You’ve landed an interview for your dream job and are keen to make a great impression. Everyone knows that first impressions are extremely important, indeed the first thirty seconds may give the panel a feeling about whether you will be a good fit for the company. Don’t fear though, there is a lot you can do to prepare to present your best self and land the amazing job you deserve. Here are our best tips.
Bring your best self
You will want the interviewers to see you at your best, and this preparation begins early! Make sure you have enough sleep in the days leading up to the interview as a rested mind will perform better answering questions.
Eat healthy food, exercise, and do the things that make you feel healthy and good about yourself. Prepare an outfit that you feel comfortable and look great in. You will want to give the impression that you are confident and look after yourself because that will be reassuring that you will also look after the company.
Big bags under your eyes, unbrushed hair and a crumpled shirt might make your prospective employers think that you don’t care about yourself or the job. If your interview is online, you might get away with wearing pyjama bottoms, but make sure your top half looks fantastic!
If the interview is online, make sure you prepare the area the panel will be able to see- empty beer cans and take away boxes probably don’t give the impression you want. At the very least, use a background filter…
The night before the big interview, don’t stay up late cramming unnecessarily. Try to have finished all your preparation in advance, so you can have a relaxing evening getting rest and having fun the night before and making sure you have everything in place for arriving in plenty of time, well prepared and ready to go! Which leads us to…
Arrive on time or be early
This is absolutely an imperative! Arriving in good time for your interview is essential for creating the impression that you are a reliable, punctual person who delivers results. If you are late to your interview, you might get an understanding employer, but it would be enough to make some immediately write you off!
Arriving in time actually means arriving early, even if it means you sit outside in your car or in a café nearby for half an hour. You want to prepare to be early enough to avoid any unavoidable delays, going the extra mile, to make sure you don’t miss your big moment. Check out the traffic getting to the interview, if you don’t know the area well, have a recce of the route, or ask a friend for advice.
It is so important to leave more time than you could think in case of emergencies, such as car problems or an accident on your route, cancelled buses or trains, or bad weather. Have a Plan A, B, C and D!
If the interview is online, this still applies to you! Leave enough time to resolve any technical issues and prepare your workstation. Have a few extra plans in place in case you need to dash to a friend’s house in case your internet is down.
Important to consider though, don’t be too early, you don’t want to stand out for being a bit strange and hanging around in the waiting room for hours taking up seats and free coffee!
Build rapport with small talk
Believe it or not, interviewers often find the process of interviewing candidates pretty dull! As there common recurring questions in a job interview, they have to ask the same questions again and again, and they might have ten candidates or more to get through. This might be the fifth time that year they have interviewed for a post. You can stand out in an interview by making the interviewers job feel easier!
In the first five minutes, you will want to get off to a great start by presenting yourself as a person they will find easy to get on with. You spend most of your waking hours at work, and so, employers are much more likely to employ you if they like you!
Be friendly, make eye contact, display open body language, smile, and laugh, these are all signals that you a nice person people will want to work with. If you feel comfortable to, you could even make a joke! But, don’t pretend to be something you are not or the interviewer may be able to tell. It is important to be honest.
If you have done your homework on the company, you may have identified a few topics of interest to the interview panel. If the company has a twitter page, you could look for posts about company events, such as fun runs or charity days, and drop in that you have a shared interest. Or perhaps if there has been a major national event, you could make a comment on this.
Be careful though, try not to say anything too controversial! You do not want to make a bad impression in the first five minutes! In Britain, we like to talk about the weather, and this is a safe rapport building chat!
Stand out before the interview begins
There is a great way to stand out even before the interview begins! Often when you apply for a job, it gives you some contact details for people to contact if you have any questions. If there is a contact for the post, absolutely contact them before the interview as it will help you stand out.
Even if you do not have a specific question in mind, ring them up to ask them if there is anything they can tell you about the role, or ask a question about work patterns or promotion opportunities. Try to keep them on the phone for as long as possible if the conversation is going well, and then send an email afterwards thanking them for their time and expressing your excitement at the opportunity.
By now, you are already one step ahead of the other candidates as you might have some additional knowledge about the role, and also your name has been exposed more times to the interview panel.
In the first five minutes of the interview, you can reinforce this connection by thanking the panel for their time in answering your questions prior to the application. Explain that you were so grateful for their time and were very excited to invited to the interview.
All of this will give you a head start as the interviewers will see how hard you try, be more likely to remember your name, and your interview itself will seem more memorable.
Drop in some remarks about the company
Early on in the interview, let the panel know that you have done your homework and really want this job! Before the interview, learn everything you can about the company and recent events. Have a few comments prepared, such as, commenting on a specific marketing strategy or policy. Be an expert before you arrive.
If at any point you are struggling to think what to say at your job interview, try to steer the conversation back to the company you are hoping to work for.
Make sure you display this knowledge throughout your interview, but the first five minutes are so important here. You can give the impression that you already work for the company by talking about their work as if you knew it. This will seriously impress your prospective employers.
When you answer the questions, try to tailor the answers by giving examples of how you are a good fit to their exact company, rather than being generic.
A note
Even if you don’t make a good impression in the first five minutes, it is important to never give up in the middle of an interview! You might spill your coffee, stumble over all your words and forget the name of the company, but you still have the rest of the interview to sell yourself and recover that good impression.
You never really know how an interview has gone, and you should certainly not abandon hope just because of a bad start. Yes, a good start helps, but it is not the only thing that counts. The interview panel may have already been blown away by your resume and decide to give you a pass on that bad start.
After the interview, you can email them to let them know how much you enjoyed the interview and thank them for the opportunity.
Best of luck preparing for that dream job!