Recorded video interviews are becoming more popular, and, in fact, public jobs.ie has recently started using this method for some screening interviews, writes Liam Horan, Career Coach, Sli Nua Careers.
In a recent engineering recruitment campaign they ran, candidates who survived the post-application form cull had to answer three recorded video questions. They gave you the questions beforehand and allowed you plenty of time to do some trial runs before you went into the arena, so to speak.
They gave you three minutes per answer. So you knew exactly what you had to do.
In practice beforehand, don’t nudge your answer all the way up to 2.57 or 2.58. That’s edgy stuff. Aim to complete it in 2 minutes 40 seconds. One stumble then won’t put you under massive pressure.
If you listen to some radio stations during the night, you will sometimes notice the end-of-bulletin music coming up underneath the newsreader before they’ve finished reading the news. What’s happening there is that they have an allotted time – 90 seconds, for example – to read the news and the music is automatically programmed to come in.
So if they have 90 seconds, you can be certain they are aiming to do it in 80 or 85, and as they get nearer the end, they can slow down and drag it out a bit to bring it to 90. Sometimes the music comes up over them: they’d cut it too fine.
Don’t cut it too fine when preparing for recorded video interviews.
Break the ice not their will to live
The question “can you talk us through your career to date?” is often used as an icebreaker. However, many candidates seem to hear it as “can you please tell us every little twist and turn you ever took in your career and, in the process, bore us all to death?”
They are not really interested in that three months you did in a fairly insignificant and irrelevant role back in 1983. Trust me, they’re not. If it’s not relevant, cut it.
Think of an answer as lasting for approximately three minutes. If you start in 1979, zzzzz, and lead them exhaustively from that point onwards, you won’t be at 1985 let alone 2019 inside three minutes.
Curate your career. Before the interview you planned to talk about items relevant to their requirements. That should also govern your approach to this question.
Therefore you can cover 20 years of your career in five seconds. This may be “for 20 years, I worked as a primary school teacher in schools in Dublin and Limerick”.
In the 21st year, however, you became a deputy principal. This might be where your answer starts to get really relevant because you are now going for a principalship.
Also, come away from the chronological look at your career, and think solely of relevance. So you might well go back 30 years, as I said above, to find that time you were involved in teaching in a newly opened school – because now you are applying for a job as a teacher in a newly opened school.
Use that opening question to give them one, two or three more reasons to hire you. Please, please, don’t bore them to death.
Sli Nua Careers (www.SliNuaCareers.com ) have offices in Galway, Mayo (Ballinrobe and Claremorris ), Sligo, Dundalk, Tralee, Limerick and a full online service. Their services include CV preparation, interview training, public speaking and presentation skills, and career direction. For more details, visit www.slinuacareers.com
