interviewing - Office of Career and Leadership Management

Getting called for an interview is a positive sign in the job search process. With the focus on virtual interviews, our workshop last week covered tips and strategies on how to prepare for an upcoming interview and questions to anticipate. Tips included:

- Connect with alumni who either worked at the organization or are in similar roles to gain insights into the organization’s culture and challenges
- Test your technology ahead of time, choose a quiet, well-lit space to conduct your interview, and limit any distractions (learn more about video interviewing here)
- Anticipate behavioral and situational-based questions and prepare answers that show how you’ve demonstrated pertinent skills

If you missed the event, you can review the presentation slides posted in Career Connect within our Document Library under the Presentation/Workshop folder.

resume GIF

As if crafting a resume that aptly and succinctly highlights your background and skills within a 10 to 15 second glance isn’t hard enough, highlighting critical soft skills, such as interpersonal skills — an essential qualification for any job — can be especially challenging.

So how do we tout such skills without saying that we simply have them? Start by thinking critically about what these skills look like in action-and-result form. For example:

Collaborated with a team to develop a new intake process.
Trained a group of student leaders on conflict resolution and mediation skills.
Developed partnerships with community organizations to streamline the client referral process.

Using concrete language to demonstrate your ability in these ways (i.e. showing versus telling) is far more effective than simply stating that you have good “people skills” or that you “work with well people”.

For more tips, review the resources in the Document Library within Career Connect.

Tag: interviewing

Interviewing Skills Workshop Recap

Highlighting Your Soft Skills in Resumes and Interviews