How to brush up on your interview skills

As a recruiter, I spend a lot of my time interviewing candidates, often at relatively senior levels and I am frequently surprised to find that they are very unsure of how to answer, what most would consider to be, standard interview questions.  They often don’t know how to structure their answers or even more common, they talk around the question rather than give a straight answer.

This is normally a result of inexperience in an interview situation or an assumption that the interviewer is trying to ‘trip you up’.  In most circumstances this is simply not the case, the interviewer wants to understand your background, your experience and your motivations.  They are not always looking for the ‘finished package’ but a level of self awareness of your abilities and your areas of development.

I have addressed a series of common interview questions and provided some tips on how to handle them, starting with;

What are your areas for development? (AKA – What are your weaknesses?)

Don’t choose an answer that you think can be turned into a positive, such as ‘I’m overly critical of myself’, a good interviewer can see through this,  instead consider these points:

·       Your prospective manager needs to know that you have a good level of self awareness and that you both take on board constructive criticism and learn from it

·       He / she needs to know where your development areas are to help him / her decide if they, as a manager, are the right person to help you improve them & to take you to the next stage in your career

·       Your new manager needs to continue to develop themselves & by developing you, they continue to learn & develop their own skills

Better to choose an honest development area, one that you are aware of yourself and have taken steps to improve, then using the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result) outline for the interviewer what your ‘Area of Development’ is, how you plan to improve this, the actions / steps you are currently using to overcome and the result / outcome of these steps (which should show an improvement).