Pass The Interview Masterclass

1. Welcome to the Course: Let's be honest, when you think of interviews, do you think of this? Well, you're not the only person. Interviews are hard and stressful and kind of a little bit boring. The good thing is, it's actually not that difficult to get better at them. Luckily for you, I've had lots of practice since 2013. I've coached loads of students to pass interviews at some of the biggest and best companies in the world. Plus, I thought what an experiment more and make pass the interview videos on YouTube and see if that also works. Luckily for me and also for you that also worked and have now been saying for a 100 thousand times. So I wanted to make this course to help anybody passed the interview and to turn this into, into basically a system that is repeatable. It's quite simple, and I've used it with clients successfully for years. And it comes down to breaking down the process. Understanding how long we've got. How do we select questions, prepare answers, how do we practice those answers and make sure that it's effective? And one of the things that we shouldn't be doing and the limited time that we have. Because let's face it, if all we had to do with prepared for the interview, that probably wouldn't be a problem. But you've got everything else going on in your life. So join me in this course so we can have fun with interviews or something like that. 2. Our Class Project: Welcome to the course guys. Thanks for joining your amazing. Okay, cool. So I'm going to ask you a question. If you are going to learn how to swim, how would you do that? Which you read a book? Maybe, but that would kind of be weird. Which you watch a video, I guess, because you can copy them and stuff. But ultimately, the way that you'd learned to swim is by now not being a weirdo in front of the camera, but getting in the water. Have a nanostructure about maybe doing a little splits plaques in the bathroom. Okay, maybe not represent in a war with God everywhere. Anyway, you get the idea. So I'm going to tell you about what we're gonna do in the class projects and they're free pops. But I want you to remember that swimming example. Why? Because learning happens by doing and by doing stuff we learned because we're actually doing it and stuff, right? We can copy people, we can observe them, we can read about them. But ultimately we're going to learn so much and engage all of our senses when we're actually trying to do something. So the class project is really just treating you like you're one of our clients. And the way that I would treat you as Festival, I'm trying to get you to pick out a list of five questions you think that you would be asked in your interview. Doesn't matter if you don't have one, just think, what's a super awesome company that I'd like to interview out? And what are the five questions I think that they'll ask me. Don't know how that's cool because we'll teach you. The next thing is I'm going to ask you to prepare a pulse to introduction. Now we do this with our clients. This is actually one of the first things that we really 0 in on. Why. Because if you can effectively sell yourself, everything else becomes that much easier. And it's a really good way to condense everything about you into a short period of time. And finally, I'm going to get you to prepare an actual answer to a question of your choice, to record yourself and to share it with somebody. Whether that be here, whether that be with a friend, but just to get feedback from somebody else. This isn't as much about getting for the fear and getting into the practice, just like jumping in the poll and really getting wet and getting in the woods and that kind of, you know, that figure who would've had drowned and that kind of thing. That's what we're going to be doing. So all the time when you're watching this, just think about how can I put this into action? How can I do? Well, this guy is talking about. 3. The 3 Types of Interview: So what are the different types of interview? Will predominantly what we're going to talk about his video interview. Why is that, Mike? I'll tell you random person. The reason is, is that most of the interviews, at least the first round interviews right now being done on video. And I've actually noticed this increasing. This isn't just a COVID thing. This is actually something that's been changing since 2015 because businesses want to save money and stuff. So the next video interview that you have is going to be one of two types. March more likely is that it's going to be recorded like HireVue or Spark Hire will basically they'll give you a set amount of time to show you the question. And you're thinking like, how do I answer this question? And then those thoughts record and be like, oh crap. And then you start to answer the question. And I'll do that for a couple of questions in a row. And then automatically the file will be saved and sent off to the great interview ribo in the scarring. The second type of video interview that you could get, it's like a live interview basically as if we were talking on Zoom or on Skype or some other related video type software hashtag not sponsored. So really what we want to think about is this idea of being on video. Now you might ask her, hey Mike, you said this would work but any video interview? No. Any you lie, I want my money back. We'll actually everything that you learn will work just as well for telephone interview, offer a face to face interview. But we want to deal with something that you'll most likely to get. I would say everything that we cover would apply for all of those, apart from potentially the old, what questions should I ask the interviewer? And that's fine. I'll put a little bonus section in about that in the end to make you guys happy. 4. How People Normally Prepare: Well, before we get into the learning, I thought it would be quite fun to you just to look at how people normally prepare for interviews. This is my experience whenever I've spoken to paper over the years. So the first thing is you're sending out all these job applications. You'll really need to get into view. I really need to get a job. But you don't actually think about getting into, you think about getting a job. And then finally you're digging for your emails. You're like, Oh my God, I've actually gone interview. And all of a sudden you like a cup and leave it up good NEW, and you're really, really happy. This is then suddenly replies by this terrible sense of panic and drag you like, good to be. What are we going to do, guys to get up and speak to people. And just as overwhelming sense of like, okay, now we're here. Now what do I do? I don't really know. So then what happens is, is you basically think, well, I better go on the Internet and research and stuff. Because basically you can find anything on the internet. And what you thought was just going to take an hour or two turns into sort of a massive k whole sort of black hole of YouTube and read air and just generally lurking in tiny forums and researching 6 thousand questions you could be asked. And actually, the more information you get, the more you just get to panic. Think, Oh my God, there's so much that I don't know. And now the Internet tells me this, all this other stuff. I don't know what am I going to do. So you think, okay, stop internet and you close the laptop or at least close the browser and you think right, time to write out some answers. I'm going to write out some awesome answers and awesome scripts to all of these questions that I research. And then after like five minutes, you've probably written pretty watts or you've written far too much, but you probably just thinking, how am I ever going to even have the time to write answers to all of these questions that I could potentially get asked. So you just start panicking more and you start writing more. And then you become more and more obsessed with your scripts going to say. So that by the time you actually get to the time when you have the interview, you're just kind of thinking, God, I just want to get this over with. I just want it to be over so I can just go back to my normal life and I really want the job, but this is so stressful. And then finally the interview ends and you're just like, thank God, that's over. Biowaste thing. Isn't it crazy how one of these things, which is so important in terms of our progressions, getting that job that we really want. We really don't probably practice that much. Or maybe our practices not that good because no one's ever taught us. So let's start to have a look at how we can get better. And starting off with a couple of principles which are really useful to think about in terms of what not to do. And what I've learned with clients and people that I've helped over the years. 5. What Does Bad Interview Prep Look Like?: Hey, welcome back guys. So let's talk about four things to avoid. A lot of times when people think about interviews, they're like, oh, how can I be better and stuff? I want to, I want you to think about it in a different way, which is, how can you be less bad? This is actually called inversion, which is to invoke auto sort of flip over the way that we think about something. So like I inverted the glue and there are four things that we want to think about. And if you can't remember, you can just use the really easy to have an acronym. Supervisors. Say it with me, soup others. So what are the four things that I kind of see people getting really hung up on, or four things that we can avoid. And just by avoiding or being less bad at these things, we can be better at interviews with the first one is scripts. So what happens is someone will come along and say, Oh, but I've done all the scripts and somebody will send me pages and pages and pages 2030, 40 pages script was the point is completely appointments because you're not being tested on how good your script saw. You're being tested on how well you can speak. Which brings us to the next point, which is practice. Lot of people avoid practice, which is speaking. You want to be better interviews. You've gotta get better at speaking, which means you don't want to spend time on scripts. I'm going to spend time on practice. You're not spending time on practice, then that's pretty silly for the third one are deadlines. Now normally you only going to get five days to prepare for a video interview plus all the other stuff that you've got going on, like we said elsewhere, if all you had to do to prepare for an interview, probably wouldn't be that hard. It's trying to fit it in with all the other stuff. By deadlines, you mean how long you going to take to research the company and the row? How long did it take to prepare for the questions, to practice the questions? When are you going to do that stuff? Deadlines also works in with dye rising. I don't know about you, but for me, if I didn't put it in my diary, it's not going to get done much like doing this course. And finally, shortcuts. So part of the reason why you're watching these videos and taking this course is because you will shortcut. You want to know how to do stuff good. In short time that it took me to learn it, which is fine. Good co-chairs, good teachers can help you do that. They can teach you the best way to do something. But there is no shortcut to practice. There is no shortcut to repetitions and kind of getting time behind you and learning what makes you better and what makes you bad. That was a full things to remember are four things to avoid. I remember sympathies. 