Preparing for an Interview

I had an interview on Monday!

It was a practice interview.

So there I was, thinking that it would be a breeze because the instructor was the one doing the interview and he’s a really cool guy. I did okay, I honestly thought I could have done better though. After the interview I realized that I didn’t say everything that I planned on saying.

Even though I wasn’t completely satisfied with my performance on the practice interview, it did help in one huge way. It was a reality check that I need more practice doing interviews! Now I’ve already been in a class or two that discussed interviews and what not and thought that I wouldn’t be learning anything new in this program but there were a few things discussed that I felt would be very useful to everybody. One part in particular was preparing for an interview by researching the company or employer you are about to go into an interview for.

Research the employer

So I already knew about this. Basically you want background information about the company or employer you would like to work for. Ideally you would want to do this to see if this is the type of company you would want to work for in the first place. And it is also good to have a better understanding of the company when going into an interview because they usually ask “Why do you want to work here?” If you do your research on the company you will be prepared and will be able to give a thoughtful answer based on your research, which will surely impress the person(s) giving the interview! To do my research I usually looked through the employer’s website, but it was suggested that you check out these other sources as well:

Hoovers Online (www.hoovers.com) – Hoovers offers extensive corporate profiles.
American Journalism Review (www.newslink.org) – This site searches newspaper websites for information on both small and large organizations.
Corporate Information (www.corporateinformation.com) – This site provides industry and company write ups.

I found these links quite useful because as we all know… the employer’s website can be a bit biased!