Introduction
I f you’d rather fight off an alien invasion than be grilled in an interview, take heart — you’ve come to the right book. With the help of dozens of interviewing authorities, I make your interviewing challenge easy, successful, and even fun.
I share with you lots of new things in this Australian and New Zealand edition of Successful Job Interviews For Dummies, ranging from the cosmic shift sparked by the rise of social media that changes what networking means, to increasingly popular video interviewing that changes how communication occurs.
What hasn’t changed is the fundamental role in the employment process played by job interviews — those crucial meetings that seal the deal on who gets hired and who gets left on the outside looking in.
Remember that job interviews are a slice of performance art. They’re staged theatrical sketches rather than in-depth investigations into life histories. That’s why theatre and drama are comparisons used throughout this book, and I hope you have some enjoyable moments with the show-biz motif.
With the help of this book, you, too, can put in a Show Stopper performance — one that wins so much enthusiastic, prolonged applause that the show is temporarily interrupted until the audience quiets down.
Successful Job Interviews For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand edition, is packed with the essentials of performing Show Stopper interviews:
- Strategies and techniques
- Sample dialogue and research tips
- The best answers to make-or-break questions
About This Book
A book of contemporary interview arts, Successful Job Interviews For Dummies contains the distilled wisdom of hundreds of leading interview experts whose brains I’ve been privileged to pick for many years. By absorbing the guidance and tips I pass on in this book, you can interview your way into a job by outpreparing and outperforming the other candidates.
To assist your navigation, I’ve established the following conventions:
- I use italic for emphasis and to highlight either new words or terms I define.
- Web addresses appear in a special font to distinguish them from the regular type in the paragraph.
- Sidebars, which are shaded boxes of text, consist of information that’s interesting but not necessarily critical to your understanding of the topic.
I use the following terminology to label specific roles and organisations:
- A candidate or job seeker is a person applying for a job. (Applicant means the same thing.)
- An interviewer is someone interviewing a candidate for a job. An interviewee is a candidate being interviewed for a job.
- A human resources (or HR) specialist, HR manager or screener is an employer sentry who is conducting a screening (preliminary) interview.
- A hiring manager, hiring authority, decision-maker, decision-making manager or department manager is a management representative conducting a selection interview who has the authority to actually hire a person for a specific position.
- A company, employer or organisation is the entity you hope to work for, whether private and profit-making, or private and non-profit, or within the public sector.
- A recruiter (also called a headhunter) is an intermediary between the employer and you. Internal recruiters work inside the company, either as regular employees of the human resources department or as contract employees. Third-party recruiters or independent recruiters are external recruiters, some of whom are engaged on an ongoing basis so know the employer organisation very well while others are engaged just for a one-off hiring recruitment campaign and are paid only when a candidate they submit is hired.
- A career coach (also called a career consultant) helps job seekers gain workplace opportunities. (A career counsellor and a career coach represent two different professions, although their work sometimes overlaps.)
- A hiring professional is any of the aforementioned professionals who is engaged internally or externally in the employment process.
Foolish Assumptions
I assume you picked up this book for one or more of the following reasons:
- You’ve never been through a competitive interview and you’re freaking out. You need a couple thousand friendly pointers from someone who’s interviewed many of the marquee minds in the job interview business and lived to write about it.
- You’ve been through a competitive interview and assume the company sank like Atlantis because you never heard a peep from those folks again. Or maybe you could have done better and actually heard back if you’d have known more about what you were doing in this interview thing.
- The most important interview of your career is coming up. You realise that now is the hour to dramatically improve your interviewing success. You need help, and you’re willing to learn and work for success.
- You’ve been through a slew of job interviews over the course of your career and have a hunch that some important things have changed (you just don’t know what exactly). You want to catch up with the help of a trusted resource.
I further assume that you’re someone who likes reliable, comprehensive information that gets to the point without rocking you to sleep. And I assume even further that you like your expertise with a smile now and then.
Icons Used in This Book
For Dummies signature icons are the little pictures you see in the margins of the book. I use them to focus on key bits of information. Here’s a list of the icons you find in this book:
A bad review for a poor performance. This icon signals situations in which you may find trouble if you don’t make a good decision.
This icon flags news you can use that you won’t want to forget.
Bravo! This icon heralds star-quality lines and moves that prompt job offers.
Advice and information that can put you on award-winning pathways in your interview follow this icon. It lets you in on interviewing best practices.
Stop! Watch out! Read these warnings carefully.
Beyond the Book
In addition to the material in the print or ebook you’re reading right now, Successful Job Interviews For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand edition, also comes with some access-anywhere resources on the internet. Check out the free Cheat Sheet at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/successfuljobinterviewsau for some quick, helpful tips. For free extra companion material for this book, visit www.dummies.com/extras/successfuljobinterviewsau.
Where to Go from Here
On the stress scale of life, job interviewing ranks with making a speech before 500 people when you can’t remember your name or why you’re standing in a spotlight at a podium. The spot where you start in this book depends on your present needs:
- If you have a job interview tomorrow, quickly read Chapter 1 for an overview, followed by Chapters 20 and 21 for an instant infusion of key know-how. Additionally, go to the company’s website to glean as much basic information as you can. Don’t forget to read the company’s press releases.
- When you have a few days before you’re scheduled for an interview, read Chapter 1 and then flip through the Table of Contents to the chapters dealing with your most pressing concerns. Pay attention to Chapter 11, which reveals how to stack the deck in your favour during the closing minutes of your interview.
- When you have plenty of time, read the book from cover to cover. Practice recommended strategies and techniques. After you master the information in these pages, you’ll have a special kind of insurance policy that pays big dividends for as long as you want to work.
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