How to Ace Your Next Job Interview

You’ve landed the interview – good work! Half the battle comes in making sure your CV makes you look desirable, effectively illustrates your skills and experience, and makes you stand out amongst the pile of applicants. But now what? Once you’ve actually got an interview lined up, the next step is making sure you come across well when you meet. To make sure you ace your upcoming interview, make sure to follow our top 3 tips.

1. Preparation

If you want to make sure you come across well in your interview and give yourself the best odds of securing the role, preparation is absolutely essential. It doesn’t matter if you are the most perfect candidate for the role, with all the boxes ticked, the perfect education, experience and skills – if you don’t seem prepared, chances are that you will not be offered the job.

To prepare, make sure you know every detail of your CV. Chances are, your interviewers will have some questions about your skills or experience, so it’s important that you are ready and able to answer quickly and clearly. It’s also important that, as part of your preparation, you do plenty of research. This means that you should know about the company, have a good understanding of what is expected of the person hired to carry out the role, and so on. You may want to do some preparation by researching commonly asked interview questions. Even if they don’t come up during your interview, they might get some ideas and thoughts moving around your head, and these could still come in useful when other questions are asked of you.

Be ready to share what you feel is important about your employee experience, and ask smart questions when the interviewers ask if you have any. Something to bear in mind in the post-covid workspace is how remote workers will be trained, if this pertains to you.

2. Presentation

Take some time before your interview to think about how you present yourself. This of course means that you should take some time to think about the right outfit to wear, ensuring your clothes are of course clean and pressed. But presentation is more than what we wear – it’s how clearly we speak, how we carry ourselves and the posture we use. Body language is very important and can communicate things we do, and don’t, want to share about ourselves. If you want to come across as competent and confident, it’s essential that your body reflects this.

Acting frazzled or overly anxious, while understandable, isn’t likely to do you any favours. So focus on projecting a calm version of yourself, showing your confidence, and reliability, and allowing your best true self to shine through!

3. Trial Run

One of the best-kept secrets to acing an interview is doing a trial run. This is particularly helpful for in-person interviews where you will need to meet at the business premises. It’s not unusual for interviewees to be late for their meeting because they got lost, took a wrong turn, or couldn’t work out the access code to the building.

If possible, the day before your interview, it’s great to scope out the planned location so that you’re confident in getting there the next day. If you can, drive to the offices or take your normal train there so that you know exactly what to do on the day of the interview. This will help you to make sure you get there on time and can also eliminate some interview jitters.

For more on making good impressions, read our guide to office etiquette.