6. The General Principles for Good Prep: Okay, So we have talked about lots of different things, but now let's actually learn and stuff about how to get better interviews. Well, I want to talk to you is some general principles and also the time that we have and how we're breaking up. So we're going to pretend that we have five days to prepare for an interview. Why is that? Well, kinda like I'll explain fall. And you were listening Naaman Jacob, most video interviews are most interviews. You sort of get five days. You're probably going to get more than five days. And if you get less than five days, Bobby, and that's just bad organization. I'm not saying, but I think Brenda could really get it together and send me the email so you know. So what we're gonna do is we're going to spend one day doing selection and preparation. So I wanted to break up the timings for you just so you had a good idea in your mind, what I find works really well with the clients that we work with is giving you a formula and structures that you can build around 20 percent of the time you spent on selection and preparation. That means selecting the questions and preparing the audiences. And the other two to five days is spent on practice. I don't optimize I'm sorry, practices like blah, blah, blah. Okay. And then optimization, it says Looking at your bla, bla and gun, oh, how could I make it less blob, basically making your answers better. All right, now we're going to talk about some general principles to think about. So we've got some general principles yea, to think about. The first one is question selection. That's really the first thing we've got to do when we get an interview, when we come together, when they're like, Oh my God, and you're going to interview like a good a job and mom, you know, all that kind of stuff. We want to figure out what are they going to ask us. Or in our case, whether the most likely questions for them to OSC. And we use the 5 plus 5 rule, which we'll talk about nato. The next thing is question preparation. What does this mean? Well, once you've selected the questions that we need to prepare our answers. Bu. So we're going to be comparing answers for those wonderful questions. The next is practice. Then we're going to be talking about how to effectively practice for questions. Now a lot of the messages that we get on YouTube and for emails from students saying, Can you tell us about how to practice? Because there's not really anybody who talks about that. Well, I tend to find is a lot of the videos and many of them are bad. That took about interviews, took about like how to on. So tell me about yourself and what is your biggest weakness and blah, blah, blah. And it's kind of okay. But I think it's not very helpful because it doesn't really tell you how to do stuff. I don't say it doesn't tell you how to practice and how to think about what's good and what's bad and how to be better than up. Next, we're going to talk about what technical kind of boring staff say like the empowerment equipment, broadband, just general things to think about that you might not think about, particularly if you've never had to do an interview. And finally, we're going to talk about you. So that's the five general principles of the things that we're going to think about and big into over the coming videos, which is selecting those questions, preparing those questions, practicing for those questions, the technical blah, blah, and then talking about US. 7. Which Questions Should I Prepare For?: By said to you, how many Chinese characters do you think would make up 20 percent of the language? You could understand 20% of a newspaper from these 20 Chinese characters when we start preparing for an interview, the first thing a lot of people struggle with is, which question should I choose? A Juneau? That's a really good question. Uh, ha, you see why I did that? And what I want you to think about is something which is kind of similar, which is language. So if I said to you, how many characters do you think make up 20 percent of the Chinese language in terms of written speaking, how many characters do you think 500 is actually 20. I know that because I've loved Mandarin Chinese for years and I was always fascinated by something which is called Haritsa frequency lists like this is a list of the thousand mice frequently used characters in modern Chinese. And actually 40% of those as my, say, 20 percent is made up by 20 characters, 30 percent is made up by 48 characters, and 40 percent is made up by 90 cart. This doesn't sound say daunting. You should learn Chinese is awesome. Why do I bring this up? Because it's pretty much the same when we think about questions. We really want to think about the 80 20 rule, which is the 20 percent or less of questions that could get answers which are going to give us 80% of the predictable outcomes. Why do we do this? Because we've only got a day to prepare and setting ourselves that deadline is so useful because it helps us to get going. And literally we might say to ourselves, a good bit of advice to say, you have 60 minutes to select the five most likely questions that you could get asked. And maybe another five. The other kind of which you're not used to. This will actually diminish the more interviews that you do. And I want to explain this. In the past, the interview series, I break down the interview processes for world-famous companies, whether that be Goldman Sachs, PWC, the lawyer. To be honest, I could do it with any company given enough information. And then the next video, we're going to jump onto my computer and I'm actually going to screen share and show you how I find the questions. But all these companies, it's really not that hard. But what you'll notice is if you've watched any of those videos, I never break down more than seven questions. In fact, most of the time, I never go over five. Why is that? Well, the reason being is personally, I think it's a waste of time. Now behind what I'm saying is you can prepare for more competency style questions. And that rarely comes on the stall stories. But realistically, what I want you to think about is just you only need to prepare for a maximum of ten questions. In most cases, five questions is enough. Now, I know a lot of you are going to be what? Smith Society. Yeah, but what about all the other question that could Gosse? And I actually answer this in a later video because it's a really good question. But the point is, think about the law of diminishing returns. Now, for example, in English, there are over a 100 thousand words in the English language. I know in Mandarin Chinese there are over a 150 thousand targets is, and I think getting glazed, it's about a 173 thousand words and they're always more words. Where does the law of diminishing returns come in? We'll actually, once you've learned to a free thousand was the rest you just kind of pick up along the y. And the point is, I'm not preparing for the questions on my own made-up Gauss. I'm preparing for the questions that I'm almost sun. I'm going to get lost. And I'm just going to hope that my practice is going to pay off in case of those questions that come up. 8. Finding the Best Interview Questions on Glassdoor: Hey, what's up, guys? So I'm going to take you for a pharmacist, I pretty much do for most companies when I do some research into them, whether it be for clients. So for the Parthian to be video, my number one IC website is Glassdoor. So I want to do if you just kind of take you through the process that I would go through for selecting questions. And then we know from the last video, I didn't really want more than 10 questions, but I will take you through the process. I'll probably find more than 10 questions. It's a festival. What I'll do is I'm going to look up a company that we're probably going to be doing a video on soon, which is a UBS. And then what you'll find on Glassdoor is that you'll have review's job salaries and interviews and all. So this 2600 people who've had paid for pole at their interviews. This is just the best resource that you can find. There are, of course, other resources out there, but I find none as complaint or as up-to-date as Glassdoor, which is always getting updated. So we just want to make sure that we only want from the United Kingdom and then we want to go by most recent. I tend to not go back more than six months sometimes of the frame mom's it depends on how many reviews. Sometimes there are a lot, sometimes they're on. Then the next video we'll talk about what happens if Glassdoor doesn't work or if that fails. So I tend to predominantly what I deal a lot with ease graduate sometimes you do with professionals while I deal with my knee, my undergraduate. So I will kind of look at the job Ty OC can see, hey, I mean, today is the 18th of May and this is from the 17th. So it's pretty good. And I'll start looking for internships and graduate programs tend to be reasonably similar. And what I'll do is, is I'll just start taking the memories and just putting them on one by one. Sometimes I will name and number them. So I might put like one some internship. Right now. All I want to do is just see cow. So I've got another one here. So we already know that it's a higher view. So you get the idea with the unknown, couldn't name them all. Pretty PM nine graduate banker, this looks helpful. One way into your knife feed back had to sign it to the exercises and to do an interview and talk about myself for free minutes at a time with no stimuli. Okay, he doesn't seem particularly happy, but that's kind of interesting. Bad mind, not all of these memories are going to be good. Some yB, but we want to get volume first. Senior audit manager spring inside. Access. Interesting. So now they took them about eight questions and we started to get some actual questions listed. Some interview free rounds, competency by 70 percent. So this is really good. Some internship, some good memories, technology graduate scheme, first round them pretty quoted, so that's not very helpful. Internship pre-recorded was the impacts of technology in the banking sector. So I might do is just put another thing in. Just put questions. Summary a few y rho Y company internship. Now you'll see here I'm already here at mobs now I'm not, I'm not gonna do the whole thing with you because you get the idea. And he might say, Well, how would you know which ones to pick? Well, basically I'm looking for Spring Insight, internship and graduate positions and then I look for similarities and roll. But sometimes I might just take all the questions that are being asked and regard for you. So here, for example, this is really good global summit banking analysts say this scene, say global banking analysts. So what will happen is we're going to end up with a list of questions so we can have all our questions and then we would copy them again here. So I just wanted them all in one big list, triune. So I can see it's like Why UBS? Ubs, why this row, you will show biggest challenge so far. Acquisition do you think will pay dividends? So I kind of know that that's quite a role specific questions. If I wasn't applying for banking, then I wouldn't. Wide you want to work for us? What skills are advantages to the row? Okay, cool. So it's actually not that many. So we already kind of like why'd you want to work for us? So we know that's going to come out twice. Why do is I didn't use X's to show what questions are being repeated. So what skills do you think are advantageous? So for me, I mean, that, that's basically why you, but you might interpret that differently. So I'd still put that as the same. So already I'm starting to figure out that looks some of them on my own. So separate out was roe specific? So that's quite row specific. That's why would you want to work this firm? So that's another one for UBS. Why bank? That sounds row of specific acquisitions the day. And the reason why I'm taking away the rows specific questions is because it might or might not apply to me. And these are kind of questions I might swing back around. So you later on, if I have the time and at the very least I can read them and go, Oh, what is the impact of technology in the banking sector? Even just being aware of something like this is really helpful. And then already I've got free questions lined up. The, I want to say, Why UBS, why this row, why you awesome? And when I go for the memories while I'm actually looking for is I want to know timings. So pre-recorded competence. So that's interesting. Snp mainly, mainly competency-based woman to prepare. So this candidate said they had eight questions. Woman, it's prepared two minutes to answer. This person talks about three minutes at a time, but I didn't know. They didn't seem particularly happy and will show us that. So I might kinda guy, oh, cool. So I, I record, of course I could go off and do some more research, but as a best guess, I'm going to get eight questions and have one minute to prepare and two minutes the answer. So I can then go back to glass door and continue to do my research and try and pick up more and more questions. But you see that I only took us 510 minutes and we've already got free of the questions. And if I don't get lots of repetition, then I might just pick questions. Because I know that this person has said it's mostly competency based and some knowledge around financial industry and trends. So I might go well, also, also competency and Industry News. 1 q because they're talking about financial industry and the trend. But it's not rocket science, right? Sort of picking these out and that's for UBS. So join me in the next video. What I'm going to talk to you about, what if something like Glassdoor doesn't what? Obviously we're talking about big, big companies. And that doesn't apply for everybody. 