Too many people under-appreciate the importance of preparing properly for an interview. As a result, they show up under-prepared, and it shows. If you want to wow the people who are interviewing you, you need to do your due diligence by researching everything you can find about the company or organization, their mission, their vision, their challenges, their accomplishments, and the people who work there. Also, you need to understand the job and its requirements. When asked at the end of the interview if you have any questions, you run a risk by not asking anything. It shows a lack of interest. It conveys that you haven't done the research, and it even conveys that you may not understand the job well enough to ask the right kinds of questions.
Listen to this episode to hear how Kitty Boitnott, Heart-Centered Career Transition and Job Search Coach offers that you should prepare questions of your own to ask at the end of an interview and why not asking questions can ruin your chances of getting the job,
For a transcript of today's message, click here: http://bit.ly/34O5DYu.
Too many people under-appreciate the importance of preparing properly for an interview. As a result, they show up under-prepared, and it shows. If you want to wow the people who are interviewing you, you need to do your due diligence by researching everything you can find about the company or organization, their mission, their vision, their challenges, their accomplishments, and the people who work there. Also, you need to understand the job and its requirements. When asked at the end of the interview if you have any questions, you run a risk by not asking anything. It shows a lack of interest. It conveys that you haven't done the research, and it even conveys that you may not understand the job well enough to ask the right kinds of questions.
Listen to this episode to hear how Kitty Boitnott, Heart-Centered Career Transition and Job Search Coach offers that you should prepare questions of your own to ask at the end of an interview and why not asking questions can ruin your chances of getting the job,
For a transcript of today's message, click here: http://bit.ly/34O5DYu.
Are you a teacher who's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." Welcome back to another episode of" Teachers in Transition." My name is Kitty Boitnott and I am the owner and founder of Teachers in Transition and Boitnott Coaching. If you are a regular listener, welcome back. If you're new to"Teachers in Transition" welcome. I'm glad that you're here. I offer a messages on stress management and a transition job change transition. Then think there for a minute. Job search strategies and career transition strategies for specifically teachers who are looking for a change in their career path. And this week I'm talking about a particular job search transition strategy. And that is when you are being interviewed. When you get to the point of the interview. At the very end when they ask you if you have any questions for them, you are going to need to have some questions written down somewhere. You may be carried in the portfolio that I would recommend that you carry into the interview with you. You need to have some questions to refer to and ask because a lack of questioning at the end of the interview sends the wrong message to the people who are interviewing you. And the message is, yeah, I'm good. I don't have anything to ask you. Yeah, you answered everything and I'm good. What that says to the interviewer is that you don't really care about the job. You don't, you don't have enough information to ask questions and that's a bad thing. In fact, I shared with someone just recently not asking questions at the end of an interview is a good way to blow the interview. And there are other other ways to blow the interview. That's not the only way, but it is a way to blow the interview, not asking questions at the end of the interview. You know, a really ideal interview situation is one where you are, um, not being interrogated. It doesn't feel like a third degree. It's more of a conversation and it's your responsibility to help to create the conversation by answering the questions that they ask you in a way that leads to discussion as opposed to a simple round of questioning. Now that's not always possible, but that's the ideal. That you become someone that they're interested in knowing more about and that the conversation becomes conversational as opposed to, you know, drilling question after question after question. So not having questions at the end is a critical error and one that you can avoid. The best way to be prepared to ask questions at the end of the interview is to have done your research ahead of time. And frankly, this is an area that a lot of people somehow fail to understand. They don't do their their research ahead of time and so they don't really understand fundamentally who it is that they're speaking with, what the organization stands for. More importantly, what are some of the challenges and problems that the company or organization may be facing? I tell people all the time that you only get hired for one of three reasons. This is true whether you're a teacher or CEO or finance person, doesn't matter, salesperson, you get hired because you can solve a problem better than anybody else because you have an understanding of the problem better than anybody else. You can make the company money somehow or you can save the company or organization money. Those are the three reasons. Solve a problem, make money, save money. So during the interview, it's a good idea if you can identify for the interviewers ways that you are prepared to do one of those three things or a combination of those three things. But in order for you to be able to do that, you have to understand fundamentally what the company or the organization stands for and what are their current issues. You know, when I was president of the Virginia Education Association, I sat in on a lot of interviews and I often use the example of one individual who came in