How to Prep for an Interview (Part 3)

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 this week we are on part three, the finale of our how to best prepare for your interview. And we’re going back to another origin story of a wonderful franchise. And Liz, this one-

this one’s all you. You go ahead and share the big news. I love it. This is one of my favorites. It’s been a while since these movies have been on, so you’ll have to dust off your old DVDs if those are still a thing. But, it’s the X-Men franchise, one of my favorite franchises, and I-

they actually have two origin stories, that I wanted to chat very quickly about.

So one is Wolverine’s origin story, that’s the Wolverine origins movie. And the second is, and my personal favorite, Magneto, who is the villain, his origin story is called X-Men First Class. So, it’s really interesting because you get to learn kind of about how a hero is born, and then you get to learn about how a villain is born, and if you think about it, they both play these parts.

They didn’t interview for them, but our connection is, how do you prepare for an interview, when it comes to connecting your background, your skill set, your resume with whatever part it is that you are applying to. And obviously a lot of this is going to come down. You’ll find in every episode, we talk about research. You know, you want to research, heavily research the position that you’re applying to so that you’re able to connect your background, your skill set, and what you’ve done to those specific pieces. Do you have any additional tips, Shania?

Yeah, whenever you are looking at the job description and thinking about how to best represent your experience, I would say, I say this to some candidates sometime who I just, I feel like maybe they would benefit from speaking in the mirror.

And I think it’s so funny because I have done it in the past, where you feel super silly like looking in the mirror and then like explaining your experience. But, it really helps just to get one run through, even just once, of you talking it to yourself in the mirror because you realize “Oh I shouldn’t talk about that.” Or “Oh I was blabbing a little bit too much about this.”

And looking at the job description and realizing, okay, I’ve done a lot in my tenure, but what can I pull out of each role that is very relevant to what’s in this role? And just run, running through it one time, talking to yourself in the mirror of the specifics, rather than trying to be too vague and going 10 minutes long, talking about your experience when the recruiter or the hiring manager is really only looking for specific points, can go a really long way.

That’s a really, really good idea. I haven’t considered that. I’m going to start sharing that as well. And I think the last tip I would share is go on LinkedIn, go for the company that you’re applying to and look at other people who are in that role. That way you get an idea of maybe what they’ve done.

You know, obviously your experience isn’t their experience, but it’s a little bit more knowledge and ultimately knowledge is power. And so you’ve got an idea of, you know, what hiring managers gravitate to as well. So there are different avenues, lots of different ways to prepare.

I think we were really excited to connect origin stories to this interview prep and we have more series down the line coming your way. If you all have any suggestions on what you’d like the series on, definitely let us know in the comments. Yeah, definitely. We’re super excited to continue 2024 off with Recruiting Reality and we’ll see you guys next week. See you next week.