‘It doesn’t take talent to be on time.’
Pete Reiser, Baseball player

In this Chapter:

• checking the job out carefully
• researching the company
• tailoring your CV
• setting up a practice group
• rehearsing.

The first thing your interviewer will know about you is whether you turn up, on time, with everything you need. This doesn’t take talent or experience, just meticulous preparation, to get comfortably to the point where you give yourself a chance to shine when the moment comes.

In the interview room, you have two tasks: first, to fit your abilities to the needs of the employer and second, to tune in to the interviewer. To do both competently in 30 or 40 minutes and drink coffee at the same time takes preparation and practice. If you want to be ready, on the starting blocks, before the interviewer asks the first question, you need to work on that interview as soon as you put down the phone from making the appointment.

Checking the job out carefully

Make sure you know enough about the job to be sure it’s right for you. Interview skills are so definable and easy to learn that, when you’ve acquired them, you will need to be more selective about your job applications. There’s a theory that no interview is wasted because it’s a chance to practise your interview skills. But an unsuccessful interview for the right job will lower your morale and waste everybody’s time in the short term. And a successful interview for the wrong job will lower your morale and waste everybody’s time in the long term.

Health Warning: there are dangers in randomly becoming an expert interviewee. These are powerful skills and, once acquired, should be used with caution -like the three wishes from the magic lamp. Ending up in the wrong job just because you were brilliant in interview isn’t going to bring you lasting peace and happiness. And don’t rely on the interviewer to weed out the inappropriate applicants – most interviewers are there simply because they have reached senior positions, not because they know how to pick competent recruits.

Do you know enough to convince the interviewer you’re the person they need?

• Ask for company information at the same time as you ask for your interview forms.
• Search for details on the Internet or in the finance sections of the daily papers.
• Look for details, not just on profit and loss, but also about company culture.

• Talk to others who have been employed or interviewed by the organisation.
• Check that company values are congruent with your own.
• Find out the company’s policy on employee leave and benefits.
• Make sure you know why this particular post is vacant.

Researching the company

Are you one of the relatively small proportion of job seekers who actually bother to find out about the company they are applying to join? Or are you among the majority of applicants who assume there will be plenty of time to check out the pension arrangements once they get the job?

It’s well worthwhile taking the time to check out a potential employer in advance. You may be wasting a couple of hours on research if you get turned down at the interview – but what if your research tells you in advance that it’s definitely not the job for you? That’s a couple of hours you won’t have to spend travelling to and from the interview and getting stressed and anxious in between. And it may even save you weeks and months of job dissatisfaction if your superior interview skills land you in a job you aren’t going to enjoy.

Why: Two good reasons for researching your potential employers

A good understanding of the company you’re applying to join puts you in a stronger position at every stage of the process.

It gives you several advantages in the interview:

• It makes you look well organised and well informed.
• It saves time. Interviewees usually get only a small proportion of the interview time to ask their own questions. You will look less pushy and you won’t waste precious time asking irrelevant questions.
• It makes it easier for you to answer the interviewer’s questions because you know what sort of person they are looking for and you can tailor your answers accordingly.
• If you can show that you understand the product and the company mission, your interviewer may assume you’ll need shorter induction training. Anything about you that might save the company money will give you an advantage.

It gives you a flying start on the job. If you’re offered the job and you decide to take it, your learning curve will be much shorter. You’ll already have a feel for the type of organisation you’re joining. You’ll fit in faster and find your feet more easily and your job satisfaction levels are likely to rise more rapidly.

Company Information
Company name Address and other contact details Position applied for Contact person
Job title Description Main responsibilities Place in the chain of command Salary range Other benefits (pension, health insurance, discounts etc) Hours Holidays
Interview details Date, time and type of interview	Check on the interview procedure. Will there be more than one interview? Who will interview you? Will there be any psychometric tests? In tray tests? Do they need you to bring anything to the interview? Will there be a job trial (this is usual with jobs which have a practical element to them -chefs for example)?
Company style Size of business Office locations Number of employees at each office Employee benefits	You need to know whether this is the kind of environment that suits you. Do you want to join an organisation that might offer you the chance to work in different locations? Do you prefer smaller or larger offices? What would it be like to work there?
Company details What does it sell? How long has it been in business? What is its market share? What is the turnover? Who owns it? Who are its leading competitors? What are the recent trends in this kind of business? Where does this particular organisation seem to be going? Have there been any scandals or adverse publicity regarding this company?	Can you relate to the product? Is it a stable business that’s going to be around for long enough to provide you with promotion opportunities and a pension (if that’s what you want)? Some companies offer share options to employees, and, if that’s the case, you’ll need to know just how valuable those shares are likely to be. Is it ethical (if that’s important to you)?