9. Using your Job Description to Find More Questions: In this video, I want to talk about what happens if Glassdoor doesn't work or you just want some additional information or things to think about, about the types of questions that you're going to get OS and your interview. Something that I've spoken about quite a lot on YouTube and also with clients is the importance of the job description ultimately accompany designs a job description for a reason, it's often overambitious, particularly for professionals, not so much for graduates. Some job descriptions can be a bit salesy by just want to dig into a job description and see how you can break it apart and figure out some questions which you might get asked. So we're looking at the Lloyd's full-time graduate consulting program. And here they've got all the different types of consulting streams that you could join. So let's say we want to do digital data analyst because actually this is something that we've dealt with recently. Tight the job description, put it over until what and why do first of all, is I always just get rid of the formatting just so I can see everything a little bit better. What I tend to do is I basically go for and just take away anything that isn't going to be useful for the interview. So I don't need to know. This was the opportunities that we use creativity technology and a focus on human experience to help our clients imagine, deliver, and run entirely new business features. So we start to see because a lot of, a lot of job descriptions are quite salesy and also honestly can be difficult to understand. But we started to get an idea about the stuff that we would do. Create an instance ventures build digital platforms and create beautiful and meaningful experiences. So as a digital, as a data analyst, you would help clients better understand their customers, their behaviors and needs and support them. What I tend to do is I use bullet points to separate the individual elements about the things that they would do. And then you should end up with something like this. So what would a digital Deloitte, Digital Data, Data Analysts do? Well, I think in total we ended up with 11 different things. So deliver and run entirely new business ventures. Cray, innovative business features, create innovative ventures, build digital platforms. So what is your experience building products for clients could be a possible question. Help our clients understand the customer's behaviors, needs, and expectations. Tell me about a time you solved a Create. You creatively solve the problem, slash, help a client solve a difficult problem, support them and using data analytics and technology to deliver amazing experiences. Tell me, tell me about a time. When you have used data. Your what is your experience using data? Coding, et cetera. And we can go for each of these points and think about, well, what's the question? What's the question that I would be asked to sort of test if I had this skill, this type of experience. For example, here they're talking about specific software. So experience of using this. And if they didn't ask a question and you knew how to use this like Qualtrics or Medallia is a, you'd insert that into your answers because that's going to make you a more attractive candidate to anybody who's watching the interview guide for that with you. So that's just something that you can do grab the job description is the job description that you find isn't particularly useful or meaningful, then all you need to do is, is just, you know, if say for example, I had a look at this job description, I think, oh, you know what, this really isn't very helpful. Then I just pop that into Google and digital data analyst and then have a look at a couple of different job descriptions. So these are all Google will produce jobs that relate to this particular job description. So actually this isn't less helpful, less helpful. This looks slightly more helpful what you would do about you. So it's actually really not that difficult to find somebody or find a job or description that's going to help you to build and think about the type of candidate they're looking for and therefore, the questions that they're going to ask you. 10. 80% of Questions You Will Get Asked Are...: When the null is the child pressure. Now, yeah, behind. Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back. So let's talk about the two types of questions that you're really likely to get. Hours. Pretty much make up 80 percent of the questions that you can expect, which are motivation and competency questions. So I'm just going to define the term diaries and mechano jump into the minutiae in the next round of videos, which is like, how do I aren't so motivational questions and how do I answer behavioral style questions, competency questions using the star technique. So motivational questions, especially when the site. Why? Why do you like coffee? Why do you want to work here? Why is the sky blue? I probably won't ask why the sky is blue. But the point is, is that the, you know, why you, why this row, why this job, right? And then motivational questions or behavioral questions are basically questions to test skills. Why? Because you need skills to do the job. I mean say for example, your job is processing data like we dealt with in the logs video. Then they're probably going to ask, you know, give me a time when you analyze data or use data or clean data or you get the idea, I just said data law. But the point is, is that if we understand the skills and experience that is required for the row and also we do our research if the company on the road itself and we can sell ourselves, we've got a pretty good chance of arts and most of the questions that okay, OS now I can he thinking, but what about all the other types of questions that I could get asked? Well, I'll talk about that in the next video. 11. What about ALL the OTHER Questions I could get Asked?: What about all the other types of questions we can get asked? This question actually has two parts which we can answer. The first part is just more questions, and the second part is different types of questions that you remember, right when we started this, we talked about the five plus five rule, which is basically where we want to pick out the five most likely questions that we can get asked. And there might be five additional questions that we think might come up. Well, they confuse us a little bit. So really outside of motivational and behavioral questions, we might have additional questions or cassettes you in the past the interview series. Well, I break down the interview process for well-defined most companies, I'm ready go over seven questions. And very rarely do I ever go over ten or more questions with a client. So that's why we have the five plus five. So if you find more than five questions, just add them on. But we don't want to go for more than 10. And you might think, why is that? Why can I prepare for 20 questions or 50 questions? Well, the reason being is that I prefer depth over bread. And what I mean by that is we really want to be very good at a few questions rather than kind of okay out a lot of questions. A lot of times people try and prepare to do too many things. It's kinda like a breakfast buffet. In my mind, there was so many different tasty things we can eat, but it's really unlikely. Say for example, I go to a hotel and a habit breakfast but fight. It's been a long time. And there's all these different types of scenarios and hot food, cold food, will these different types of food, it all looks really good, really appetizing. But honestly, I can only a few of these things because once I'm full, I'm not going to want to eat anymore. And from that point of view, people more likely to eat certain types of things. So when we're preparing for questions, we really want to think about preparing for the most likely questions, not every question. This is a really important differentiation. The chances are very high. You're going to come across a question that you don't know. Okay. We just need to get that out of the way. What does that mean, wave, I'm really well-prepared. We have really good answers and examples for other questions. I can adapt what I have to a new situation and I'm much more likely to be successful if I have the depth rather than the bread. Okay, so that's kinda like the 5 plus 5. What about more questions? So the next part that you're probably thinking about it, what about all the other types of questions like strength and situational judgment and technical and brain teasers and blah, blah, blah. The chances are these are the 20 percent of questions which might come up. Say for me, behavioral and motivational questions make up the 80% of questions that come up. And of course, let's not forget commercial awareness as you're doing your research, you might add this in your plus 5 bucket or you might go, Oh, actually that I really have behavioral questions, they have strength questions. And again, I want to address the most likely types of questions that can give us. And really the ones that I see clients and people in general struggle with a microwave because it wouldn't make any sense for us to spend IT as an acres of time on lots of different types of questions because there were lots of different companies with lots of different types of interviews. And we want to make this as beneficial as possible to the most people as possible. And of course, if you want to find out more about us and what we do, then you can look up our courses, which I'm sure will be in a link or a description somewhere. Or you can just Google Meet or job ready English, okay. 12. Task 1: The 5 Questions: It's time for your first task. Remember everything that we're doing is so important that you try and do this yourself. Learning is doing. Learning is not just watching or listening, or kind of nodding along or eating crisps as we've gotten along, which I would like to do. Okay, that's not really relevant. Okay, time for your first task. Remember, learning is about doing. If you really want to start to internalize the things that we've been talking about. Go and do it yourself. Why one needs to do is I won't need to pick a company that you really like. Govern Glassdoor. Do some research, look at the job description of a job that you really want to apply to. And I want you to create a list of the five most likely questions you think you will be asked. And then stick it down in the class project, since the five most likely questions. And if there's more than five, that's cool. But try not to do more than 10. And if there's less than five, maybe try and do a little bit more research. You might have to go beyond Glassdoor, beyond the job description. So you can create that list of most likely questions and share it with all of us in the class. 