How to shine

Key Takeaways

imagine that you have just received the email that you are waiting for and hoping for the news that your application was successful you've been shortlisted and you're now invited to do an interview and presentation you feel that you'd be great for the job but how do you demonstrate to the panel that you'd be great in the role how can you demonstrate your knowledge skills and behaviors so that the panel can see the great things you are capable of how do you shine before i joined the university i worked as an occupational psychologist in the field of employee selection assessment and development and assessed hundreds of candidates each year there were things that performing candidates had in common things they did to prepare for their assessment and approaches they took when performing in the selection process i will share these with you here are my top 10 tips to shine in a selection process tip 1 do your research high performing candidates do their research before the selection process this can include desktop research asking questions and reading upon topics useful things to research include the purpose of the role why was the role being recruited what needs does it serve what does a role provide to the team and the wider university which is important enough for the post to be approved for recruitment what's the context in which the role will operate what are the current challenges opportunities and work assignments that will face the role holder what is the organizational and team climate and key topics if there is knowledge criteria in the person specification what are the most important topic are there any areas where you need to refresh your understanding before the selection process all of this research helps you understand the context for the posts you are being assessed for and can help you understand what is important to the recruiting manager when recruiting for this role this can help you anticipate likely interview questions that you might be asked and if you're doing a presentation key content that you should include if your selection process involves some sort of simulated exercise or work sample test researching common tasks assignments and challenges in the role can help you anticipate what these might be tip 2 know the person specification criteria inside out successful candidates have a clear understanding of the selection criteria this means they know what the person's specification criteria is and therefore understand what the assessors will be measuring when observing their performance in the interviews and other selection methods they understand what the panel is looking for and this then helps them to understand what they need to demonstrate read through each person's specification criterion carefully and reflect on what it means what would effective performance look like what are the things that the assessors will be looking for you to say or do to enable them to credit your performance if there are descriptions provided for the criteria make sure that you read these for example the managerial specialist administrative job family has detailed descriptions for each of the behaviors on its personal specifications check out the descriptions that relate to the grade of the post you're being assessed for i've linked these in the youtube description box tip 3 prepare interview examples how people like to prepare differs from person to person however most candidates benefit from preparing a collection of example scenarios that they can use as examples in the interview prepare at least one example for each criterion on the person specification looking back at your work calendar can be a good reminder of all the different things you've done and help you think of relevant examples it's easy to forget all the different things we do in our role look at your performance feedback to help you identify where you have performed particularly effectively this can help you to select your best examples for example you might look at your performance and development review documentation or your behaviors and skills audit if you have completed one if your audit and the role you're being assessed for both use the transferable skills and behaviours from the same job family this will give you useful information on your performance that directly relates to the selection criteria it helps to have examples that are more recent this is because recent examples are easier to remember and you are more likely to be able to describe them in the level of depth required to effectively evidence the criterion that said it's fine to use older examples as long as you can remember them it's still valid evidence of you demonstrating that criterion even if it's from a while ago and your examples can be quite simple they don't have to relate to a big grand impressive piece of work what's most important is that it's a scenario where you've personally demonstrated the selection criterion prepare yourself some example questions that link to the selection criteria and have a go at answering them using your example scenarios this will help you determine if the scenarios are a good fit or if you need to think of more tip four listen listen listen one of the biggest pitfalls that candidates fall into is not listening carefully to the interview question asked preparing example scenarios in advance is very helpful but you need to listen to the specific question and adapt your response to it often you can see candidates answering the question they want to be asked rather than the question they were actually asked it's okay to listen to the question then take a couple of moments to think of the best example and response tip 5 provide quality interview responses candidates who score well understand how to provide interview responses that evidence how they have personally demonstrated the selection criteria to provide a quality response there are a few things to bear in mind your interview examples must be specific they can't be a general i do this all the time in my role they need to relate to a specific scenario or occurrence if it relates to something you do often such as team meetings choose one specific time where you best demonstrated the criterion in question your examples must relate to what you did personally and not relate to what your team did generally in other words you should be talking in terms of i did this rather than we did this assessors need to be able to pinpoint what your personal contributions were in order to be able to give you credit quite often the best interview responses relate to a scenario where something was challenging perhaps you face some setbacks or difficulties these scenarios give you more scope to demonstrate the criterion at a deep level and it's important to tell the interviewers not only what you did but also why you did it this evidences your thinking which can be important for evidencing the criteria for example saying i asked everyone in the meeting to share their perspective it's very different than saying i asked everyone in the meeting to share their perspective i did this as i wanted to welcome quieter voices to express their views so that all attendees felt included and i was able to gather a representative list of opinions rather than just those of the more dominant voices in the room tip 6 structure your interview responses high-performing candidates provide well-structured interview responses providing a logically structured coherent response allows the interviewers to easily understand what you are describing to them and allows you to focus the bulk of your response on the content that is most likely to score use the star method to structure the order of your response describe the situation task your actions and then the result or outcome you should spend the bulk of your time describing your actions as this is the part most likely to score against the selection criteria if you're unfamiliar with the start method check out the star method guidance i've linked this in the description box tip 7 welcome the prompting questions high performing candidates listen carefully and respond to the prompting or follow-on questions that the interviewers ask them listen carefully to any prompting questions you are asked the interviewer isn't trying to catch you out they are trying to help you and provide you with more opportunity to evidence the criteria tip 8 don't talk too quickly this is a simple one effective candidates paste their response so that assessors have time to note down their responses as verbatim as possible you obviously want to get a lot of content into the allocated time for your response and some of us speed up our talking when nervous but don't talk so quickly that assessors miss some of your response in their notes your scores will be based on the evidence in their notes so you need to give them a good chance at capturing all of this tip 9 do timed run throughs of your presentation effective candidates carefully time their presentations it's very common for candidates to run out of time in presentations and not get to present all of their prepared content this is because you often want to cover a lot of content but you're only assigned a short amount of time 10 minutes is quite typical for a presentation it's worth doing some timed run-throughs of your presentation and aim to do it with one minute spare this gives you a bit of wiggle room if you stumble over words or lose your place it will also give you confidence that you can pace your delivery and don't need to rush and tip 10 sell sell sell successful candidates know that they need to sell themselves they need to show off their abilities they need to blow their own trumpet this is something that a lot of people can feel uncomfortable with but the reason you are there is to shine and talk explicitly about all the great things you've done show the panel what you can do it's not the time for modesty don't underplay your part or not take credit for your role in a task or project people can feel a bit weird about doing this if there are people on the panel who they work with but the panel won't think of you as big-headed you are literally there to talk about how good you are hope you found these tips useful and best of luck in your selection process