for an interview and on paper she was perfect. Absolutely 100% perfect. And had we only been looking at resumes and references and letters of recommendation, she would have had the job. What caused her not to get the job was that as we asked questions, it was clear to us that she had not done her homework. She had not researched our organization. She did not understand fundamentally what challenges we were facing and since she was coming from a different part of the country geographically, she didn't have a grasp on the political or geographical challenges that our organization was facing. And she could have known those things with just a little bit of work on her part. As we ask more and more questions, it became more and more evident that she did not understand the issues that we were facing and she was not prepared to help us solve those problems. We wound up hiring someone who had done his homework. Not only that, that he had attended the convention that spring and had talked to delegates from all over the state asking them, what do you think some of the challenges the organization, uh, are facing and what would be some of your recommendations for how to fix them? He actually talked to people and learned from our membership what they thought needed to be done and he was prepared not only to address the challenges that we were facing at the time, but to offer some solutions. He got hired. Now on paper he wasn't nearly as qualified as the other person. He didn't have many of the kind of the attributes that we were looking for we thought, but at the end of the day he nailed the interview. He demonstrated that he had done his homework, he had done the research. He knew what challenges we were facing in some ways better than we did because he had done more research than we had done recently and he was prepared to offer whether they were solutions that we actually implemented or not. They at least they were suggestions that we could follow up on. He ended up getting the job. So you want to be able to ask questions at the end to show your interest, to show that you have done your homework, that you've researched the organization. The quality of the questions that you ask will demonstrate your intelligence, your preparedness, and at the end of the day it's the individual who can ask the sharp, pertinent question at the end of questions at the end of an interview. That can make the difference between the candidate being asked to take the job or not. So if you have in preparing for interviews lately and you haven't been doing your research, you haven't been figuring out what challenges and organization that you're interested in applying to, if you haven't figured out what challenges they're facing, whether they're financial or some other sort of challenge, if you aren't prepared to speak to those and if at the end of the interview you are, you aren't prepared to ask good questions, then don't be surprised if you don't get the job. When you are prepared with good questions and you are not intimidated. I mean, asking questions indicates a level of confidence in yourself that people are interested in seeing. They don't want somebody who's mealy mouthed and will go along with whatever they say. They want somebody who's going to be, uh, prepared to offer something of value and asking questions. Being confident in your ability to assess a situation and ask questions about it will set you apart from many of the other candidates. So when you are preparing for an interview, the amount of research that you do on that company, on that organization, on the people who work there and their mission and vision, you cannot know enough. So just do as much as you possibly can. Everything you need to know is on the internet somewhere. So it's not that hard these days to find out what you need to know about an organization. So do, do your due diligence. It's possible that while you do your homework on the company or organization, you'll decide, you know, they don't seem to have the culture that I thought they had and maybe I'm not as interested in working for them as I thought I was. That saves you. And them time. You don't even need an interview if you decide you don't want to work for them. So the research will benefit you as well as helping you prepare for the interview. It'll inform whether you want to work for that company or organization or not. If you don't do the research, you won't know that and you'll be going into the interview more or less blind. And frankly, having done that myself on a few occasions, it's not a good thing. It's not a good feeling. I wish I had known back in the day when I was interviewing what I know today about preparing for an interview. I made all the mistakes that people normally make until they know better. It's like my, Angela said, you do better when you know better. So now that you've had an opportunity to hear this message, you know better than to walk into an interview unprepared without having done your research on the company and preparing. Have had people say you should prepare at least 20 questions because they may answer a lot of them while they're asking you questions. And so you don't want to ask all 20 questions, but you want to be prepared in the event that they ask you."Do you have any questions for us?" You never want to say no, I'm fine. I you, you've answered everything. I'm okay. That is not the right answer to that question. Be prepared. Have good questions listed somewhere where you can get to them at the end of the interview. Show your interests. Show your passion for the job, show your understanding of the job, show your understanding of the organization or the company, by asking excellent questions. I promise you it will set you apart from the other candidates if you do that. And that's it for today. This is Kitty Boitnott of"Teachers in Transition." Thank you so much for listening or watching and I'll be back again next week with a s tressed strategy message. Have a good week. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition."