Do you have to face a job interview? Our suggestion: BE YOURSELF!
When you are facing a job interview, remember that it is mainly a meeting moment for mutual knowledge and evaluation. The recruiter, or the headhunter in charge of the research, must get an idea of how much your person combines with his expectations about skills and personality. Your goal should instead be to be able to communicate and maximize your Personal Brand, your strengths, and weaknesses.
We want to give you some suggestions here to better face this meeting.
GET READY
Before starting the interview, inform yourself thoroughly about the company, its services and products, the markets in which it operates and the values it promotes.
Getting ready shows real interest and allows you to identify which skills and characteristics can arouse more interest.
RECOGNIZE YOUR STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
To list their strengths and weaknesses is a classic request to the candidate during a job interview.
Be honest!
Do not overdo it: list only two or three points on which you are strong and two or three of your weaknesses. Exceeding in lists and details would risk boring the selector or, worse still, making the image you are giving of you not very genuine (you can not be right in everything!).
Accompany each aspect of strength and weakness with direct experience that can substantiate what you are declaring.
When listing your strengths remember to mention at least one soft skill that you think you have acquired. Soft skills are skills that characterize more managerial figures, but they are increasingly sought out even in junior professionals because they reveal the potential of the person.
Soft Skills are:
- Achievement – what one can produce generally during an exercise
- Vertical team leadership – the ability to govern a hierarchical or functional team of people, but also to manage one’s own boss; many people see their career fail because they can not understand how to relate to their direct contacts. Remember that the relationship with your manager is bi-univocal (Two-Way-Communication)!
- Horizontal team leadership (collaboration) – manage the relationships with colleagues in the same degree but also with customers and suppliers
- Strategic vision – the ability to look forward and go far. It is a fundamental feature for managers but valid for everyone: there is always the possibility to propose something new, look beyond, be innovative!
- Changeability – attention, and sensitivity to understand the evolution of the surrounding environment, such as alliances to be tightened and what not to do. The ability to create networking.
You will undoubtedly be asked for more technical skills (Hard Skills). In telling them you mention those for which you have real passion and interest.
Be honest even on weaknesses and tell the strategies you put in place to make up for them. Don’t worry; everyone has their own “Achilles’ heel”! You can try to limit them, but it’s almost impossible to solve them. Perhaps even useless! As Zenger and Folkman tell in their book “The Extraordinary Leader,” it is much better to work to improve further your strengths rather than trying to correct weaknesses. Improving an aspect in which you are strong, and you have more interest, is an exercise that you face with lightness and agility because it concerns aspects more congenial to you. Moreover, if you try to improve something in which you are already strong, you produce a “halo” effect that ends up hiding the weaknesses: the others have a perception of you as an even stronger person, and they don’t see your limits.
SHOW CLEAR OBJECTIVES
Show you have clear short and long-term goals.
To declare where you imagine yourself after five or ten years is another question commonly asked during the interview.
Talk about your expectations of professional growth, report to the position for which you support the interview and describe the steps to take to reach the goal.
VALUES PERSONAL ASPECTS
Do not neglect aspects of your personal life, the sports you practice, your interests and the hobbies to which you dedicate your extra-work time.
In addition to helping to give a complete picture of your person, it allows creating an engagement with the interlocutor that can improve the nature of the interview. For this reason, if you are given the opportunity to start the interview by talking a little bit about yourself, we suggest you start with personal facts.
REQUEST FEEDBACK
Remember to ask for feedback at the end of the meeting: it shows your interest in understanding the perceived image of your Personal Brand and it gives you the opportunity to receive useful ideas to improve it.
In ZeraTech, we always like to give feedback to the candidate at the end of the interview, even when it is not directly required: we love the meeting can provide food for thought precious for the person.
In the same way, we also like to ask for feedback from candidates on our company, precisely because we live the interview as a moment of mutual exchange.