13. Personal Introduction Pro: Hey guys, you're doing really well. See you selected the questions, you selected your five most likely questions. So we're just probably an hour into day one. Remember we had that 60 minutes for selection on day 1 in kind of our five-day plan to get ready for that crucial interview. So this section is all about preparing for questions, which is something that people really struggle with. Either they don't do enough of a DTD much. We're gonna go for it in a really systematic way. In this video, we're going to talk about getting a personal introduction ready. We're going to understand how to answer the why questions, motivational questions. I'm going to type two videos to talk about hacking the star technique and telling stories stories. Then we're going to talk about writing effective scripts, things to look out for, things to think about as well. Because I always feel like that's something that doesn't really get spoken about. And then finally, your task, we'll talk about at the end is going to be preparing your own personal introduction. So let's start off with a personal introduction, also known as Mike recital. So this is me selling myself. First of all, what is this and why do we do it? A personal introduction is basically a quick pitch. So it could be a two-minute pitch, a face that can pitch, also known as an elevator pitch. Why is it important flow, essentially, I am trying to sell myself. This whole process is about tailoring my skills and experience to the job that is required. And also selling myself and saying to somebody, anybody who's going to watch me. So listen to me to engage with me, to say, look, I'm the best candidate for the job and I need to be as persuasive as possible. And the best way to do this is ready to nail a personal introduction. So how would we do this? And what do we kind of aiming for? Well, festival, I like questions and preparation to be around two minutes long. If you're wondering how many words that is, it's about 250 words. So this kind of a sweet spot for how quickly you should speak. And I tend to find is about a 125 words per minute. Everybody's different. Anyone who gets over a 150 was from, and they tend to do that. And they tend to Gosse, I'll talk about that a little bit more ineffective scripts or probably just repeat myself. So what do we have an apostle introduction? We're actually, we've got quite a lot. So what you'll find is initially, personal introduction will run long and then we'll get shorter. And if you're not sure how to lay this out, don't worry, this is going to be a worksheet for this section. Just be you to lay out h, so it's paused. So what did we talk about fast, but obviously I didn't Stresemann, so say hi, my name's Mike. And then I took about my education. And when I say talk about my education, what do I mean? Well, it's just really basic. So I'd say I have a Bachelors in Sociology from work, Eva St. Yes, I know the liberal arts. But the point is, is that I'm just giving you a really basic background. If I did a mouse as it's doing a masters, and this is where I got my bachelor's. That's it. The next thing that we talk about is, what do you want? Well, I really want to set up a business helping international students to get hired and all students in fact, because I'm really passionate about helping people. I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to breaking stuff down, and I really enjoy teaching people. So that's just a little overview. Now this is going to change based upon the role. And if you're really not sure about this, you can actually just leave this out. But what do you want is a really good idea because the education gives context, sort of who are you and what you doing. And then the what do you want implies your destination. You're gone away, you're heading 2. Next, we talk about your work experience. So in my case, it's I, I have a background in management and running businesses. And since 2013, I have been coaching international students. I started out as a mentor and a coach. I then progressed on to being a coaching manager and finally, the COO of a medium-sized toasting firm. I've also consulted for Chinese companies. He won't sell that coaching companies. And finally, I set up my own company, corporate English because I was really passionate about delivering the best service to students. Being like, oh, that's all very well for you. You might buy, don't have any work experience or relevant experience. We all have relevant experience. I guess that's something that we don't have the time to dig into right now. Why would say chooses, you might find that you have to deal with the next section, which is other experience. If you don't have work experience now, other experience can be lots of different things. It could be extra curricular activities, societies, volunteering, personal hobbies are not going to give you a couple of examples just to give you an idea. For example, I've had clients who have Paul of a Who are classically trained, jazz musicians, who are dancers, who are part of voluntary organizations, who are part of organizations to provide subtitling for South Korean movies. And the list goes on. But the point is, is that I want to kind of give you a really quick overview of my experience of what I've done. And also war makes me an interesting and relevant Canada. Everybody has some form of experience that they've done. Whether that be at university or outside of university. For example, for myself past and actually, I didn't really make very good use of my time at university. I didn't have a lot of extra curricular activities, but I did do a lot of voluntary work because the things that I was really passionate about was actually stuffs to do with people who are suffering with mental health issues. And we've drug addiction and alcoholism and that type of thing. And that's something that I can speak about because it says something about me. So if you're not really sure how to do this, what you can do is that I'm also going to put a link in the description to a long-form video that I did on YouTube about writing CVs. Think would be really helpful in terms of thinking about your experience if you're struggling to think of what that is, the next things we'd have is our skills. So skills could be the languages that you speak, the technology that you know, the coding languages that you can use, just anything is very particular to you and that you can name. Well, I would say for the skills is bearing in mind. This is Shaw. And also everything that you say should be actionable in a business context. And y mean by that is, don't tell me that you speak seven languages. If really, you can only barely speak a few of them. It needs to be actionable in a business context. Could you speak that language to me? Work? Could you use that programming language to actually build something or an application? So this isn't about, again, it's only about quantity, but it is about quality. And then finally, what I like to get my clients to end off with is to say some things that make you go all. Or just to kind of enticing curiosity out of the audience. That could just be something that you really, really proud of and accomplishment that you achieved a scholarship that you got traveling to the UK to do your studies, traveling abroad. Maybe you've been to 67 different countries or maybe you're just a really good cook. But thinking about all of these things will really give me a really good overview of who you are. And I like powerful endings because I come from a background of rising copywriting. And I think I'm just trying to hook the audience and make them want more or want to know a little bit more about you rather than just a really bland and boring ending. So that's how you can do a personal introduction. You can find out more in the worksheet for this video. And remember, this isn't something that you're going to get first time. You are probably going to need to edit it down and refine it. And part of that process is going to be you doing this, right? So don't spend loads of time editing and reediting your script. Really what you want to be doing is you want to be speaking out loud, watching herself back on video thinking, Yeah, that was a bit boring or that's not really that interesting. We're actually, I said they inspired meant to say that a lot of the corrections that going to happen is actually going to come from you and from your own mind because you're going to have an idealized version of what you're looking for. So get started with that personal introduction and really learn how to pitch and sell yourself. 14. Answering the Why Questions: Why did you want to work at this company? Because I need a job though. Why do you want this job? Because I made money. Doi, say, these are the two why questions, the motivational questions. If you hadn't already figured out a personal introduction is literally just an answer to the question, why? Yea. So when we're thinking about why this company and why this row, the first thing to tell you is if you really want some good videos where I dive into this in depth and it's very methodical. Go and check out the cover letters that gets into these course. Taught. The reason why I put that course together with just because the paragraphs you literally need to answer is why this company, why this role YOU. So that's a really good place to stop. But if you just want the highlights. So thinking about why this company, the problem I tend to come across this is that people give really generic and boring answers. Those site I want to work ABC Company because it's really big and famous and the clients that good and the revenue is good and I'd get the opportunity to grow and blah, blah, blah, right? Why is this a bad idea? Number one, it's not specific. So when you're thinking about talking about a company, you want to be looking at, picking out four to five specific facts. The number isn't that important, but the facts must be specific. It's not noteworthy if you save the companies big or they're famous, or a lot of times people will just talk about themselves. So site, I would have the chance to develop my skills and I would have the chance to travel. Think about it from the company's point of view. I don't care. Then looking you thinking, I want you to show that you've actually done some research you've already full about why you want to work at this company. Now for this video is, well, we've got the worksheets which are from that course. So you can kind of break it down really systematically and thinking about those facts and where to go and get those facts from. Sometimes I'll have people say, Oh, but my gut and know where to find the facts. Do you literally not know how to use the Internet? So a lot of these companies, if they're publicly listed, they can have a annual report. From the annual report, you can really just read the initial card of managing director or the chairman's statement or woman statement. Smaller companies, you can look at news articles, just Google around. If you just spend 50 minutes is going to make a massive difference because sounds so different in your answer. And you say with the examples in the worksheet just how different they are as well, because it has more impact is kinda like the difference between someone calling you. I don't know, the slang that you would use both in London was I bought my my card by basically that's me sign. I don't know. I can't be bothered to remember your night. Right. So I just call people might call ever on my right, but obviously not in this video because I wouldn't be very professional. So it's and it's the difference when we specific, it's someone remembered. My name is someone who said the sun god. Oh my God. Hi Mike. I'm like, Oh wow, I remember my name. That's the difference between specific and generic. So that's for why this company, What about why this row, we will break this down into two parts. The first part is, what are you actually going to do in the job? So you can learn this in