What: Knowing what you want to know

Before you start to research your target organisation, decide what it is that you want to know. It’s a good idea to draw up a form or checklist so you can be sure you haven’t missed anything. See examples on pages 6-7.

It always surprises me that people often go into an interview – and even accept a job offer – without answers to many of these questions. If you’ve done that in the past, and maybe regretted it later, you can be much better organised in the future.

How: Doing your detective work

When you’ve drawn up your checklist, you will probably have a much clearer idea of what you need to know about your prospective employers and why you need to know it.

The next big question is how to go about getting the information.

The Internet

If you have access to the Internet it’s definitely the best way to get information. If you don’t have a computer yourself, you can still do your research online.

• Ask a friend for help – most people know somebody who’s a surfer.
• Go to an Internet cafe – some of them will give you help and advice.

• Visit the local library – most of them now have terminals you can use and the librarians will show you how to use them. The library may even subscribe to specialist business research companies like Dun & Bradstreet or, more likely, to the UK government’s own Companies House.

Once you’re online and you start to find your way around, you’ll be amazed at how much information is available to you, but you can get started straight away with these suggestions.

Visit Companies House

The Companies House website (www.companieshouse.gov.uk ) will give you some basic information for free. If you want more detail, including copies of accounts, you will have to pay for it, or subscribe to their fuller service.

Check out the company directly

Enter the company name on one of the search engines (Google is very good) and it will pull up a list of all the websites which mention that name. Some will be relevant and some won’t, but you’ll soon see which is which.

First check the company’s own website. If your target doesn’t have one, that in itself is probably a bad sign – nowadays almost everybody, regardless of size, has one. In fact, you can learn quite a lot from the style and sophistication of the corporate website. Ofcourse, it will put the most favourable spin on its operations, but the basic facts about office locations, numbers of employees, products, mission and share values will be there. Some companies even have a section on their website which is specifically geared to provide information to prospective employees.

Next, check for any other information about the company that may be available (this is where you’re likely to find out the downside, if there is one). In the case of public companies, a Google search for the name will often turn up analysts’ reports on financial websites which give some more independent information.

Check the government websites

If your prospective employer is a school, hospital or a government organisation, you can use the web to get information on those as well, starting with the government’s own statistics:

www.statistics.gov.uk

www.statsbase.gov.uk

www.homeoffice.gov.uk

Ask Auntie

The BBC website is a great source of information about all sorts of things from schools and hospitals to local government. The best thing to do is call up www.news.bbc.co.uk and take it from there. If, for example, you wanted to know about schools you could check www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/education/league_tables/default.stm

Find out about your new neighbourhood

If your job search involves relocating, you might also want to find out some more details about where you’re going to live. If you enter the name of the place in a search engine you will find many areas have local websites that give you a good feel for what it would be like to live there. But, if you want the facts and figures, take a look at www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk

Visit the library

If you really don’t want to go online, you could visit the library anyway. Central libraries in particular carry a lot of reports and statistical information about companies and businesses and neighbourhoods. They vary a lot, so call in and ask.

Call the company direct

Sometimes the obvious route is the easiest. Either ask at the time of arranging the interview for company information to be sent out to you, or call separately, ask for the press department and request annual reports and anything else they are currently putting out. If it’s a publicly listed company, you have a right to ask for the information – and you can say you’re thinking of buying some shares.

Read the press

It’s surprising how much you can learn from watching TV and reading the papers. Once you know you’re getting interested in a particular company you’ll find its name jumps out at you when you would never have noticed it before.

• If you’re looking for work with one of the big global conglomerates, or even a small but dynamic publicly listed company, get in the habit of buying the Financial Times or reading the city pages of your regular newspaper for a few weeks.
• If the company advertises, look at the style and extent of their advertising campaign.

Ask the employees

The best way to find out whether you really want to work in a particular place or not is to talk to people who work there. If you know someone who knows someone who does, then ask for an introduction. Or you could take to hanging out in the winebar nearest the office in the early evening, particularly on a Friday.

Tailoring your CV

Unless there’s only one perfect job for you in the world, which is very unlikely, there’s no harm in fine tuning your CV to each application. In order to do this, you need to find out as exactly as you can what will be required in interview.

It’s as important to know about the method of interviewing as it is about the likely content and focus. For example, if it’s a criteria based interview, you can ask for the criteria in advance. All this means is that the interview will be focused on requirements of the job rather than on the interviewee as a whole person and there’s a lot more information about this in Chapter 2.

