How do You Prepare for Later Round Interviews?
It’s exciting when you get the call that your application has caught a company’s attention, and they want to interview you! The first round interview is fairly straightforward: you’re most likely asked questions about how you accomplish the job’s essential tasks which is why the job description functions as a cheat sheet at this stage in the process.
As you move through the interview process, the interviewer’s focus shifts away from evaluating your qualifications for the job to evaluating your fit for the role. Answer questions for fit is a lot harder to prepare for – these questions require knowing a bit about the company and the role and even the individual team. A recruiter does this by conferring with the hiring manager before conducting screening interviews but as a candidate, you have fewer options to really assess what they’re looking for.
In the rest of this article, I’ll share several strategies to help you prepare for interviews after you’ve had your initial discussion — focusing in particular on auditing your standard interview answers and going beyond STAR in your answers as well as preparing questions to ask the company.
What is “fit” exactly?
Fit is a really nebulous term we throw around to describe a person who clicks with the team and the job description. It encompasses the hiring manager’s must haves as well as the particular mix of skillsets currently on the team; it also encompasses future company needs. In fact, a lot of companies respond to challenging marketing conditions by hiring people who can successfully navigate those choppy waters. So even if a company is hiring for a position they’ve hired in recently, what they’re looking for in the right fit might change each time.
For example, I recently saw a job description for an Account Executive that said they needed candidates who could demonstrate “Success in consultative sales of non-core/textbook products in the ESSER expiration era.” The candidate who satisfies this requirement may be a very different type of candidate from their last AE hire. In this case, the company’s business needs are driving the definition of fit.
Another example could be when the team’s current makeup is lacking an essential skillset. For example, an Instructional Design team that’s particularly strong on designing scenarios and assessments may be looking for candidates who can help them assess needs and develop stronger learning objectives. You may be an exceptional ID but if the other candidate you’re up against has more strengths around learning objectives, then they’ll get the job.
Sometimes, though, fit has a darker side: the company might be using fit as a proxy for bias – for example, making assumptions about age or the candidate’s current profession or even selecting candidates who would be a ‘fun’ teammate rather than evaluating each candidate on their skills to do the job.
Ideally companies have systems in place to monitor for unconscious bias, and the recent trend towards rating candidates using the same rubrics and even asking each candidate the same questions (something government jobs have always done!) are examples of how companies are trying to root out these shaky hiring grounds.
But even when a company is monitoring for unconscious bias, they may still be looking for a particular type of background and someone who will round out the team’s existing expertise. They may include this information in the job description (as they did in the AE role above) but often companies use boilerplate job descriptions and are hesitant to edit them for specific hiring rounds. This is especially true if you’re interviewing for a role that is common in the organization but has different teams and supervisors – the job description is company-wide so may or may not reflect the particulars of the project that team works on.
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