the job description or you can go and do some research from prospects or the government or target job. So there were lots of websites out there which explain what you would do in a row. Because from an employer's perspective, almost just think about the common sense of this. I'm like, okay, so you've applied to be a risk assurance person. What would you do in risk assurance? And I've asked this question many, many times to candidates and by R don't really know, like I don't know what risk assurances. We know it's going to give you 12, but you need to be able to understand what you're gonna do. And a simple idea to think about this is just like what would you do day-to-day? You in the office? Outside of the office, he on the computer, you on the phone. This specific qualifications that you'd need programs that you need to use, is there a specific workflow that you'd need to follow? These are again, just simple questions that you can ask yourself. That's the first part of answering that question. And the second part is why you good with that row? No. Have you got the skills that they're asking for? Do you have the experience that they want? And he used the programs that they're looking for. But this seems really simple. Because a lot of this is about pattern matching. A matching our skills and experience to the role that is required. But people missed us how a law, because they just don't think about it. That's been too much time thinking about themselves and not thinking about what the employer wants. And really what the employer wants is actually the most important thing because they're the person that's going to give you a job. So again, you can find that on the worksheet and you lay it out and I tend to split it 5050, say 50 percent, what would you do? And 50 percent, YOU good for it. Why you get for this row? So again, if you're looking at sort of how many words should you write about 250 words, because we're always going to be pitching for two minutes. If you get a question, we have to also slightly less you trim a bit, but most of them are going to be in video interviews or in video or in interviews in general, two minutes is a really good time that I've kind of tested over time. And sometimes you run it on goods, afraid minutes, in which case, happy dice. 15. Hacking the STAR Technique: Let's talk about behavioral questions, skills questions, competency questions, none by lots of different names, but it's like tell me a time when you worked in a team. Tell me a time when he led a team. Give me a time when you saw creatively solve the problem and so on and so forth. So first of all, what is the purpose of these questions? The purpose of the question is to test for a particular skill. So yes, let's use the one that gets us all the time. Tell me about a time then you worked in a team. What, why are they asking you this question? And this is a really useful thing to think about. A lot of times people quite robotic in terms of answering questions and they just kind of start speaking. But the first thing you want to think about is, why are you asking me this question? Well, it must be because I'm going to be doing teamwork and you want to see if I'm good at teamwork. So when I give you the answer, I need to talk about stuff that's good at teamwork like communication, working with others, resolving conflicts, being helpful, and so on and so forth. And you would write out a little list of things that you've gotta do. So the way that we aren't so competency questions is cool. Star. It's quite an old technique, has been around for quite a while. What I tend to find is sometimes people know what star is and I've used it a lot, sometimes they don't. I want to talk to you about what is the star technique and how can we hack it? By hacky, I mean, what's the best way to answer questions using the star technique? So star literally stands for situation, task, action, result. The situation is the kind of the broad brush. So when I was a second year student at work University, I was part of a team to do a project for a finance module. That's the real broad stroke, that's the big picture. Then the task would be the specifics of what you have to do. So I was assigned as a member of a team of four. We had to work on creating a model for what we believe would be the best investment for a fictitious client, 4 million pounds into the footsie 100s, 100s biggest companies on the London Stock Exchange Group. Okay, so that's the talks. It's a bit more detail with a bit more granularity about this. And then finally, we would talk about the actions. And the actions would all be about the teamwork. So in this particular case, as part of the team of four, each of us had different skills that we could bring to the table. Personally, I'm not particularly good at Excel. That was something that my other team members write a better at researching the MAY better at doing Excel and putting together reports. However, why am pretty good at is putting together PPTs and also giving presentations and speaking in front of an audience. So I said to the great, maybe it would be best if I gave the presentation and organize the PPT. And they put in the research and the hard work all the way through this time, I sat up a WhatsApp groups that we could communicate. I made sure that we had regular weekly meetings. I would check in with different members of the group, check that they were doing okay and see if there was anything I could do for help. Even though I'm not particularly good at Excel, I did type the time to learn a little bit more about it. So the ICC, it helped my team mates to check their work. So that's the actions know is that this is the biggest pop. And it's all about me. Actually, it's all about you. And the reason why I say that is because the interviewer really wants to hear what you did. What's your example of good teamwork? Sometimes people get sidetracked and I stopped talking about other people or other things. But really we want to hear about what you did to demonstrate that skill. And the result is very small. So it's the simple paragraph at the end is the same. As a result, we received a really good mark and accommodation from our teacher for that report. Done. That was all just basically says, Will, did you meet your goal? Did you achieve what you set out to do? So how can we break this down with Gemini when I go through with clients in terms of breaking stuff down, I really like stuff to be done numerically. So someone says all there are four paths. This okay, well, what's the percentage for Part a or Part B and so on and so forth. So for the situation, you're looking at about 10 percent. So if you're writing this out in 250 words, then you'd be looking for about 25 words for the situation. For the task, you'd be looking about 15 percent, So that would be 30 to 40 words. And the bulk of what you're talking about, the action, that's going to be your 70 percent. So that's going to be, what is that? A 175 words. And the result is just 5%. So it's literally going to be about 10 words. 15 was something like that. Why is it useful to think about star like this? Because it lets you know when you're talking too much in one particular section. And I like most of the content to be in the 70% of the action. Doesn't matter if you're a little bit over or under on the words, it just gives you something to aim for because just like anything, if you know the boundaries, then it's much easier to navigate that process and you can see more information. And an example in the worksheet is attached to telling Star Stories, which is in the next video. And then what you want to think about in the action is, okay, So you're asking me a question about give me a time when you multitask. So what are the skills that I need to share free for five skills of things to, I've done that really show you that I am good at multitasking that demonstrate the I understand what you're talking about. I'm free that you can build really successful star answers that can be used for different questions, which we're going to talk about in the next video because I'm not so interested in answering individual questions. I'm interested in telling stories because stories is really is what's going to grip the audience. And also stories of what we can use for lots of different types of questions. 16. Telling STAR Stories: Remember the last time you went to a family party at R1 has the uncle, auntie. He just tells the same story over and over again. Why? Because we all have a favorite stories that we'd like to tell. The things that make us look good, the things that we know will make people laugh or get people to be interested in us. Storytelling is as old as mankind, and it is an effective way. It is the most effective way to convey information and it's something that we can use to be better at speaking, better at persuading. And also cut down the amount of work we're going to do. And we can do this by telling star stories. Now what do I mean by this? Well, first of all, and you'll see this in the worksheet. Think about your five best stories. The stories that you'd like to tell. I'm not saying the stories that you think the I want to hear. Now of course there was a sudden filter to this. I didn't really want to know about when you got pissed on a Friday night with Steve and what you've got up to with that blow-up doll. That's not really interesting to me. There is a right and King. So we think about work experience, either experience and academics. We're not talking about personal stories. Things that make you look good or you think are interesting. Now why do we want to tell these stories, our five best stories, with number 1, you won't look bored and sound boring when we tell stories the amount of times and I've listened to candidates tell me a story that they think an interviewer wants to hear and they look so bored because they're not really that interested. And it was a time when I was working in a company we had today's project. I'm falling asleep. You're falling asleep. Let's not tell that story. And what doesn't mean that it's not a good story, but I want you to be infused and motivated an active. You can lay out those story 12345 and you can just write a little paragraph. But then you're saying, but Mike, how is that relevant to the question that I'm going to get asked? Well, actually it's quite easy to say, for example, you've got a story about there was a group that you worked in and you were part of a competition at university and you let that group. Well, that's awesome because that's probably a story that you could use for leadership. The team work for solving a difficult problem. Now by learning those stories and being able to tell them really well. And then thinking about what are the skills that I would need to prove that I'm good at teamwork or leadership or, and so on and so forth. It allows us to, number one, took about things that we want to talk about. Number to reduce the amount of stuff that we have to learn. A number of free be really compelling and give us so something good to talk about when we're talking in an interview, because naturally we're gonna fill, I'm just going to feel nervous. And so being able to talk about stuff we want to talk about. For me, for example, something I love talking about is craft Mughal or baking, or just geeking out about tech stuff. Even if I have a little bit nervous. If you say, Oh, do you do martial arts and go, Oh yeah, I did this thing and it's really interesting. You know, when you talk to your friends, everybody's got that thing where you, they've just one shop. You're just going to Tolkien talk about it because you love it so much and you want that other person to love it as well. So use that in your interviews. What happens is you can then lay out life stories. There's five stories, and then you may come a question. Every time you come across a question you think. All right. I kinda get what skills they're looking for. Yeah, There's cord, right. And this goes, what story would fit that question? And every so often you may come across a question you think, oh, I don't have a story that would fit that question. Okay, cool. Let me think of another story. The good thing about this is, is that we really develop into something which will help us to adapt to almost any question. It doesn't matter whether it's a surprise or not when we already know the stories that we want to tell, it makes us so much more effective at interviews. And actually it kinda makes it fun because it takes the guessing out of it. I'm talking about something that I really want to talk about. So give that a go right out lifestyle stories and think about what stories would apply to which questions and skills. 