An interviewer at a job interview session. [Photo|merinppd.blogspot.com]
As employment opportunities continue to shrink away from the job market, employers are currently in an overdrive of raising the stakes for job seekers to secure any type of job.
With the ballooning workforce from local Universities, Colleges and Vocational Training Centers, it is imperative for any job applicant to be versed with skills on how to handle interviews.
This will increase your chances of getting hired by your prospective employers.
Below are some of the techniques that will help you succeed in an interview:
Phone interviews
The phone interview is a current interviewing trend being adopted by employers.
According to John Lees, a career coach and author of The Interview Expert its challenging one.
This he says is attributed to the fact that one only has their voice to prove their worth despite them having nice looks and outstanding papers.
Lees advises that while attending to phone interviews, one should move to calm places without destruction and background noise and then pump enthusiasm into their speech.
He also encourages having testimonials and relevant notes within reach to minimize fumbling and fidgeting.
If nervousness is encountered, he suggests the phone call be handled while standing adding that the interviewee must establish speech consistency and avoid prolonged silence.
Group interviews
Group interviews, Lees says are currently being embraced with employers as they are time-saving and candidates team playing skills can easily be observed through them.
It is important, Lees says to prepare answers to the commonly asked interview questions. “This way, if you the fourth person asked a similar question, you’ll have a new thing to say,” Lees notes in his book The Interview Expert.
If asked to perform group assignments by recruiters, he urges any job seeker to demonstrate collaboration warning against talking angrily against others.
The panel interviews
This kind of interrogation is mostly used for senior roles like Commissioners and involves key stakeholders during recruitment phase.
According to career coach Lees, they are tailored to establish how prospects handle high presser situations.
Here, he says it is necessary to do a background check of the hiring organization and if possible, find out who will be in the panel and also research on them.
This he says may give you an idea of possible questions to be asked.
Important to note, he says is maintaining eye contact with the panel and when answering questions, call people by their names while looking at all of them for none to feel ignored.
Finally, he notes it’s important to read the panel’s facial expression to assess how well your answer is received.