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In the second segment of the ‘How to Prep for an Interview’ series, Liz and Shania talk about the importance of researching your interviewer and how best to do so. Throughout this series, they’ve paralleled recruiting tips with origin story movies. In this episode, they draw a comparison to the newest Hunger Games movie, The Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes, to illustrate this tip.
If you want to learn more, you can check out parts one and three of this series!
Hey everyone, welcome back to another week of Recruiting Reality, the show where we pair up hot topics in the entertainment industry with some helpful recruiting tips. And we’re currently on a three part series about how to prepare for your interview. And we’re tying it into movies that have really strong origin stories.
I’m super excited about this week because we’re talking about the newest Hunger Games movie, also the Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of the Songbird and Snakes. And I’m a big fan. And Liz, you’re a big fan of Hunger Games too, right? I am. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, but I know that you take it to the next level in terms of your fandom.
So tell us more. Yeah. I mean, I read all the books, even the new one and it’s-
I don’t really read much. So that’s big for me. But yeah, so the movie is all about President Snow, like his origin story, how did he become the villain that he is in the later books? And it’s really, really good. I won’t give out any spoilers for anyone who’s watching, but we’re connecting it to how do we research the interviewer.
Last week, we talked about how do you research the company and best practices there. But Liz, do you want to start off by just giving us a few tips on how to best research the interviewer before stepping into that interview? Absolutely. And you all will find that it’s very similar to how you research the company.
A lot of that is just getting down and gritty with your LinkedIn research and looking for that person on LinkedIn. I like to take it a step further and really learn a little bit about them. So I’ll go into, you know, what posts have they shared? What have they liked? What do they talk about?
Because I think it’s just so great to not only learn, you know, how long have they been with the company? And questions that you can then bring back into the interview, but kind of who they are, and who they present themselves to be professionally. And so just really getting in there with that LinkedIn research, and you will be surprised how much you can find just going down that avenue.
Do you have any other tips that you might suggest? Yeah. The only thing is like if they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, which is pretty rare for a hiring manager, but if they don’t, I would say talk to your recruiter. Whether that is an internal recruiter or an agency recruiter, they’ve definitely had some sort of interaction with that person and can give you best tips. Whether that’s their communication style or if you guys have any similarities. Maybe you went to the same college or had a same prior role in the past.
Anything like that can be very helpful just to find a foundation to start your conversation on and find a similarity. So if they don’t have a LinkedIn profile and heck, even if they do, it may be beneficial to ask the recruiter if they have any tips on the interviewer themselves to see if you can pull together some quick facts.
Exactly. And you’ll find this is like another tie in within the tie ins. You’ll find that learning the origin story of the person who is going to be interviewing you is going to make you feel so much more comfortable in the interview and kind of help you build that rapport and connection. And look at us, we just keep tying in origin stories all over the place.
Yeah, well, it’s the truth. It’s the truth. Stay tuned for our episode and final three of our interviewing series next week. We’re excited to share with you the other origin story movie that we came up with.
