Today’s guest post comes from Jayden Bregu, a Senior Manager in Public Health who has incredible leadership experience. I am constantly inspired by Jayden and his career insights are always worth exploring. Thank you Jayden for sharing your tried-and-tested formula for job interview success.
Prep time
The amount of time you should be prepping for an interview is 2 to 4 hours + 2 hours for each night until your interview E.g. if you find out about your interview on a Monday and the interview is on the Friday, then you should be doing 2 to 4 hours + 2 hours x 4 nights = 10 to 12 hours of prep time. This will make you more prepared than 95% of candidates.
Actual prep
For each interview you should expect an average of 5 questions asked. For this you should prep 6 to 8 examples. The types of examples to prep can be found in the job advert. If there isn’t a job advert. Call up the interviewer and find out about the role. Guess the questions they might ask and prepare your examples as if you were responding to that question. Your examples shouldn’t be more than 300 words long. Once you have them written. Read them out loud 5 times each. Make changes after each as necessary. Then record yourself saying your examples. Listen to them on the way to work (listening doesn’t count as prep time – this is extra). So you end up reading your examples out loud 30 to 40 times. You have 1,800 to 2,400 words written. You will guess 2 of the questions almost exactly, and the questions you don’t guess you will have examples to alter on the fly.
Success rate
Anecdotally, anyone I have coached who has actually followed this has gotten the job they applied for. Those who started the process but didn’t follow through had a higher rate of getting on talent pools/having their referees checked. Those who said it was too much didn’t get the job.
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