After re-reading and, if possible, discussing with the prospective employer, the job you’re applying for, write down a detailed, point by point, job description and then add the personal specification which you think will be required, also point by point. You may be surprised at how much more information you have than you might have thought. For example:

Zoo Keeper Required for lions and tigers. Must have experience. This may be the only information given. You may have been a Zoo Keeper before and think you know all there is to know about the post. But, take the time to write it out as follows:

Job Description	Person Specification
Cleaning out cages of large cats.	Hard worker, able to cope with messy, possibly dangerous job.
Feeding large cats.	Knowledge of very specific dietary requirements and ability to handle raw meat.
Ensuring that large cats are healthy (they are harder and more expensive to replace than their keepers).	Some expert knowledge and keen powers of observation.
Ensuring that cages are secure and the public is safe.	Attention to detail and powers of observation.
Ensuring that the public is well informed. Without the paying public there is no zoo and no job.	Likes people, and animals, ability to communicate.
Ensuring that zoo management and fellow keepers are well informed.	Knowledge of hierarchy and ability to communicate. Needs to be a team player.

When a job, even with scant detail, is broken down in this way, it’s easy to see how a CV might be laid out, with past experience appropriately highlighted. The zoo keeper job obviously wouldn’t suit a timid vegetarian, however fond of animals they might be, and previous experience would clearly be highly important. Any applicant who liked animals but couldn’t communicate with other people would be a non-starter.

When preparing your CV, bear in mind the following points.

• Many large companies feed CVs into scanners and do a key word search. You need to know in advance what they are looking for, otherwise you may not even get called to interview. Ask before submitting your CV whether it will be computer scanned. If they won’t tell you, it probably is. That is your cue to get more information before you fine-tune the wording.
• Tailoring your CV also enables you to keep it succinct and readable. Multi-purpose CVs tend to be over-long, especially when the applicant has many years of work experience. Even CVs that aren’t computer scanned will probably be reviewed first time around by an HR executive rather than someone from the department you’re applying to. Make sure that your key points won’t be overlooked.
• Leave no gaps in your CV. If there are gaps, you may need to make the dates a little more vague. Employers usually assume that a hiatus means imprisonment, mental illness or undeclared pregnancies. If there’s a gap with a good reason, like working for VSO in a job related area, then declare it.
• Most employers nowadays are sceptical of family business involvement and of freelance and consultancy or voluntary work. They will assume that this is a cover for unemployment unless you can prove that you really were running your father’s chain of department stores single handed. Voluntary work, to a prospective employer, means that nobody was prepared to pay you for what you did. That’s OK if you were a student gaining experience at the time, but, if not, you’d better have a good reason. Or leave it out.
• If your work is technical, IT related, for example, then use a one-page summary CV and attach backup sheets with additional detail such as software and applications.
• Summarise ambitions and key achievements at the top and keep personal detail to a minimum. Write employment details in date order, with the most recent at the top.
• Prepare the other paperwork carefully and always take copies of your cover letters, references, application and interview forms to interviews with you. They can be a lifebelt in a tricky interview situation, saving you from contradicting yourself or from forgetting to raise key points.
• Give good reasons for leaving previous employment.
• Finally, before you finish with your CV, take a moment to list your own personal selling points. The positive ones are easy, but what about the negative ones? By this I mean the things that you take for granted about yourself but which stand out as defects in people who don’t have them. Examples might be: punctuality, ability to communicate sympathetically, honesty, efficiency-consciousness, profit-mindedness, loyalty. If you can’t immediately think of examples, look at people who have been dismissed from your present or previous job. Why were they fired? Was it for a specific misdemeanour, or, more likely, because of poor timekeeping, frequent sick leave, low energy or a prickly disposition? Some personality traits go unnoticed in people who have them but can be impossible to work without in people who lack them. Nobody notices the person who regularly comes to work on time, but everybody notices when someone is late. Don’t take anything about yourself for granted.
• Don’t refer to anything that isn’t on your CV. It’s likely to make your interviewer query what else is missing.

Setting up a practice group

The best way to make sure you excel at interview is to practise. And you don’t have to go to an expensive recruitment consultant to do that. Your local Job Centre may provide this service, or, if you currently work for a large organisation where redundancy is commonplace, there may be a Career Action Centre offering all kinds of job hunting help. And, if you are registered with recruitment agencies, look out for ones that provide interview skills training. Some do and some don’t.

Your other alternative is to organise your own interview practice for free with the help of this book. You can do quite a bit yourself by rehearsing questions and answers in your mind and on paper. But it’s much easier if you set up a Practice Group with some other job-seekers and work together on fine tuning your interview skills.