17. How to Write Effective Interview Scripts: Hey, what's up, guys, I wanted to talk to you about writing effective scripts to things to think about. Number 1 is time, number 2 is content. So first of all, in time or how long should you write to speak for? So we've already talked about writing for two minutes. Say this is me using egg timer.com. Why two minutes? Because it seems to be a reasonable amount of time. How much can you fit into two minutes? I would say roughly 250 words. Now if you want to test this, just use something like egg timer.com. And you can read out some text, say for example, for a minute. And then you would count the number of words that you said out loud. You just count the sentences. So you might go and grab some random texts. So this is just some Lorem Ipsum you would read out, say for example for a minute and then you'd go, okay, you would count, you could count the words. You just count the average words per sentence and countless sentences. Say, Okay, cool, I feel comfortable speaking at a 100 words per minute or a 115 watts per minute. Either way, just do what works for you. Everybody's different. Why would say is most people will strain to understand you and you strain to speak effectively over a 150 words per minute. So in terms of length, your script should be no more than I would say 250 issue words. And also, you want to be speaking for no longer than two minutes. Now it's just someone's gets died. So what about the content? So I want to show you just something from one of our clients, which was just being a bridge to remove any personal details. So what this particular clients done is they've just laid out the answers for free questions. I don't know is the, I split this into four parts. Why? Because I think initially, it's really quite helpful to break stuff down. Particularly when you're just getting used to doing something. And you can, even without really meet counting the words, you can see, the layout is almost, is fairly similar to that kind of we're looking for the 10 percent here and the 15 percent here, 70% here. Task looks a little bit long actually, or maybe we could put more on the result. And also the 5% here. And in sounds of total word count, we're looking at about a 140 words. So maybe this particular candidate speaks quite slowly or they just want to give themselves some wiggle room. So when you're writing out your stories, to say tell me about a challenge, you had to overcome something. I find that it's also really helpful saying, okay, so what are the skills or maybe I would need resilience and asking others for help and teamwork. And of course, don't forget something you can always, it's a good skills for overcoming challenges. I just use Google, right? And then you can guys, i, o, okay, cool. A powerful enough drive, visualizing resilience, lack of self-discipline, commitment. Oh, that sounds pretty good. So I could kind of go. Oh, so I want to have self-discipline. And what was the other one? Commitment. So I want to have commitment. So we'd have a look. When I was in a bank of Luxembourg. And initially, don't worry too much about SVG errors because that will all come out with practice as you go from. We'll talk about that in the next section in terms of getting better. But then I'm having a look at this and then I went to deadline approaches, blah, blah, blah. I realized it's important to combine the efforts of colleagues from different OSes to handle the task. Oh, that sounds like teamwork. Coup to witness of what I explained to LTE benefits of attending to compliance rules, secure, sustainable client relationship. I communicate with compliance regularly to make sure we're on the right track. All that sounds like asking others for help 0, so what's overtime and support the relationship managers. So that talks about self-discipline and commitment. So this arts, and it's pretty good. Could we add more stuff to the answer? Sure, we could, but if we keep it short, we're more likely to remember and be able to repeat it. So you might think, well, Mike, why don't we use all 250 words? If you don't need to don't use it, you can use it as a guide. But really, the less you can say the better, and so on and so forth. So this candidate talks about their proudest moment. And I will have this as one of the examples. Because really what you're looking to do is, and you might break this down further and just say, Bank of Luxembourg countywide, see that the clients deadline, compliance, etc. Why am I saying that? Well, because you want to be relying. You want to make the script as simple as possible. What is an effective scripts? And effective script is something that's really going to help you to answer a question. So if you can make it shorter, so it's easier for you to read so that you sound more natural, then that's a better and better script. But we always want to, my mind, I always want to be thinking about how could I make this clip shorter and even easier to understand so that I can give a really fluid and fluid answer. 18. Task 2: Personal introduction: Okay, and see the PO2 of the class project. What I want you to do is to prepare your own personal introduction so you can write out the script. So you're looking for about two hundred, two hundred and fifty words. But don't worry if you do less or more. It's more about the action, about doing it and getting something ready that you can start to practice by yourself. And special bonus. If you really want to be top of the clause, why don't you record a video of yourself and share it with somebody? Whether that be with somebody in this class, mom and dad's, your friend's boyfriend, girlfriend, whoever to, somebody to sort of put it out there and say, Hey, this is what I'm doing, I'm getting ready for my interview. And would you mind giving me a bit of feedback or just just sharing it and just watching it. And the fact that I've done that, It's helpful enough. So give that a go and put it down. Your introduction down in the clause for Jaipur life apart, say. 19. Developing 2 Minute Habits: Well, so we have spent that one day of five getting a common questions together. The questions, if it were gonna get asked, we've written out some scripts and now we've got four days to practice. So this is where we want to be spending the bulk of our time. What I want to do over these next couple of videos is just giving you lots of different things to think about, different ways of doing things and also doing it in a way which is reasonable and achievable in the time that you have a like we said before, the problem would be much easier for you to be good at interviews if that was all you had to do, right? The problem is, is that you'd call studies or job or this or that and you know, all of these other commitments that the rule kind of pulling on your time. And then we need some sort of jam, this really important thing in. And it just makes you feel anxious and Bohr and all that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna give you lots of different things to think about to make that easier for you. That's why I wanted to do, and I want to start off with something that I stole from James Clear and Atomic Habits. It's a great book. I've read it a couple of times. I really recommend it. It's probably the best book that I know about forming habits, good habits and breaking habits, hashtag sponsored. So there were two things I want to take away from this. First of all, a two-minute habit. So two-minute habit is really thinking about what's the smallest habit that you can have to get started. So something that we want to do is we basically want to be practicing speaking. We want to be practicing talking. And there's quite a few different ways you can look at this. You could set an alarm window fine. You could put probes around the house. So you might take these cards and I can stick it on the bookshelf or I've had it with clients. I said stick the card on the fridge or on the toilet door. And just as personal intro, when you go in and I stick it on the inside rather than the outside. Because obviously if you're going into the toilet and got a reason to be there, right? And you can just think about a tiny two-minute habit that you can get started with. Now I know that you've only got four days. We kind of need to accelerate the process. But personally, I really respond well to visual prompts. I think just thinking about doing it is not really sufficient because there were so many draws, my attention and my time. So make it visual, make it small because we won't see you make it fun. Something that I think is particularly helpful is when somebody is gonna go on, I'm going to practice for hours and hours and do it over and over again. And the fingers, you kind of get really sick and tired of it. And I've seen this a lot of candidates would they do this initially, maybe for the first die, and then it just kind of wipes them out. But the point is, this isn't going to be your lost every interview and this isn't all that you have to do for the day. So it's probably better if you do it little and often than rather for a long period of time when it stops getting fun, to stop, to stop, take a break, go for a walk or do something fun, reward yourself. This is all really important. An important part of the price isn't something that James Clear talks about really well within that book, Atomic Habits. But without getting into the details of habit formation, what I want you to think about, It's just two simple things. Make it small, make it fun when you're practicing that. Why you're much more likely to do it repetitively throughout the day. Whenever you get snatches of time, maybe you have five minutes. Another thing to think about is, you know, take stuff with you having on you, whether that be on your phone. I really like, as you might have guessed, I love these index cards. I really liked them. For example, It's something I use for my to-do lists and the things that I didn't die. I also like fiscal pipe just because it gives me something tangible to have in my pocket or have a main. Whereas, the problem that I find is if it's on my phone, I'm quite likely to get distracted sometimes hours in an e-mail, but the chances are you're going to go, Oh, yeah, What about there? So I can't get the structure of an index card. It literally only has one purpose for me. So that's the final thing. I'd say fee to think about with the prompts or having something that you can practice from a, make sure that it's relatively easy not to get destructive to something else. 20. The 3 Stages of Effective Practise: Now we're doing our practice. What I want you to think about in this kinda longish video are the free different levels of effectiveness or being getting better in terms of giving your audiences in a fluid fashion, fluidly and fluently. And then also what to do if you just can't live with our scripts, anxious to get rid of that script. So we'll talk about the end. So the first stage in terms of getting best out, is to teach the script. That's really the first thing we want to be doing. A lot of people kinda paralyzed by just having a script and reading from the script. I've got my laptop here in front of you. And you'll notice there's a big difference if I'm just looking at my laptop and not looking at you and not feeling like I'm maintaining any kind of eye contact. And that's absolutely a