How to Prepare Interview
Most Valuable Lesson
Recently, I have completed a wonderful journey of Amal career prep fellowship. An inspiring and fruitful accomplishment.
Are you concerned about your career success? Curious to know about career building? If you’ve already started looking for a job, you have probably realized that companies in Pakistan and across the world are no longer just looking for high CGPAs, they’re looking for candidates that can communicate effectively, solve problems, think creatively, a good team player, and much more.
Amal Career Prep Fellowship started with the support of Stanford University, PEEF Portal, Acumen, Echoing Green and TED to guide motivated job seekers, develop the skills and abilities that companies look for when hiring.
I have an amazing learning experience with Amal academy. I have developed a lot of skills and polish my qualities through this experience. I have learned lifelong learning lessons such as the concept of blended learning, a life of immersion, having perks of mentor-ship and most importantly the PASSENGER series; a series of courses designed specially to prepare one for the interview process. This is the most valuable lesson I learned; it stands out from others. That is why I want to share with you some important points about this series that you might able to develop interest.
PASSENGER stands for:
· P: Passion
· A: Audience
· S: Specific
· S: Support
· E: Engagement
· N: Nonverbal
· G: Gratitude
· E: Equip
· R: Real
Passion:
For me, PASSENGER series was one of the most important takeaways. The first letter of the PASSENGER denotes Passion. It describes how to use passion in interviews by:
1. Showing Passion through Research
2. Showing Passion through Punctuality
3. Showing Passion through Dress
4. Showing Passion through Energy
Through these steps, I was able to find a passion for my dream job and company. One can trace his passion by doing proper research about the company and then presenting himself in front of the interviewer.
Audience:
The second letter denotes the audience. In an interview process, our audience is the interviewer. It helps out in exploring the employer by focusing on the two ideas:
1. Understanding interviewer’s mentality
2. Understanding interviewer’s questions
In the first idea, I’ve gotten to know about employers’ mentality, and as it turned out, employers are on our side. They want to hire the best candidate for their team, they are interested in us and they hope that we are the perfect match for the vacancy they have. While in the second idea, we explored the types of questions, what employers are looking for in answers to those questions, and how we can be prepared for any kind of question.
According to research from Forbes, LinkedIn, Business Insider and others, there are 3 main questions, known as the Question Behind the Question (QBQ) that every interviewer is looking for answers for in each interview. Recruiters may ask you 15 questions, but there are 3 main questions that they care the most about and we have to make sure that we prepare for them.
The three main QBQ’s are:
1. Can you do the job? That indicates the skills, abilities and strengths you have.
2. Do you know the job? That indicates the passion you have.
3. Can we work with you? That indicates either you are fit for the job or not.
Specific:
I have learned about 4 rules on how to be specific in interviews. Here, we have 4 rules of storytelling or being more specific in interviews.
1. Keep it sada
2. Focus on Amal
3. Focus on kya haasil hua
4. Ask kyun kyun kyun
These rules of storytelling help to share our story of specific examples effectively. “Keep it sada” here means “keep it simple”. Firstly, you have to share the situation, secondly, the obstacles you faced and at last the solution. This is SOS (Situation, Obstacles and Solution) technique. SOS is essentially a universal sign for help and in this context, if you are in an interview and you need help, you need to remember. How do I tell a story? How do I give an example? Keep the story short. The story; the shorter the better and one (1) minute story approximately is best. What does it mean by “focus on Amal”? It means what did you do? How did you overcome the obstacles and how did you add value? You have to answer these.
Now focus on kia hasil huwa, what was the solution? and quantify wherever possible. Finally, what does the story say about you and what skills does the story prove? Why does this story matter? Keep in mind all these perspectives while giving an example. I want to give an example to clarify to you people more. For example,
The interviewer asked, what is your biggest strength?
I can answer in this way: my biggest strength is teamwork during my Final Year Project (FYP) in graduation. We were assigned a group of 4 people while working on a research project. After a few weeks, there was a boy who didn’t want to engage with us anymore. He wanted to work on a somehow uncomplicated project. The day before the 1st presentation of FYP, he quitted. I went to his hostel’s room, I persuaded him to join the work and explained to him it is the team effort, not an individual work. In the end, we presented altogether as a team we scored the maximum and finally, we published our research paper.
Support:
In Amal fellowship, one of the important things is to support each other while giving feedback. One can help others by giving very thoughtful and specific feedback when you are working on various skills. This follows the principle of “Aik or Aik Gyara”. This is a helpful way to identify the skills that are lacking in us.
Engage:
In this part, Amal focuses on a skill that will set you apart from the majority of the interviewees: that is engaging your interviewer. Because it is better to be interested or interesting. As we would prefer someone to be interested in ourselves or just interesting in ourselves. So, we should focus on how to engage with your interviewer by being interested in them by the following two ways:
1. Remembering names
2. Asking questions
There are 5 different ways to remember the names, includes repeating the names in your mind, noting down the names and relating to a specific situation. This will help out to make a good relationship with the interviewer. While the biggest discoveries worldwide took place when curious minds searched for answers to their inquiries. A question has always come before the answer. Therefore, a brilliant answer requires a brilliant question. If one shares some questions with the interviewer at the end of the interview, it shows the guy genuinely interested in the company and the interviewer. I’m sharing a few questions here:
1. Please tell me what type of people are successful here?
2. What type of people succeeds in this business?
3. What type of challenges this organization will face over the next 2–3 years?
4. What do you like most about your job/ what thing do you most like while doing a job at organization? (most important question because everybody loves talking about himself/herself.)
Nonverbal:
According to Stanford University research, words only account for only 7 percent of how people judge you. The rest 38% is based on our tone and 55% based on our body language. From these stats, we can realize how important is nonverbal communication.
Amal covered several of really important things, including the following:
*Active listening
*Body language
*Handshake
Gratitude:
“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”
William Arthur Ward.
Through this part, we can be able to understand:
*How Gratitude will increase your chances of being selected for the position?
*How to Express Gratitude?
We can show our gratitude in case of an interview by sending a thank you email to the interviewer after the interview within 24 hours.
Equip:
We should prepare ourselves mentally for the interview that we would be going through. So, we should have mental preparation, how to manage stress? What kind of exercises we do beforehand? This will help us to show our passion and we would be comfortable and able to make a good first impression. We should be equipped with;
*Have a deep study of the company and its competitors.
*Have to come up with 3 to 5 stories according to SOS model to make our case strong.
*Have to come up with 4–5 questions we want to ask.
*Have to come up with ideas on how to plan our interview, how to climb accordingly?
I used the word climb because the interview is the most difficult part “ascent” of this fellowship. Finally, we have to prepare ourselves physically means how to dress up? How to make good eye contact, a good handshake and how to present good body language?
We have to come up with a resume, cover letter, professional attire and we need to follow up afterward. These are all the tools you have been equipped with at the time of the interview.
Real:
Being real perhaps is a new concept for us. It means being your authentic or true self. Not trying to pretend to be someone you are not. In this way, there will be maximum chances that you can get a job offer, or impress some of your friends, or even make your family proud. But only by being true and honest with yourself.
Being authentic is not only important for the interviewer but yourself too. Make our own talk. You know what distinctive about you. You know what makes you authentic. This will help you to appear as a unique identity.
Why we gave so much time to PASSENGER? Because I do firmly believe that PASSENGER is a really strong framework for getting success in an interview. PASSENGER is a complete tool kit and each letter represents a different tool. Now, we know how to use it at different times at the time of the interview. The main takeaway is that we should always be authentic and always be ourselves.
You have the tools, now it’s your call!