preparing for a job interview

I had to deal with job hunting for quite some time and even prepared for getting help from my virtual assistants. Here are the main lessons I learned when preparing for a job interview.

The mundane: prepare your clothes

Learn how to tie a tie!

This is a key skill. It’s fine if your mom knows how to do it better than you – at the beginning.

(To be honest, my mom still makes better tie knots than me. But I know I can tie a decent tie if it comes to it!)

Think about it: what if your tie comes undone right before the interview?

You would be screwed if you didn’t at least know the basics of it!

If you want to learn how to tie a tie step by step, then you’ll love this video series!

You can download them for free now!

Have your suit cleaned and ironed in time!

There is nothing more useless and unnerving than trying to figure out what to wear a few hours before your big interview!

Make this decision the day before and stick with your choice. This will relax you a bit.

I won’t have to say that taking a shower and shaving are definitive to-do’s before an interview, right?

Prepare for hard job interview questions

Do your research!

1. You can use tools like Glassdoor to research possible interview questions.
2. Here is a great collection of 100 potential interview questions
3. Do mock interviews with a friend or a spouse – or even record yourself talking as if you would discuss with someone from HR. Chances are, you could speak more slowly and clearly.

How can a Virtual Assistant help here?

You would have to be very creative if you wanted to find a way how your VA could help you preparing for a job interview. In principle, you are on your own as soon as you sit in that chair in front of the commission.

Still, just as it is possible to get coaching/reminders in Chemistry, as I did, you can simply hire someone to do mock interviews as often as possible with a few random interview questions until you are calm, prepared and ready for whatever they will throw at you.

Remember:

The best things you can do, next to real job interviews, are

1. training job interviews and
2. imagining doing job interviews

Sure, this is not very usual. But if you consider outsourcing as a lifestyle, then you are not very usual either.

Not that there is something bad about being creatively unique 🙂