| IMPROVING YOUR INTERVIEW SKILLS |
S5 |
Who is this for?
This leaflet is for anyone who is thinking about ways of practising
and improving their skills and strategies for interviews in English.
The aim of this leaflet
The aim of this leaflet is to introduce you to some of the materials
that you may find useful if you want to improve your interview skills
and strategies. This leaflet will also give some advice on how you
can practise for interviews with your friends.
Useful materials in the SAC
Books
The following books are located on the ‘Speaking’ shelf
in the Multimedia area:
- The Interview Preparation and Practice Workbook
This book contains tips from a university Careers Education and
Placement Centre. It gives guidelines for interviews and group
discussion practice.
- Interview Skills
This book is designed for trainers, but on pages 294-296 there
is a useful section which looks at a real interview.
Videos
This video is located on the Business shelf in the Multimedia
area:
You can also watch sections of the company and campus interviews
from the video through the following HKUST Language Center website:
http://lc.ust.hk/~courses/305/interview.html
Textbooks and related videos
This course book, with video, is located near the entrance
in the SAC Area A:
- Lang 3049 Spring semester: The Real Challenge
CD-ROMs
- Through Other Eyes
A series of job interviews in English – in Hong Kong. The
CD-ROM allows you to try out your own responses to the kind of
interview questions faced by the characters in the video.
Useful materials on the WWW
This HKUST Language Center site provides you with very useful links
to sites in the areas of career planning, understanding industries
and companies, developing your job-seeking skills – and developing
your interview skills. Some of the most interesting of these sites
are highlighted below. They allow you to work through tasks and
exercises and watch or listen to audio/video clips, to develop your
skills gradually.
Interview Skills (Sites in HK)
- Interviewing (HKU)
http://ec.hku.hk/epc/interviews/
The site contains video clips showing students in interviews.
The on-line practice will improve your understanding of interviews
and sharpen your awareness of language that's appropriate for
the situation.
- Job Interview Package (CUHK)
http://www.ilc.cuhk.edu.hk/job/
Listen to 8 interview situations and follow the questions to
think about the strategies needed to tackle the situation.
- Job Interview Skills (CUHK)
http://www.ilc.cuhk.edu.hk/english/jiss/main.htm
A more recent addition to the job resources at CUHK. You can
find video episode from 5 campus interviews, FAQs for different
careers, vocabulary for interviews and other useful resources.
- Job Interview Skills (HKUST)
http://lc.ust.hk/~material/jobseek/jobIn/index.html
A comprehensive package that covers every aspect of job interviews.
Contains interactive tasks that you can try out and get feedback
on.
Interview Skills (Sites outside HK)
- On-campus Interview Success
http://www.collegegrad.com/book/17-0.shtml
A very thorough guide, which focuses on the campus interview.
- ULCS: Virtual Job Interview
http://www.careers.lon.ac.uk/advice/vi0000.htm
A virtual job interview from the Careers Service of the University
of London. You answer some common interview questions and get
feedback about the answer you choose.
- Monster.com: Virtual Interview
http://content.monster.com.hk/tools/v_interview/
You respond to common interview questions and get immediate
feedback on your choice of answers.
- Mock Job Interview
http://www.1st-impact.com/interview.htm
From the web site of a US-based career consultant. You answer
some common interview questions and read comments about your
answers.
General advice
- Find out about yourself! Be ready to speak about your strengths
– and provide specific examples to support your claims.
- Find out about the company you’re applying to. Do your
objectives and strengths match the needs of the company? If so,
how?
- Draw on real experiences that you’ve had. Avoid standard
answers.
- Go to lots of interviews - get lots of practice. Don’t
be afraid of signing up or applying for jobs you don’t think
you are qualified for. The more interviews you experience –
and think carefully about afterwards – the more your confidence
will increase.
Suggestions for practice
Any time you spend practising interview skills will also help with
your general speaking skills. It is a good idea to find a person,
or a small group of people, who are also interested in improving
their interview skills. If you practise with them, you can get useful
extra feedback.
- Have a particular job in mind. This could be a real job that
you have applied for, or an advertised position which you would
be interested in.
- After looking at some of the materials in the section above,
write a list of questions that the interviewer would be likely
to ask you, and a list of questions that you could ask the interviewer.
- Try to work through an interview with someone, taking the role
of interviewer and interviewee. The best way to practise is to
actually ask the questions which might arise in a real interview,
and try to express the answers.
And now...
If you need any help or advice, or just a chat about your progress:
- see an Adviser,
on duty at the SAC Advice Desk (for details of advisers and their availability, please go to http://lc.ust.hk/~sac/sacadviser.html)
- e-mail lcsac (lccommons@ust.hk) with your query;
- ask at the reception counter of the SAC — if the receptionist cannot help you directly, s/he will pass your query on to one of the SAC advisers
Note
The introductory leaflet in this series is the leaflet Improving
Your Speaking Skills (S1).
This advice sheet is part of the Speaking series of leaflets supporting
independent language learning, produced by the HKUST Language Center
SAC team. This leaflet was re-written by Jan Pople, 2001. If you
copy from this leaflet, please acknowledge the source. Thanks.
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