I try to get to the location that the iterview is going to be at
an hour in advance, that might seem like a lot of time but you
can't plan for traffic, you can't plan for things that might happen.
When you walk into the room, the biggest things that
I had to make sure was that you smile. Sometimes you're quite
flustered or you're a little bit nervous and you're playing around maybe with
a bag in your hand or something but make sure you give them your full
attention,
give proper eye contact, good hand shake,
open body language.
There are there are so many people applying for these jobs,
you've got to be able to distinguish yourself not just with your
skills and all your education that you've taken but some
personality as well. I actually ran the books for
my university cricket team. Back in the day in university we
distributed about two thousand papers to the student body
where I took it upon myself to be in charge of the finance section.
And I always mention that because it was fun and it shows that I had a life outside of
my studies and that numbers are something that I am passionate about
in my day to day life as well.
You're going to get asked a lot of questions.
that's how an interview works, you will have been able to prepare for some of
those and particularly if you've done your research into the company
you can definitely have an idea of what they're going to ask you as pertaining
to the
role that you will be fulfilling and also the company more generally.
You need to know what's on your CV and you need to be confident about that, but you also need to prepared that
they might ask you something
completely different and off the wall and you need to be able to really listen and be switched
on to what
ever that asking you. It's really, really important to make sure that you specifically
giving the right examples or the right skills
or whatever it might be for that particular question,
and I think they'll be really, really happy that you've listened.
At the end of the day you know they're interested in you,
and you're interested in them, so again it's a conversation
and the conversation is about talking but also listening.
There's always a part of the interview that says, 'well,
have you got any questions?', and you don't want to sit there blank,
that's not good. And maybe you've covered everything that you'd pre-planned to ask at the end, but
it's always good to have a few back up questions just in case. Pprobably in an
interview avoid asking questions about payroll and HR,
that will be covered after the interview. If they offer you the job
it's then your remit to ask about that. I think it's really important to ask questions that
are relevant and important for the interviewer
to hear that you care about the company
and your position in it. So I came with questions you know again my questions were in
relation to the goals of
the company. In 5 to 10 years it was important for me to know what their
long term future was.
But the main thing is really finding out how are they going to support you
on your ACCA journey. You want them to be able to take you to that
full membership
and are they going to be flexible about that? Are they really going to be able to help
you
and give you the best possible chance of achieving that full membership?