Interview a two way process

They are interviewing you but do not forget you are also interviewing them.
Yes, you might want a job but do you really want this job? Is there a better opportunity somewhere else?

Do you really want to get this job and then spend time looking for something else, when if you had done your homework, properly in advance, you wouldn’t even have bothered to apply in the first place?

In addition, it is easy to have a good HR department who make everything sound wonderful, whilst all around is crumbling. So your interview questions to your potential employer are vital.

Don’t wing it, prepare them well in advance (if you can, memorise them) list and then prioritise them. Work out your plan of attack, how do you want to come across hard-hitting, thoughtful... …Just like your C.V. if you haven’t written and rewritten them at least 20 times they probably are not as good as they could and should be.

Just remember not to be intimidated. Yes they might be older than you. Yes they might be more senior than you, so what?

There are a multitude of questions that you can source from the net, some of them very good. So, go seek.


The people clues to a company!

People are the key to any organisation. Your line-manager will be one of the biggest ingredients to your happiness or otherwise.

A good one and your on the way up, a waste of space and you will stay in the same position or worse, until you decide to leave. You need to find out if that person is organised or disorganised.

Organised = good and it means that that person is on-top-of-things, which means your working life will be proactive. It means that you will not spend your working life having to things at the 11th hour and waste valuable time fighting a rear guard action.

So make sure that you have a few “tactfully” worded questions to ascertain how organised that person is.

Do you team build?

An easy way to spot a company which has very little people management skills (don’t be fooled by that 9001 ISO fluff, in every organisation that I’ve worked in it hasn’t made any difference, whatsoever) and, therefore, is a cr*p company to work for, is to ask about their team building programme.

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