an honest assessment of what you bring, relevant to the role and where the gaps are. Does the role broaden or narrow your career path? What will you do next? Can you do that in this business?

Remuneration

Do you know what the remuneration structure is and what the growth potential is? What did the business pay in STI/bonus last year? Do you know the market rate? You do not want your REM to be too low or too high

ABOUT AXR 

We’re a proudly Australian specialist recruitment consultancy established in 2003. We've built a team of experienced and passionate specialist recruitment consultants who are inspired by the impact exceptional recruitment has on careers and teams.

We see things a little differently at [axr]. Our mission is to prepare people to have better career conversations, to make great career decisions, to enable individuals and organisations to get the best return out of their relationship. This philosophy and approach helps professionals to have strategic career conversations which means better retention of high-potential talent, the right level of staff-turnover and optimised staff attraction and recruitment.

We achieve this by creating pathways between future and current leaders. We have an active talent network who engage with our career incubator programs: The CFO Incubator, Finance to Leadership Incubator, our career podcasts, Your Future in Sales & Marketing, and From Go to CFO to help to build this pathway and, ultimately, create better careers and teams.

At [axr], we focus on building careers not jobs, teams not hires, because if it matters to you, it matters to us.

It’s your career, not a job

It’s your team, not a hire

If it matters to you, it matters to us.

Contact us today for a CAREER CONVERSATION.

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