Simon's job log: 7

The story so far... Simon works for a small IT firm in North Yorkshire, and runs marathons to raise cash for Alzheimer's research.

You are invited to attend an interview… 

The beginning of the year is always a time for reflection. Plenty of people are making new plans for the year ahead and many of those plans will involve finding a new job. It was around the start of the year that I went for an interview which would land me where I am now.

Thinking about this, I realised that I’ve been employed in my first graduate job for two years now (although at times it feels a lot longer!). When I went for my interview at my current job, I was hopeful that I would get the job, but I was more confident I would be asked for a second interview with a company I had interviewed with earlier in the week. Also, my now current job was quite out of my way, so I would have to move away from home to another county.

Before that I had a six-month period between graduating and finding my current job. In that time I must have applied for about forty jobs and got interviews for eight of them. That might not sound a lot, but that’s nearly one in four, or about a quarter of all the jobs I applied for.

So when I was offered my current job, I decided to take it. I can still remember how surprised I was to have been offered a job. I was even more surprised to have been offered one at the start of the year. I was totally expecting to be searching for a job for another six months - or even more.

Those were the days

Now that I’m a happily employed professional, I think my time spent writing CVs and attending interviews allows me to be a little bit nostalgic about it. So let me share with you my experiences of interviews.

My personal experience of interviews was rather terrifying. I was much more at home manicuring and minutely tweaking every punctuation mark and letter on my CV, or cramming my skills into a one-page cover letter, than I was facing a panel of interviewers. So the skill of being interviewed never came naturally to me.

What also struck me was the vast gulf that exists in the standards of interviews. The first interview I ever attended was a formal panel interview for a Web Designer vacancy. There were three people, all heads of their own departments, who asked several questions, some of which I struggled to answer competently. The interview was rigidly structured, even the talking before and after was polite and formal.

A few months later I took three separate trains across the Pennines to attend an interview for a mail-order company, in a suburb of Manchester, which was expanding its operations by building a new ecommerce site. The journey to get there must have taken me at least two and half hours and I had done hours of preparation beforehand (as I always do). The interview itself was briefer, lasting a mere 15 minutes. After leaving their offices, I did feel rather annoyed that I had put in the effort of a near cross-country train journey and all the effort they could muster was to send in an employee who was obviously making up the numbers and had never interviewed anyone before.

Unfortunately, experiences like that, where I was interviewed by someone who had never done it before (or had certainly never had any training in it), were fairly common. The most frustrating thing in these interviews was that the interviewer would never ask anything but the most obvious questions, so I would never be able to wheel out some of my classier responses which I had been practising. Hence, in these interviews I felt like I hadn’t given the interviewer an accurate picture of my skills and what value I could bring to their company.

The interviews I do remember, however, were for the companies where there was an obvious process in place. These were the interviews where I put the most effort into putting across a good impression. In my head, I had a mental checklist of things I must (and must not) do. Did I greet the interviewer(s) with a polite yet friendly opening? Check. Did I shake hands with them? Check. Have you engaged in small talk with the interviewers? Check.

The only problem with that approach was that I was afraid of not being myself and therefore not acting naturally enough: Am I being too formal? Perhaps I should loosen up a bit. But am I then being too casual? I don’t want to appear too confident... I was always worrying about if I overplayed my hand in those difficult moments before and after an interview.

On with the show

After brief introductions (I was usually so nervous I had the distressing habit of forgetting the interviewers’ names as soon as they were mentioned), now came the interview itself. This is where I know I can shine. I was always as meticulous as possible when it came to researching for interviews, for several reasons.

Firstly, I had put so much effort into the first stage, tailoring my CV and hand-crafting my cover letter, that to skimp on the research now would be like training for a marathon by only doing warm-up exercises. My philosophy is: Avoid the scattergun approach of applying for jobs and put your effort into one or two per week. That way the extra effort you put in shines through when the employer reads your CV.

Secondly, just like I could tweak and perfect my CV, I would tweak and perfect my answers to the questions I predicted they would ask. I practised matching my answers to skills I had identified they needed during the first stage. At least that was the plan. Often, nerves, or sheer forgetfulness, would mean I rarely delivered the perfect answer. More often than not, it started out great and then I would forget the point of my response or fumble the explanation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked out of interviews and thought ‘I didn’t tell them about…or how I…’

It was important to try and leave a good lasting impression with some closing remarks. I usually had a few stock questions to ask so I appeared interested or to fill an awkwardly quiet moment. I found the approach I was most comfortable with when tying up the loose ends of an interview or the informal chit-chat afterwards was to be a little forthright - after all, an interview is as much an opportunity for me to inspect the companies’ offices and establish whether I could work there.

Fortunately I think I did get better with practice. Remembering my last interview for my current company, I managed to deliver one or two ‘perfect’ responses. I don’t remember being very nervous either. So the moral of the story is, you can practise for interviews, but some things can’t be rehearsed - but you will get better at them over time.

My earlier job logs 

Suggestions to editorial@prospects.ac.uk