given if I'm doing that face to face. And in a way with video interview, it's difficult to get around that. You can glance away maybe for a couple of seconds and then look back. If you're reading a script is really obvious. Let's go for two things. Number 1 is where your eyes go, and number two, how you sound. When people read scripts, they tend to sound really monotone, just like you're reading out of a book. You can try it yourself and record it. So that's kind of what we want to be doing. We want to ditch the script and we want to start relying on the power of recall that been plenty of scientific studies to show that really the best way to learn and to remember stuff is to try to recall it. Now it's difficult. And where a lot of people get unstuck is they're trying to perfectly recall that script, which isn't going to happen. We've got four days to get better. And you're not going to perfectly remember something. Reason is there's not enough time to have those repetitions. Every time that you give your answer that you actually say it out loud, It's going to be slightly different. It's going to change. So that's why kind of what we had when we were talking about writing effective scripts, tried to break stuff down into bullet points and think, Well, as long as I hit the important things that I want to talk about, the rest is okay, it's negotiable. So that's stage one. We want to have ditch the script and start trying to recall. And I say you want to do that as soon as possible. So maybe do one or two run freeze with the scripts in front of being, say ya kinda get that just a bit. Let's move on. The next stage is rural afraid and repetition. So what we're looking for is just repetition. So a lot of times I can pretty much know how well someone's gonna do in an interview by how many times they have repeated and going through the answers, I tend to find that nine is the high-end, free is good, six is better, nine is perfect. And anything more than that, any sort of drop into the law of diminishing returns. So what do I mean by the rule of freight? Actually, it's really simple. So what I would do is I would record myself. I would give my answer. I then what's my answer back? This is really important because I need to be engaging a feedback loop. I can't just record the answer over and over again because I'm not actually looking back to see if I've gotten any better. So I'd watch it back, make a few adjustments internally because you're going to have an idealized version of what you'd like to look like and sound like it's you incarnate. Okay, yeah, I might change this and this and then you do that again. You record yourself, watch it back to record yourself, watch it back free, and then stop. So why start with number 1? To do that process would take roughly 15 minutes per question, say two minutes society two minutes to watch it back OR and then to sort of reset up and do that again. So 15 minutes is pretty manageable. Maybe if you had 5105 questions that 75 minutes, right? So we could 550 minutes for the diet with whatever we're doing. Reason is to do it anymore, just gets boring. And to me, I tend to find that you're not getting as much results and there's a massive difference. You will see the change yourself if you just use the rule of frayed. And the reason why we do this is because it's realistic, that's exactly what we're going to be doing. We're going to be recording ourselves on video, or we're going to be on the phone or we going to be face to face, whatever it is. If it's just me and my phone, then I can use that to kinda see what do I look like? What do I sound like? Is it the same in my head as it is in real life? That red is, I'm not proof that kind of review and recording is so important in terms of getting. So. So I think about the road afraid and the final stage that we're really looking for when we're sort of, I would say probably we've had free repetitions of each question may be six and we're kinda thinking, yeah, like, I know how to answer these questions, That's pretty cool. So we want to engage in what I call randomize and optimize. Now, interviews by their nature, are random. If we knew the questions in the order of the questions, it would make that long life so much easier. But in a way, it would kind of escape the point that employers are trying to mate with. Just, I just want to see what you're like. A minimum amount of preparation or as realistic as possible. But we know that candidates are going to prepare an employees are going to expect that. So what you can do is, is that you can, you can load a load of questions. You got your five questions plus 5. You might throw in some more questions, you might say, Okay, cool. Now I've got my stories, now I've really kind of got my scripts and I feel okay with that. I want to practice how to answer 20 different questions. Just because, just because I want to get used to the fact that I might answer these questions. So how could you do that? You could use Anki flashcards. You can literally just print off a list of questions and new something like random.org to just use random number generation. And then as it's going up, you can optimize and you can tweak. And what do I mean by optimize? I mean making better. So really, then you start to think about what questions am I really unhappy about? So as we're going through this process and we only have these four days and the days are getting less and less. We want to concentrate on what we're bad at it. We didn't really want to concentrate too much on what we're good at. So as soon as I've got a question, I think you know what? That why Goldman Sachs question? I nail it every time called tick done. I don't need to do that anymore. But really when they talk about, tell me about a recent piece of financial news, I still feel a bit fuzzy about that. So you kind of go away and think, Oh, I really want to concentrate on that one more. I want to get more repetitions of that because that's the part that's kind of pulling my performance down. So that's the very last stage of randomized and then optimize. And if you can just have a little mock. So if you know that you're going to get six questions and do some little marks of six questions in a row y data because it's realistic, because as you go on you flag a little bit. So you'll begin to get a little bit tired or maybe you won't feel as fresh as when you started. And that's something we do with our clients quite a lot. We test them with mocks because it's realistic. I mean, look, there's no point in bainite would supply five minutes are really good football when a half a football it's 45 minutes. I want to see that you've got the stamina endurance to loss. Okay? So that's the sort of free stages of practice. So just the middle end. No. What about if you really can't do without a script? So there's a couple of things to think about this. And first of all, why then you try to just use flashcards, right? So I can literally stick a flashcard just underneath the screen or things that I can't remember. These tend to be Facts and Figures, very specific things. I know a lot of candidates that I've seen will struggle with. Like why this company, why this row? Because it's just not something that they're used to. And another thing that you can do is you can literally have some giant night and you could sit there in front of you. So I'm talking to you. And then I looked down and I look back up. The key is, you can have notes, but they've got to be really easy to read and easy for you to get the basic information that you need. Don't have four or five pages of scripts in front of you with tiny 12-point writing that you can't read is literally something that I can look down to free, look back up and keep going. And that's how you can still use a script. 21. How to Get Feedback: How can we get better at interviews, at giving our answers? And we say, how do I know if my audience is any goods? And should I try and get feedback from other people, it can be really difficult if it's just you and a camera and you're talking, you think, is this good? Is this not good? I don't really know. So first of all, something to think about with good speaking or really being successful or anything. It's just about imitation. So YouTube is your friend. You could see cow videos from things like Toastmasters or just ideal onces. Not in terms of the content, but in terms of delivery, you should have most of what you need in terms of structuring your answer. Things to think about is that if you think it's boring, then it's boring and you should cut it out. Less is generally better than more. A lot of times most people, they just need to say less. And also think about is what you're saying specific enough or is it too vague? I'm talking too much about yourself or are you talking about the company and the role generally for the why questions. And also, have you had sufficient repetitions. So free? Or six or nine, we're talking about quite a lot of repetitions. And people will get better over time. When someone says to me, I don't think my answer's very good. Almost the first thing I'll say is how many times if you repeated it and those are once or twice, I think. Well, that's not very good. Once you get to a point where you pass in a film like this is a good answer because it's effective and answering the question, it's clear, it's concise, and I deliver it in a way which is engaging to my audience, then you maybe think about seeking out some feedback. And of course I understand if you've got four days, you might feel really constrained. But some things to think about with feedback. Now, if you can get feedback from a coach, that's great, Just make sure they actually know what they're doing and they already have the results that you want. Say sporadically, I will see clients on a one-to-one basis. That's maybe what's the videos that we've done on YouTube? And a lot of times what they're seeking is feedback. Say, is this good? Is this not good? Why would say about seeking feedback is just Fink, is the feedback useful for my audience? So a lot of times, I think feedback from people who have passed interviews, who have done interviews, who have, who are working. Basically you want to hear feedback from somebody who's already gone through, always going through that process. And it's something to take on board, but it's not something to change everything that you're doing. So feedback can be additive. And for me, I appreciate feedback and it might allow me to tweak what I'm doing. But if someone's hands on it, I saw that was really bad. And I say, well, how is it, how can it be better than that? I don't know, It's just really bad. And I think number one, I'm probably token to speak to you again. A number say that's not really helpful because in the four days we really don't want to change too much what we're doing. We want to improve what we're doing. Someone say, Oh what? I would change, I would do it like this. The thing is feedback is useful, is only as useful as the person's experience that they're adding to that. Let's face it, lots of people want to give their opinions. The Internet is full of those people, but how useful are those opinions? In my mind? Have you gotten the results that I want and have you come through the experience that I've gone through? If you haven't, then I'm not really that interested in your opinion and I don't want to seek out, say they, getting feedback is good. Just think about the audience and how much you trust them, and how relevant their feedback is to what you're doing right now. 22. Task 3: Record yourself and SHOW someone: Okay, so the last and may probably something that I would initially struggle is the mice via fitness so much value in this, particularly if you're an introvert, I have to say me personally minor seem like it. I have a bit of an introvert. I don't particularly like large crowds of people. I don't like lots of, you know, I don't seek out people. I spend a lot of time with a small group of people or by myself, and that's really where I feel happiest. So making videos and recordings and putting myself out there initially was quite difficult, but I realize that that was a really good force multiplier for the help that I wanted to give other people. And that really helped because I love helping people. So knowing that my videos help people help to kind of get past my anxiety and nerves. So what I want you to do if your task is recording, share a question according, share an answer to a question. And you can just record and share it to your best friend or your mom or your dad. You could record and share it in a public link and put it down the description below as a privately listed YouTube video, whatever you want to dig, but put yourself out there to kinda see what people think. If only just because you're being vulnerable and revealing yourself to the outside world. Because of course we're all scared. I get negative comments on videos and this and that. And I just think why don't care? I'm not for everybody know, everyone's going to like what I have to say and everyone's got a different agenda. But by being open to that, it really is quite freeing an invigorating because this isn't about being good or being the best. This is about being committed to getting better. And getting better means. It's a writing and doing more and putting out more videos. And this is a really good place to start. 