Interview Skills

“The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.”

Anthony Jay

In the course of a lifetime, most people tend to apply for new positions and change jobs at a few times. The process of getting into a new role or obtaining a new position often involves interviews. Success in an interview in majority of cases guarantees getting hired. The information and skills needed for achieving success in an interview process can be learned and mastered through effective training and practice.

In this course, we cover the life cycle of an interview from the beginning to the end, while explaining pre and post interview activity and processes. This course introduces the delegates to the objective of the interview, the necessary preparation before attending the interview, interviewer’s mentality and purpose, different types of interview questions and the effect of applicant’s image, behaviour and body language during the interview. Essential interview skills such as communication skills, effective listening skills, how to handle salary questions, responding to common interview questions, reducing anxiety and making the best impression are also covered in the course. Effective tactics and strategies accompany question examples in every stage and enhance the process of learning new techniques.

These exercises become progressively more sophisticated until at the end of the course you will take the role of an interviewee and go through a final simulated interview which is scored accordingly. Delegates get to practice many methods during the course and also receive detailed course material for study and reference after the course.

In this day-long highly practical course delegates will learn:

What is the Best Strategy to Approach an Interview?

• What is the purpose of an interview?
• What types of interviews exist?
• Who gets hired?
• How to prepare for an interview

What Goes on in the Mind of an Interviewer?

• What psychological techniques can you use to leave the highest impression on the interviewer?
• What does the interviewer look for?
• What is the interviewer afraid of?

How Should You Behave at an Interview?

• How to greet
• How to present yourself at your highest
• What is the best body language?
• How to convert your nervousness to your advantage
• How to shake hands
• How to sit, how to move, where to look, etc.

How to Structure Your Conversations

• What to say?
• How to improve your conversation by paying attention to the words spoken
• How to make the best of words
• What strategies to use to make yourself likeable?
• How to satisfy the desire of the interviewer, who wants to know you inside out, by using specific words and styles of communication
• How to show that you are truly interested in the job

What Are the Most Effective Strategies?

• How to deal with general questions such as “Tell me more about yourself”
• How to deal with difficult questions
• How to prepare for questions you might not anticipate
• How to handle salary questions
• How to improve your listening skills

How to Answer Questions

• What are the most common questions asked in interviews?
• What is best way to answer these questions?

How to Leave an Interview

• How to close an interview and leave a good impression of yourself
• How to maximise your chances of success in the interview using a few simple tricks at the end of an interview

Audience: Suitable for those who want to learn how to be interviewed, for example, to get a job. 

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 or 1.5 Day depending on your pace and use of optional content.

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Learn and use effective strategies to handle interviews and understand what interviews are all about
• Look at the interview from the interviewer’s position to better formulate your responses
• Use body language and first impressions to get through interviews successfully
• Learn how to make the best use of words and apply established tactics to get maximum results in interview conversations
• Learn how to make effective interview conversation and use the best strategies to get maximum results
• Answer interview questions confidently using the most effective strategies
• Finish the interview in a way to increase your chances of success

The course is designed with the latest advances in training and skill transfer where delegates will be going through the content repeatedly from many different angles until they can memorise the topic during the course. Many areas are covered as discussed in the course description. To make sure the content is memorised easily, each topic is followed with a specific exercise that helps the delegates to understand what was just covered.

Due to a large amount of theoretical content in the course, it can easily be extended to more than one day. Optional exercises are provided along with guidelines on how to extend the course. If you follow with a multi-day course, you can spend more time on certain critical topics or repeat certain exercises to make sure that delegates will completely learn the new skills and distance themselves from their previous bad interview habits.

We believe that the best way to learn is by examples as demonstrated by many studies. As a result, just about every topic in the course is covered with comprehensive examples so that delegates can see exactly what they need to do or say in a given situation. Experience shows that learning using examples is extremely effective especially when new topics are described for the first time. This method of teaching is also very quick which means more content can be covered in a given time.

All in the all, the course material is an excellent resource for trainers who are engaged in teaching Interview Skills and considering the current global financial market, it is indeed an important area worth considering.