Successful Job Interviews For Dummies - Australia / NZ

Kate Southam, Joyce Lain Kennedy

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780730308089
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

A friendly guide to the skills and tools you need to ace your next interview - specifically for Australian and New Zealand job seekers!

Just landing a job interview in Australia's current economy is a challenge, so you'd better be ready when you do. It's more important than ever that you perform at your best when you get the opportunity for a face-to-face interview. Successful Job Interviews For Dummies, Australian & New Zealand Edition includes handy tips and practical advice for acing any interview, whether you're a new graduate looking for your first job or an experienced professional looking for a career change. You'll find unbeatable advice on every aspect of interviewing, from getting prepared to answer tough questions to negotiating a better salary offer.

• Presents useful, practical guidance on acing interviews, with a particular focus on the Australian and New Zealand job market
• Covers such topics as overcoming fear of interviews, asking the right questions, tailoring your qualifications for specific positions, interviewing across cultures, and much more
• Includes ten ways to win rave reviews and ten interview challenges to master

It's tough out there today. When you do get your foot in the door, make sure they can't slam it closed on you. Successful Job Interviews For Dummies gives you the guidance you need to succeed.

Part I

Getting Started with Job Interviews

Visit www.dummies.com for free access to great Dummies content online.

In this part…

Understand why interviews are similar to acting and what this means to you as the interviewee.

Become adept at screening interviews, whether by phone, in person or using automated systems, and breeze through to the next stage.

Get ready for your in-person interview and get a handle on video interviewing, whether it's used for a screening or selection interview.

Master interviews no matter what type you encounter — focusing on the objective, the type of interviewer or the technique used.

Chapter 1

Honing Your Job Interview Skills

In This Chapter

Seeing how job interviewing is like acting

Spotting what’s new in interviewing

Applying seven concepts to make you stand out

Putting into practice ideas that make a good impression

A resume or profile functions as bait to snag a job interview. The interview is the decisive event when a hiring authority decides whether you’ll be offered the job.

Because the job interview is such an important part of getting a job — and you may not have interviewed in awhile — any number of unfortunate scenarios may be sneaking into your unconscious, including fears of these confidence-disturbers:

• Stumbling and mumbling your way through the ordeal
• Being glued to a hot seat as they sweat the answers out of you
• Forgetting your interviewer’s name (or the last place you worked)

Exhale. You’ve come to the right book. Take the suggestions within these pages to heart and you’ll head into every interview feeling confident, calm and well prepared. What more can you ask?

Note: This first chapter serves as an overview for the entire book. The pages that follow are wide and deep, with details that can help you gain a lifetime of confidence in your ability to sail through the drama of interviews and secure the best job offers.

Being the Successful Candidate

When you’re engaged in a selection interview, your entire future may rest on how successful you are in presenting yourself to a stranger across a desk in 15, 30 or 60 minutes. Making life-altering decisions during this micro slice of time isn’t real life — it’s a performance.

The most successful interviews for you require solid preparation to rehearse what you want to say, showing your future bosses that you’re smart and quick on the uptake, as well as able to communicate and not likely to jump the tracks.

At each meeting, your goal is to deliver a flawless performance that rolls off your tongue and gets the employer applauding — and remembering — you. Perfect candidate, you!

But what about all the people who tell you, ‘Just be yourself and you’ll do fine in your interview’? That advice doesn’t always work for you when it comes to job interviewing.

Why ‘be yourself’ can be poor advice

The bromide ‘be yourself’ is very difficult to articulate with consistency. Be yourself? Which self? Who is the real you? Our roles change at various times.

Your role: Job seeker

Jerry is a father, an engineer, a marathon runner, a public speaker, a law student at night and a writer of professional papers. Jennifer is a loving daughter, the best salesperson in her company, a pilot, a tennis player, a rugby fan and a history buff.

But at this time in their lives, Jerry and Jennifer — like you — are job seekers. Similarly, the stranger across an interviewing desk is in the role of interviewer.