23. The Boring Technical Stuff: Let's talk about the boring stuff. I mean, the technical stuff. I didn't want to spend too much time on this because I think it gets really done to death by so many thousands of videos about it on YouTube. But I just wanted to give you a really quick rundown of free different things. So fascinating to think about is your gear. So whether you're going to use your computer or your phone, what is the audio you're going to have? And also thinking about your internet. Number one, you should always test. So test the video, test the audio, play it back. Sometimes I vary, especially people really mess up on the audio. For example, they'll use audio on an old laptop, which sounds horrendous. And then that's really going to mark against you because I can't really hear what you're trying to say. The next thing to think about is, is what you're using. For example, thinking about using phone, is the recording going to stop if you get a col is going to be a pop-up which comes up on your PC and makes a noise often, I don't know why, but people have email pop-ups on their laptop. So there'll be talking about balloon. That's just like dude, switch off all your notifications. And the other thing to think about is your internet. If you're a student, probably the best time for you to do the video is light in the morning or early in the afternoon when people are out of dorms. If you know that your internet is bad, don't leave it until the evening when the Internet clients be worse. That's really just thinking about the hardware aspects of what you're doing. So as the device that you're going to be shooting on in terms of notifications, audio, and also thinking about the Internet. And you can even test the link if it gives you the opportunity to do a test run, they would test run. I always think better to be prepared and do too much to not be prepared. And then also, I need to shoot the video again and they just say, Well, no, you can't, you've failed. Basically. The next thing to think about is background. So you'll notice I use this background just because it's cool and I can mess around with bits and cookbooks up there. That makes me look like I'm smart. I think the easiest thing to do is just make sure that you have a blank background and that you have some lying. So I use light boxes, you don't need to use that. But the best thing to think about is that you will sit in underlie or you've got some natural light coming in from the side of you just so we can see your face. And you see that in the test run, we know sitting down and going forever thing because sometimes the shadow can kind of obscure somebody saying, good lighting is quite important and just a black bank crown will be fine. And the other thing is about removing distractions. So whether that be notifications, friends in the house, drilling that's going on outside, whatever it is, it's just kind of taking away all the distractions and destruction zone sanctuaries, the background. Don't have it. If you do have to, for example, sit in front of your bed when you're making the video. Just make sure your beds made if you're sitting in front of other stuff in the room, just make sure it looks tidy. The focus should really be on you. That's why I want to see you. I want to hear you and I don't want anything else to distract me from what's going on. And the same for people in the house. What's aware? You know, what's aware. Just make sure it's formal dress, business dress, and whatever you feel comfortable in. The kids pick about video interviews is that you can be business on top. Like you can't have a show unlike Pi on the bottom. So you could just be that I'm seeing and some pajamas and some nice comfortable shoes, whatever works for you. The main aim is that you look business and you feel comfortable. 24. Getting your Mind Right: In this last video, I want to give you some thoughts about mindset, what to do the night before and the day of. And those are just some reflections from helping hundreds of clients making all these different videos, thinking and helping people with free the interview process for a number of years. Say festival about your mindset. Rarely everybody gets nervous. People just show it in different ways. What's going to make a difference for you is your preparation. Your preparation, the repetition, and the mastery that's gonna make the difference. You'll still feel nervous. But when it comes to actually being asked questions, the practice is what's really going to carry you and sustain you through in terms of what you're doing. So if you're worried about being nervous, Don't look for shortcuts. For easy answers. Just think, I'll just do a little bit more practice. I'll just do a bit more practice the night before. What I tend to say to clients is make sure you get really good night's sleep. If there's one indicator for performance on the day of an important event is sleep. Sleep is so important and early night sleep, not eating too light, making sure you're well-hydrated, sleeping well switching of screens and our four, you go to bed just getting a really good night sleep, even if it's a bit of a toss and turn. Thinking about on the day, if you can remove as much distractions as you can if you're gonna do the interview in the morning, I would say if you're going to look at your notes, just make it quick, really fleeting. The same as if you've got to travel to somewhere or, you know, whatever it is and you want to remove as much brain work as possible. So sometimes people will say, Oh, I'm going to do the interview in the afternoon, but I'm going to do it with this other stuff in the morning. I'm lightly, the brains is finite in terms of the power that it has. And really it has maximum juice in the morning. So if you can do it when you're feeling really awake, alive, you've had to show a high breakfast and you feel like you're good to go. Everybody is different. But I think as you go through the day and you'll know this as well as I a day. If you kind of go free making decisions or throughout the day, you will get decision fatigue and you're not going to feel as good and that's fresh if he could do it in the morning. So folks to think about just my reflections from thinking about dealing with clients and seeing people PaaS and foul is that if it's your first interview, just treat it like practice. In fact, you can really make a significant difference to how you approach something if you just treat it like it's practice for the real thing. The more expectation that you put on something, the more important that you put on it. Generally, the wass that you'll kind of form because you're thinking about the result rather than concentrating on the actions that you need to be carrying out in this moment. So training it like practice, failure is just feedback. You might say, why didn't get any feedback from the interviewer. A really useful thing for you to do. And something I try and get clients to do all the time is as soon as you've done the interview, just think, Oh, what was good, what was bad? What was bad? What can I improve? Because that's the best time for you to do it. Kinda sit there, take stock of thing, okay, regardless of what happens, let's learn about how I can do it better because I've had the opportunity to practice what I'm doing. Failure is just feedback. If you found an interview, don't think too much of it. Just think, Okay, cool. One in the bank, definitely going to, What can I do to be better next time? And then we're going to be so many opportunities out there for you. Don't give yourself a hard time. Don't feel like you're not good enough. You are good enough and you will be successful As long as you keep putting in the work, putting into practice, adjusting, optimizing, and getting clutter. And for all of you, I wish you the very best of luck with your interviews and in your career. 25. BONUS: What to Ask the Interviewer?: Almost forgot. And especially, or bonus, what questions should I ask the interviewer? I know this is something that seems to come up with an awful lot and I don't really know why. So here's a couple of things to think about that I've used Gemini, we'd only have them in face to face. I think first round interviews, it's not really that important. The only question I wanted to know is, when can I expect to hear back from you? When we saw getting more to the end of the process of if I'm having a second or third round interview, a partner interview that I tend to say, think about what you can learn from that person. So say for example, I was sitting there with a partner from a consulting firm. Number one, that is a crap ton of money that's being spent for somebody to interview me. And that is a really valuable person sitting in front of me potentially, if you want to go on and become a partner, a managing director and that type of thing. So things to think about. What's the, what's the most valuable lesson that you've learned in your time here. What books could you recommend to me? What the fill is really interesting right now? Are there any news articles that have really piques your interest? Is there anything that you feel like I could have done better in the interview? What do you think? Really? Who was the type of person who really fits in well hair? What could I do to prepare for this role if I was successful? What are the strategies and tactics that you've used to be successful? If you could give one piece of advice, what is there? Now, you'll notice all of these questions are really based around that person and not really based around me and why I want white. Because people love asking those questions. In fact, they're really good. Cold openers. I used to do that. Sometimes I'd sit there, say I was with a girlfriend at the time and she's shopping. I'm sitting there waiting for next year, probably another guy. And I'd be like, Hey, what's the best piece of advice someone's ever given you? And it's a real, it really makes you think because it's really quite specific. And also the recommendations allow us to replicate in some small part what that person has done and they really help that person to think into process. And ultimately, I think the vast majority of people, they quiet, they basically want to help you. And also they want to talk about themselves. Some people might say, you know, I don't really know that when you think about it and you can get the measure of the interview. Some people just don't like talking about themselves. So if you ask an interview a question or two and they're really not opening up to you. That's just who they are, the problems not you. They're just not that talkative. So sort of take the hint and leave it there.