If you don’t know anyone in the same boat (unlikely in today’s economic climate!), and your family aren’t prepared to take the exercise seriously enough to help you out, make a start anyway. Take the time to do this every day until you get the job you want. Once is not enough. For a start, you are unlikely to take it seriously yourself the first couple of times. No wonder you feel you don’t do yourself justice in job interviews if you can’t even impress yourself with your own performance.

What you need to be able to do is to put yourself into a calm and confident state at will. Think how great it would be if you could do that whenever you found yourself sitting in a reception area, waiting to be called in to interview. Think how great it would be if, instead of walking in with trembling hands and a blank mind, you could be composed and resourceful.

Sports psychologists use some simple but powerful techniques to put athletes into a positive, winning frame of mind. These exercises can be useful in all stressful, competitive situations.

Step One	Sit down and think back to an interview when you performed really well. It doesn’t have to be a job interview. It could be a successful sale you made, a difficult situation you defused – even the romantic dinner when you proposed to your partner. This first step in your preparation is nothing to do with techniques, it’s about getting yourself into the right state. Because, as you know, more interview opportunities are lost through nervousness than through lack of knowledge or expertise.
Step Two	When you have a successful situation in mind, run through it again, picturing how you looked, what you wore, what you said and did. When you have that information, take it one step further and recall some of the feelings from that situation. What emotions were associated with that positive experience in your life? What physical sensations were there?
Step Three	Check now whether you are an observer, watching your confident, successful, self giving a great performance, or whether you’re actually right back there playing the role all over again.
Step Four	If you’re looking at yourself from the outside, try bringing the picture closer. If it’s like looking at an old photograph, put some life into it. Put some colour into it and turn it into a movie.
Step Five	When you’re close enough, just step into it. Get right there into that experience again and re-live it.
Step Six	Do this a few times. Go in and come out again. Train yourself to do it at will and, gradually, you will find you are able to access the feelings of control and confidence without having to go through the whole visualisation process first.

Rehearsing

Having taken some hints from sports psychology, we can also learn a lot about interviewing skills from the acting profession. Am I suggesting you shouldn’t go into an interview and be yourself? Certainly not. Competent, qualified, people usually fail in interview simply because they are too nervous to be themselves and come across as too anxious to be employable. Most interviewers believe that a person who can’t cope with an interview would be similarly incompetent in a stressful work situation.

Let’s assume that you’ve managed to set up your Practice Group and you’re ready to rehearse some interviews. The following techniques are useful ones in that sort of situation – and if you can use a video camera, it doubles the usefulness in terms of feedback to the interviewee.

Most actors work with a script. But the script only works if it’s so well rehearsed that it doesn’t sound like one. The first thing to do is to write it, memorise it and practise it.

Prepare a tell me about yourself statement with six positive points:

• 1.I’m well qualified.
• 2.I’ve got lots of experience.
• 3.I’m well organised.
• 4.I have a good track record in this area.
• 5.I’m a good team leader.
• 6.I would fit into your organisation perfectly.

The next task is to make this catalogue of virtues sound totally convincing. Practise these statements over and over until they become second nature to you. Now try them out in front of your audience and ask for feedback. The fact that you will be doing the same for them usually makes this exercise a little less embarrassing. These are the answers you need to have:

• Do you believe me?
• What is it that gives me away? Is it my body language, my tone of voice, my eye contact (or lack of it)? Get some real detail here.

Of course a real interview isn’t going to be like this. There aren’t many situations when you get an uninterrupted opportunity to tell a prospective employer how wonderful you are (except in your CV). So invite your audience to heckle, or at least interrupt your flow and ask you difficult questions. There are some classic questions in Chapter 6.

Finally, ask for more detailed feedback.

• What are my strengths?
• What are my weaknesses?
• How is my image?
• What changes could I make?

Summary points

• Check the job out carefully: have you really found out as much as you can? Do you know enough to be sure that you want it, that you have a chance of getting it, that you can ask well informed questions and can tailor your CV?

• Tailor your CV: have you refined your CV so that you have a basic model with different trimmings? Or, if your career path is so tightly defined that the same CV will do for all applications, have you had someone else check it over for glitches and inconsistencies that might let you down in interview?
• Practice: put together a practice group. It’s a useful way of working through many of the exercises in this book.
• Rehearse. Be disciplined about this – if you are currently unemployed, then job hunting should be your nine–to–five job, just to keep yourself in the working habit. Allocate an hour or so, either daily or weekly, to work with your practice group – or alone –on your interview techniques. Lining up the prospects is great, but it’s the interview that will get you the job.