Interviewing: Before the Interview (Part. 1)

BEFORE THE INTERVIEW

First of all:

CONGRATS

for getting the interview!

Now the ‘fun’ part begins.

Research about the company

You basically need to do some hard research.

Find out more about the company/organization, find out their motto, values, try and feel around your network for stories of what kind of people they’re looking for (“dynamic, independent achievers” right? 😛 Every company posts that).

And you have to also research on the industry to know what’s happening that’s affecting all the companies at the moment (are they facing a regulatory issue? consumer backlash? what?)

Have some insightful questions about the company or the industry ready to show that you’ve done your homework. Questions to ask would be: “I read about the new regulation going into effect at the end of this year. How is Company Y responding to the regulation, and what are your competitors doing so far?”

Practice possible questions

If you’re going for a technical interview, know your stuff inside out. If they hit you with questions about coding or IT design, you better know your stuff. I’ve been in interviews where they’ve said: “This situation happened. Tell us how you’d go about designing a fix for it.” Then as you give them your initial ideas, they may throw back some limitations like “Oh but they can’t add any more fields to the configuration, it has to be what is there. So how would you deal with that?”

And if you are going for a regular non-technical interview, think about the industry and what kind of questions they may ask. In a consulting interview for example, they may give you a situation (an actual consulting case) and want you to work through it in about 5-10 minutes to give your initial valuation of what you think the problem is, and where you think the project should start. (The ones I went through were grueling LOL…)

In a finance-related interview, they may ask about the different models that can be used for company valuation, formulas, whatever.!

You have to be able to think on your feet and it’s easier if you know the material.