For Candidates

INTERVIEW TIPS

KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL INTERVIEW
How often do you get a chance to have a meeting that may last no longer than one hour but could materially affect where you work, where you live, who your friends are, how much you earn, and the general course of your life? Apart from the first meeting with future in-laws, there is no meeting more important than an employment interview.

With that in mind, we have taken our results from more than 20,000 interviews and compiled the following advice that in more instances than not has been unfortunately learned from experience.

PREPARATION - Before you go to your first meeting with a prospective new employer, there are several things you must know. On your own, or with the help of your executive search consultant, you should find out where the company has its headquarters, branches and local offices. You should also know correct names (and correct spellings) and title of all people involved in the interview process. It is also important that you know the company's products and/or services and whether the company is private or public. Any website operated by the company should be studied and the most recent annual reports from public companies should be reviewed before the first interview.

TIMING - You must be punctual to every interview. On every actual interview occasion, you should plan on arriving a full thirty minutes prior to the interview time. Park out of sight of your prospective employer's facility and take time to prepare mentally for your meeting. Parked away from any line of view, you can also attend to any last minute grooming needs. Approximately 10 minutes before your scheduled interview time, you should pull into the company's parking lot, get out of your car and with a purposeful stride and a smile on your face (people are probably watching you out of the building) walk to the front door.

FIRST IMPRESSION - Every candidate should dress for an interview at one level above what the position will require on a daily basis. Men should wear a jacket and tie (preferably a suit) and women should wear a business suit. Conservative clothes - gray or navy blue - are always the safest choice. Men should wear a white professionally laundered shirt, a silk tie (no novelty or theme ties!), black shoes and a black belt. Both men and women should avoid excessive jewelry, and little, if any, fragrance should be worn.

ANSWERING TOUGH QUESTIONS - The interview should take place in a conversational style. Open ended questions should be completely answered in three or four sentences. Closed ended questions (answers to which are usually yes or no) should be answered directly, but with short elaboration or a return questions - "yes, we did cut our defect rate by 20%, but most of that was accomplished by an accountability program we implemented." Your goal is to answer every question completely but concisely, while fostering a conversational style so that your interviewer will openly share information about the position and company with you.

GETTING YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED - The questions you have about a prospective new employer are important and must be asked in a way that ensures you an accurate and meaningful answer. During your interviewing process, all of your questions should be strictly related to the company and the performance of the position, centering on the company's products, services, and plan, as well as any contemporary issues that may have a direct impact on the company. Questions regarding benefits, hours, vacation policy, smoking privileges, and other personal questions should be addressed only to your search consultant until after you have a firm offer in hand. Frankly, those issues are not pertinent to the candidate who is not going to receive an offer, and all of your attention needs to be directed toward winning the best possible offer. At the close of the interview, you should thank the interviewer for his/her time and say something along the lines of .... "From our conversation today, I feel certain that I could be effective in this position, and I'd really like the opportunity to come to work here. Can you tell me what I need to do next?"

YOUR FOLLOW-UP - Immediately following your interview, the candidate should call the executive search consultant for a debriefing and strategy session. At this point, you should also send a short and personal note or e-mail to the employer thanking them for their time and interest and expressing a significant interest in the company and the position.

We may be a little biased about the value we bring to your relationships with prospective employers, but job change decisions are among life's most important transitions. Take advantage of the training and expertise of the search consultant with whom you are working and work with him/her to make the right career related decisions and beneficially to grow your career.

The key to our successful search process is open and honest communication between our consultants and our candidates.

Whether we have contacted you through direct ‘cold’ recruiting means in reference to a specific search or whether you were referred to us through our extensive network, we will spend the time necessary to better ascertain your areas of knowledge, expertise, and career aspirations as well as your personal interests.

You will have an opportunity to share with us what aspects are critical to your career progression and what characteristics would make up your ideal organization and role. It is our goal to ensure you that any opportunity presented aligns with your long-term career aspirations as well as your skill set.

If you are ever engaged in a search that aligns with your background, we will keep you apprised of our continued interviewing process and progress. Once the interview process has been completed, we narrow the pool of candidates to those that best meet our client’s culture and needs. It must be recognized that equally qualified candidates will vary in attitude, chemistry and interest level.

We consider all of these important factors when selecting the "Best" candidate for our client. Our goal is to partner with you through the entire interview process so that you are well informed regarding any changes or deviations the search may take. At the conclusion of the interviews, if you selected as the candidate of choice by our client, we will conduct extensive reference checks. Lastly, we partner with our client to develop a compelling offer with a specific start date, and will help you finalize the various aspects of a professional resignation.