The Insider Guide to Careers
Insider information, secrets and tips about getting hired and building careers. For employees and job candidates.
Prework begins well before you even enter the interview room. One needs to follow a three-pronged approach to crack an interview. As a first step, you have to identify the skills the company expects from you. Secondly, you need to frame STAR answers to the questions identified in Step 1. Finally, it would help if you practiced a lot. Let us review in a lot more detail each one of the steps.
1) Skills prework:
Assume you are applying for a hardware engineer role at Apple. It would help if you first identified the skills required for the job well before the interview. I will illustrate an easy way to identify the skills required by the company:
1) Go to the Apple corporate website
2) Go to the careers section of the Apple website
3) Type the job title “Hardware engineer,” choose the location you want to work in, and click search
4) Open up the job descriptions (JDs) which pop up and make sure you are opening the JD which matches your level of experience
5) Scroll down to the skills section of the JD
6) List the skills you see on a piece of paper. Club the skills under three categories: Technical, Business, and People
Almost every question you will face in an interview will test these exact skills. Now I will show you a method to predict the questions you encounter during the interview process. This method will work well to anticipate business and people skills questions but may not work for technical skill questions. When it comes to technical skills, you have to prepare for it the hard way; there are no shortcuts. You will face specific questions meant to estimate your level of technical expertise. Not surprisingly, the answers and technical evaluations are binary – you either have the skill or don’t. When it comes to business and people skills, evaluating them is way more complicated. They don’t lend themselves to simple assessments.
2) The STAR question prework:
In most interviews, business and people skill questions will use this format: “Tell me about a time in the past when you had to exhibit Skill X,” “Tell me about a time in the past when you had to exhibit Skill Y,” and so on. Skills X, Y, etc., are the skills you should have already read in the job description. So if the JD has eight skills listed, with three technical skills, two business, and three people skills, you have to be ready with at least five examples to share for the five business and people skills. An excellent way to identify a proper experience-skill match is the following:
1) List all your projects, assignments, and unique experiences in the last three years. The more recent it is, the better. University students should only go to their school days to pick experiences if the experience is unique and commendable.
2) List all the skills you identified as part of the skills prework exercise.
3) Ask yourself what prior experience best exemplifies an ideal answer for each skill question. It is OK to share the same experience for two skill questions, but ideally, you should map every skill to a unique experience.
4) Use the STAR framework to list the intricate details of how you plan to answer every question. Situation refers to the background of the project or assignment before you stepped in. Task relates to the goals and expectations which your manager defined. Actions are straightforward; they refer to what you did to solve the issues. Finally, results are the most critical part of a STAR answer. They refer to an objective and numerical evaluation of your actions. Instead of exclaiming, “I did a good job,” try saying, “I made efficiency/productivity gains of X%,” “I ensured cost savings of Y dollars, “My work got an excellent evaluation in the customer survey,” and so on.
5) You should go an additional mile to avoid surprises during an interview. It would be best if you referred to my youtube video, where I have listed down every possible STAR question you will be asked in an interview. There are about 30 odd questions. List these questions in a book and then write down the answers in complete detail, sharing your experiences in the STAR format. Then, before any interview, refer to these notes and quickly review which example to share for which question. These notes are an excellent tool for anybody to crack interviews, whether for entry-level university roles or roles at Director/VP levels.
3) Practice as much as possible and then some more:
Nobody is a born interviewer. If someone had a great interview, they have spent much time prepping for it in advance. You should never hear an interview question you have not prepared for (especially business and people skill questions). The reason is that if you hear a question for the first time in your life, it is just impossible to frame and deliver a great answer in a short span of time.
This idea of STAR interviews and answers is a bizarre and abnormal way of communication. No sane person will use this STAR model in their day-to-day conversations. Therefore, the only way to become proficient in this way of answering questions is to practice. Ask your friends and colleagues to conduct face-to-face interviews, where they ask you questions, and you try to answer.
Ask your siblings or parents to ask you questions on Zoom. It is even more challenging to convey a positive impression on Zoom than in face-to-face interviews. If you are an experienced employee, hire a resume or interview coach. The cost of hiring a coach will be peanuts compared to the new compensation you can get by impressing the recruiter.
Finally, the person who keeps interviewing learns by trial and error how to give the best possible answer. So, especially when you are early in your career or a student, keep attending as many interviews as possible. Make as many mistakes as possible early on. Then, whether you get through the interview or not, you still gain valuable interview experience.
Let me know in the comments section if you have any further questions or topics you want me to address.
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