To turn job interviews into offers, you need to be ready to ace the behavioral questions, the ones that require you to tell a story. That takes preparation, practice, and a good, complete list of questions to work with.

Your list isn’t complete unless it includes two types of questions: general behavioral questions, and occupation-specific ones…

Well known fact: If two job candidates are about equally qualified and equally skilled in interviewing, but one of them conveys more enthusiasm–more passion, to use the current jargon–that’s the one who will get the job. But not everyone knows how to show enthusiasm in a job interview.

As an interview coach I’ve worked with many job seekers who initially said nothing about enjoying their work, loving their occupation, or being excited about anything. Most of these job seekers, I knew, felt passionate about their work; they just weren’t bringing it into their interviewing.
Often these were people in scientific or engineering professions, but not always.

Is it possible your interviews are lacking this key ingredient for success?

Before I became a career coach I was, at times, a job seeker. I was always a bit puzzled by the idea that I should “ask for the job” at the end of an interview.

How would that sound? “Will you give me this job, please?” Laughable.

Here’s what it’s really about, and how to do it.

The bad news: you’ve had many job interviews and few offers, or no offers at all. You’re wondering what you’re doing wrong. The good news is that you may be about to find out what your mistake is, and you can fix it. And you’re not alone. In well over a decade as an interview [continue reading…]

If you’ve read much about job interview preparation I’m sure you’ve come across acronyms like SOAR, CAR, PAR and STAR, frameworks to help you build compelling interview stories. In this post I’ll review these tools and pose a useful question: which of the letters in this alphabet soup is the most crucial?

And to make it more interesting I’ll use a favorite story to illustrate my points.