Preparing for interviews is often done alone, so how can we know we're doing it
right? In this video I'm going to break down exactly what I feel you should do
and when, from the moment the email invitation lands in your inbox to when
you stroll through those lobby doors with a confidence that can only come
from good preparation. I'm your UCL Careers Consultant, Raj Sidhu, let's
roll the intro and get right into it
Let's start with a timeline. Let's say we're seven days out from interview, your
very first task is to research the organisation; get to know them, what
motivates them, the projects they're working on, new markets they're targeting
and how their revenues have been behaving. Now the very best place to get
this information is from quarterly reports. Look at a few different editions
over time to get a sense of the organisation's direction and momentum.
The objective is to find really good material for the question "why do you
want to work here" maybe look for two or three things that genuinely interest you and
that you can build parallels to. Starting your preparations by looking at the
organisation is a great strategy because then you can orient the rest of your
preparation around what you feel that organisation might most like to see and
the language that they use. Now six days out from interview
I recommend predicting interview questions that you might be asked by
circling key skills and attributes in the job description attached to the role
you're interviewing for. I'd estimate that around 70% of the interview
questions you might be asked will focus on what you've just circled, so next,
write interview questions that test the things you've circled, adding them to a
spreadsheet in the order they appear on the job description. With five days left
to the interview, I recommend developing good answers and examples for the
questions you wrote. Writing these up as bullet points rather than full sentences
makes it easier to memorise the points themselves and build fresh sounding
answers each time you vocalise. Then add any other questions you feel may come up.
By spending time getting your answers in really good shape at this stage you're
essentially outsourcing some of the deeper level thinking from the interview
day itself, and this is great because then you can just go into that interview
confident in the knowledge that everything about your answer is
constructed in the optimal way for you. So now we're getting closer; four days
out from interview start practising your potential answers out loud. Now this is
really important because you get used to how your answers sound and feel and
you automatically memorise the structure of your answers. Three days and two days
out continue practising out loud. So it's the day before the interview and you
might be feeling nervous... that's totally okay it shows you care, you might
also be feeling confident, especially from the 70 to 80% of questions that you
have prepared diligently for, but there's still work to do... you must prepare for
unexpected questions... how? Start by searching for 'top 50 interview questions'
and not clicking on any links. Find Google's random number generator and set
it from 1 to 50 and generate a random number. Now go back to your top 50 interview
questions, find the corresponding numbered question, and then answer that
question immediately, as you would have to do in an interview. Now the first few
times you try this it will probably be painful, the next few times you will
notice a definite difference. You'll soon arrive at a place where you feel great
responding to any question and that's exactly the mindset you want to take
into the day of your interview. Follow these steps in whatever time you
have available to you for interview preparation that you can feel confident
about. Now if you're a UCL student you have access to free one-hour one-on-one
coaching for any upcoming interview be that for an organisation, a medical role, a PhD,
a postdoctoral or researcher position, where a careers consultant, maybe even me, will
take you through questions relating to the specific role that you will be
interviewing for. I can't emphasise how useful these can be. We can talk you through
things that are working well in your answers but also things to focus on, in a
supportive and constructive way. Lastly I wish you the very best of luck, you're
really not that far from securing an offer at all. If you have any further
questions about optimal interview prep then include them in the comment section
down below, and I'll respond to everything I see there, or you can email
me with any careers question at careers.marketing@ucl.ac.uk and your
question might well feature in the next Q&A video. That's it for me,
for now, I'll see you next time!