Please note: This article is transcribed via AI from our Healthcare Facilities Network video titled “Five keys to interview success.” Please excuse any misspellings. Watch the video of this transcription here.
Peter Martin
Joy, please focus from a candidate’s perspective on the interview. Are there three or four best practices that you have found through the years that work for candidate? What’s a good thing? And then maybe what’s a bad thing to do? So what’s a positive and a negative to avoid?
Joy Curtis, Cambridge Health Alliance, Chief Human Resources Officer
Yeah, so positive things, and this is we’re not not in facilities, but we’re leader right now says is top of mind, like who did well in the interviews and who didn’t know, certainly being prepared, you know, research, the organization know, you know, everybody’s website, you’ve got their mission, they’ve got stories about the organization, that will impress people that you did your homework, and that you probably really interested in the organization.
Learn to be as concise as possible, you’re probably going to be asked, you know, tell us a little bit about your background are you and why you want to work here. Try to get that under 10 minutes. Because we just had someone recently, luckily, was a very, very strong candidate. And made up for but their openings, you know, it was like, looking at their watches, and it’s like, 25 minutes. Really? Yeah. Okay, we just took up a lot of power with that. So, you know, and practice, have a family member or something, or, you know, that feels weird. Time yourself.
Write down the salient points, you know, look at the job description, or posting, and, and pick how you’re going to do that, you know, sometimes I tell people, if PowerPoint is your thing, take a point and develop some bullet points underneath it. So you can keep yourself structured. Yeah, that’s really, really important.
And have some, you know, good questions, you know, go on sites of, you know, interviewing questions and read those because they’re, you might very well be asked to, to answer this question. So you should be prepared. So you’re not like, Oh, isn’t thinking about talking about my weaknesses? Yeah. And and then at the end? Certainly. The the question to ask is, it’s a six months or a year from now. You know, I am been selected for this job and which I would be thrilled, that would have happened, but how, you know, what would be happening in the organization? How would you know, that, you know, you hit it out of the ballpark and recruiting the right person for the job, because it gives you a sense of the organization, then they may look at you like deer in the headlights, I never thought about that. But it gives you a sense of, of expectations. It’s also a good intelligent question to ask. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think those are, are the the points. So you know, the, the inverse is what you shouldn’t do, right? Don’t go on and on and on. I try to I have concise answers to questions.
Take a few deep, deep breaths, so that you’re not completely nervous. And the thing to remember, because it’ll be like, Oh, my God, this this interview, you know, I could blow it. But you know, we sadly we all know that the that they’ve done research. And the interview actually is not at all a good predictor of how someone will do on the job or good for selection. But it’s what we all do. Yeah, also means that, so if you get the job, great, you won’t be thinking about this. But sometimes people are so nervous, and they’re feeling like, you know, very badly if they don’t get the job. They feel you know, that they haven’t been affirmed as a good person.
Remember, it’s basically a random walk. And so you’re just gonna have to go in there, do the best that that you can, and know that at the end of the day, it’s not necessarily a personal reflection. I know it’s a very imprecise process if that helps quite calm you down. So yeah, be centered in the interview, and not be like, Oh, you’re like going on in your head. You’re gonna come across as somebody is like, oh, please like me, please like me. And that’s usually not what you want to be projecting an interview. You don’t want to be air Again, but you want to be grounded of like, I hope you like me to give you my best. But if you don’t, it’s okay.
Peter Martin
I love that analogy and I’m gonna actually steal I don’t know how I will credit you is the random walk.
Joy Curtis
So all you can do the only thing you can control and it is just put your best foot forward.