Getting real about the job seeker role

Playing the role most appropriate to you at a given time, and playing it effectively enough to get you the job you deserve, isn’t turning your back on authenticity. To do less than play the role of a hard-charging job seeker courts unemployment — or underemployment.

Why ‘be natural’ can be poor advice

First-cousin advice urging you to ‘be yourself’ in a job interview is the ‘be natural’ admonition. On the whole, isn’t natural better than artificial? Not always.

Is combed hair natural? Shaved legs? Trimmed beard? Polished shoes? How about covering a cough in public? Or not scratching where you itch?

Being natural in a job interview is fine as long as you don’t use your desire to be natural and authentic as an excuse to display your warts or blurt out negative characteristics.

Never treat a job interview as a confessional in which you’re obligated to disclose imperfections, indiscretions or personal beliefs that don’t relate to your future job performance.

In job interviews, every minute counts in the getting-to-know-you game. And to really know someone in a brief encounter of 15, 30 or 60 minutes is simply impossible. Instead of real life, each participant in an interview sees what the other participant(s) wants seen. If you doubt that, think back: How long did you need to really get to know your flatmate, spouse or significant other?

If you insist on being natural, an employer may pass you over because of your unkempt beard or unshined shoes, or because you don’t feel like smiling that day.

What exactly is a Show Stopper in job interviewing?

In the drama of job interviewing, a Show Stopper performance causes the interviewer to mentally shout, ‘Bravo! More!’ Your stunning impact quickly translates to a preliminary decision in your favour. If follow-up interviews, testing and reference checking support that reaction, a job offer is on its way to you. The employer may continue to see other candidates to round out the interview process but, in reality, no-one else stands a chance of landing the job after you figuratively stop the show.

The things you’ve done to date — your identification of your skills, your resume and profile, your cover letter, your networking, your social media efforts — are all wasted if you fail to deliver a job interview that produces a job offer.

Make the most of your critical brief encounters by learning the skills of storytelling, using body language, establishing rapport and doing more of what’s in this modern interview book.

New Faces, New Factors in Interviewing

Are you having trouble staking out your future because you can’t close the sale during job interviews? This mangled proverb states the right idea: If at first you don’t succeed … get new batteries.

Recharge yourself with knowledge of the new technology and trends that are affecting job interviews. Here are highlights of the contemporary job interview space.

Interviewing in the digital age

Classic interviewing skills continue to be essential to job search success, but more technological firepower is needed in a world growing increasingly complex, interconnected and competitive.

The new tech trends revolutionise all components of the job search, including the all-important job interview. Here are examples of technological newcomers and how they change interviewing practices:

• Video interviews: Both live and recorded video job interviews are coming of age, requiring that you acquire additional skills and techniques to make the cut. Chapter 3 is a primer on how you can outflank your competition by presenting like a pro in video interviews.
• Phone interviews: Automated and recorded phone screening services permit employers to ask up to a dozen canned screening questions and allow candidates up to two minutes to answer each question. Informed interviewees anticipate the questions and must hit their marks the first time because you don’t get the chance to go again with recorded answers. Read about this technology in Chapter 2.
• Credibility: Credibility issues are surfacing for multitalented job seekers (or those with a chequered work background) who, by posting various resumes and profiles online, come across as different people with different skill sets. This development can be a knockout punch for you in a tight job market where employers have plenty of candidates on offer. Sidestep the emerging problem of identity contradictions in interviews by following the advice offered in Chapter 14.
• Web woes: Employers can hire experts to scour the internet and social media (such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to check out your online history. Such a service rakes through closed databases in the deep web, leaving virtually no secrets unrevealed. If the deep web reveals negative information, you may get a chance to defend yourself in an interview — or you may never know why you struck out. See Chapter 14 for more information on this digital sleuthing tool.

Expect new kinds of interviewers

If the last time you trod the boards of job interviewing you w...