500 Words a Week - Reflecting on some recent interviews

Since moving to London, I’ve been lucky to have a few interviews. For this blog post, I’m going to briefly reflect on the interviewing experience and some of the areas I could improve on for the future.

First point is a bit of a catch 22. In one interview I was honest about what I would like to do over the forthcoming years, which was a small factor in me not getting the job (the main factor was there was a better candidate on the day). Ultimately the employers were unsure if I would be happy long term in the role and if I’d look to move up shortly once starting the role. Looking back, if I did that interview again I would still be as honest as I was, which I believe is important in the interview process. If I wasn’t honest, and just said what I believed they wanted to hear, firstly, I would be unhappy as I may have pigeonholed myself into a role I didn’t want to be in long term, secondly the employer would be unhappy in the future if I wanted to move up.

The old saying of “fail to prepare, prepare to fail”, certainly rings true. A few months ago I had an interview for a sport I hadn’t worked in before. Rather than taking a deep dive into some of the information of the sport and preparing the interview directly around that sport. Instead, I took what I had been doing with the sport I was working in at the time (football), and the general principles I had been using with football that I feel could be applicable to other sports. This didn’t go down well, I was far too general and didn’t really apply any context to the sport in question. If I were to go back and do that interview again I would try to blend both the approaches. That is, be specific to the sport and talk about the sport in question, but then show how some of my principles I had developed from working within football would transfer across.

Lastly, for one of the interview presentations, I spent the majority of time talking about what some of the research states for working within this cohort of athletes. Feedback I received was that they did appreciate my understanding around some of the research within this population, but I didn’t spend enough time talking about what I would actually do in this role. The employers stated that the person who was the successful candidate, had laid out in detail exactly what he would do in the role. So again similar to above, I would blend the approaches. Dedicate some time to talking about the relevant research, but spend the majority of it talking about what I would actually do/ implement/ how I could add value.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as I read this back I’m frustrated about how obvious some of these issues are. There is an archery adage I heard recently, you only have control over the arrows that are still in your quiver, once you have shot an arrow you have no control over where it’s going. You can only learn and move to the next arrow.