Blogs

Hi all,

I've put up a few blogs and discussion posts recently about the training vacancies that I had coming up..

Well, things have moved on a bit. In fact, it's all come to fruition and I've had the enjoyable experience of ringing the successful ones to pass on the good news, and the rather more difficult experience of also ringing the ones that didn't get selected.

A few things that I noticed, and thought were very much worth sharing:

The opening question, designed to settle them in gently with a subject that I expected them all to be able to answer well, was 'Let's start with a straight forward question then. So, can you tell me a little bit of what you know about our organisation?'

What I didn't expect was a succession of really very poor replies, ranging from 'Crikey! that's a good question!' through to 'Not much really, can you tell me a bit about it?'.... Seriously!!  

Don't get me wrong, there were a couple of candidates that had obviously done their preparation, and gave a complete history of the Trust, examples of what we do etc. but the huge majority seemed to be completely at a loss in how to answer such a question. 

It was so bad that I am considering putting on a free workshop for local young people in how to prepare for an interview.  I should add that the majority of the candidates were recent graduates. Does anybody know if they get any sort of professional development sessions at Uni - to address such an obvious shortcoming? 

One other thing I noticed..  I informed every candidate that I would be ringing them on Friday, no matter what the outcome was. I had to ring a total of 19 people that day.  Only ONE of them answered their phone!  It took me into the evening to finally get hold of the last one.   If that was me waiting for news of the outcome of an interview, my phone would not leave my hand all day..

Anyway, to end on a high note - an example of how to prepare correctly for an interview.

Many thanks to Lucy Saunders ( a fellow DPG Student) for allowing me to link to her personal blog, in which she describes her transition from an Army Career into an HR career.  This post post really struck me as being THE way to prepare for an interview.  Well done Lucy - that sort of preparation is exactly what I would hope to find at an interview!

Steve