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Welcome to
the Interview Styles And Techniques section of Accountancy Jobs Board the specialist place where you can search to
find your ideal job in accountancy.
Interview Styles And Techniques
A job interview is probably one of
the most stressful short periods of time most people
spend in their lives, predominantly due to the fact that
most people have a fear of the unknown. It ranks well up
there with going to the doctors, the dentists or for
people with a fear of aeroplanes, flying!
However, stressful situations can
be overcome and actually be made to become a relatively
enjoyable experience if you are well prepared for what’s
ahead, with a job interview this is basically having
some form of answer to a question posed to you from an
employer at interview stage. No one likes to experience
that intrepid silence that follows when an interviewer
poses a question to you that you do not have an answer
for as it can appear that you are unprofessional and
have not prepared properly for the interview, hence
giving the impression you are not overly bothered about
getting the job.
Over the course of the next few
paragraphs we will give you scenarios as to the kinds of
questions that employers will ask you along with
replies, that will not always be the exact answer the
employer may want to hear, but will make you look like
you have thought about your interview without just
turning up with the usual “I am the person for the job”
attitude that so many people have and which can cause
failure at interview stage.
Employers do not want to waste
their time seeing hundreds of applicants for jobs as it
costs them time and money, they do not set out to cause
embarrassment or be sadistic making you feel inadequate
or stupid at an interview, they simply want to employ
the right person for the job as cost effectively and in
the least time as possible, so if you are well prepared
with your answers you will stand a far better chance of
a second interview or possibly getting the job there and
then if you tell them what they want to hear.
The more help you provide to the
interviewer the better your performance will be and the
more at ease you will feel so be positive and do your
homework and it will help you sail through your
interview with ease.
When you attend the interview you
are selling yourself and for the period of the interview
you will have the centre stage. People buy off people,
if they like you as a person you are 25% of the way to
getting the job, smiley professional faces are always
accepted in a far more welcoming manner than dead
serious ones! To a degree you are having to carry out an
“act” to sell yourself but have to “act” in a natural
manner, you must not pretend that you are someone that
you aren’t as if you are not relaxed and natural the
interviewer will think that you probably won’t enjoy the
job anyway and you won’t get any further than the door.
Most importantly when you get
through the tough stage of getting the interview in the
first place don’t be too nervous, easy for us to say I
know! A great deal of emphasis is placed on body
language by professional interviewers and although most
people expect you to be slightly nervous in an interview
situation they also expect you to be confident in terms
of what you are talking about, something you will do
with ease if you know your stuff.
You must always remember that we
all only go to work for the same basic reasons, to
provide for our families and to enjoy a better standard
of living and that applies from the Chairman down to the
Cleaner!
Finally, even if you don’t get the
job as long as you have given it 100% you will come away
feeling positive and good about yourself and this will
help you along way with the next interview you attend.
Preparation.
The motto of “always be prepared”
has never rung more true than when attending an
interview. It is always a good idea to find out a little
information about what your prospective employer does,
they after all have had your CV to look out to find out
background on you so why should this not work the other
way around. You don’t have to know the inns and outs of
the companies financial results for the last 200 years
but if you have done some research on the firm this will
look to an interviewer that you really our serious about
the job and their business. Useful information can be
found on companies websites or in the financial news
papers, a copy of which is kept on microfiche at most
libraries. It may be that they have just released some
news on a new product or had some good publicity over a
charity event they have sponsored, it never hurts to
comment on positive information about their company.
Most employers expect you to live and breath their
business during Monday to Friday so the more knowledge
you have about their company the better, it shows a
genuine interest.
There are basically three
fundamental questions that an interviewer sets out to
answer over the course of his/her time spent with you,
these are as follows:
-
Can You Do The Job?
-
Do you have the right
experience, qualifications, skills that they
require.
-
Are You Willing To Give The Job
100%?
-
Are you keen and eager, do you
want to succeed in helping make the company
stronger, bigger and better, are you self motivated
and are you able to demonstrate this.
-
Can You Become Part Of The Team
& Will You Fit In?
-
Are you a team player? Most
employers like this, one person doesn’t run the
company single handily it is made up of sometimes
many 100’s of people all doing their bit to make the
cogs turn smoothly. Do you get on well with people,
can you adapt, can you deal with awkward and
difficult situations, are you flexible.
At the end of the day the
interviewer has asked you to see him/her to find out
more about you. When answering these questions make sure
that your are well prepared with positive answers to
them, most people have a rather bad habit of singing
like a bird about their bad qualities and not their good
ones.
There is nothing worse that yes or
no answers to questions asked by an interviewer. We have
prepared a list of general skills question’s. Go through
this list and give an example to each one that you feel
you have strengths in. For example (interviewer) “are
you able to delegate work ?” (answer) “yes I am, in my
previous job I had responsibilities for overseeing
purchasing for all of our stationary as one of my
duties, but on a Friday I would have to do the week end
run off figures, which were crucial for my sales manager
to budget for the following week as well as the
stationary orders so I would ask my assistant to prepare
the stationary list to save time and I would check
through this before I authorised the requisition order”.
Try answering some of the following
question’s with your own answers:
-
Am I able to use my own
initiative?
-
Am I able to work under
pressure?
-
Am I good at communicating and
explaining things to other people?
-
Am I approachable by my staff?
-
Am I able to learn new jobs and
absorb information quickly?
-
Am I good at solving technical
problems?
-
Am I computer literate?
-
Am I able to work under
pressure?
-
Am I confident on the
telephone?
-
Am I good at meeting deadlines?
There are many more questions like
these that interviewers will ask, you should take five
minutes to think about as many of these as you can and
perform the same task as above. If you think about it if
you were to expand on each of the ten samples above with
a brief statement this would take about 10 minutes of
interview, on the basis that most interviews last less
than an hour you have given your interviewer a good
insight into your general experience. You will impress
your interviewer if you expand on these questions and it
will show that you really have thought about the
interview before it began.
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