Q: I’m a member of a remote working team collaborating on a major project – and I’m struggling. It feels like everything has to be scheduled and I never know if people are even concentrating in Zoom meetings. I feel overloaded and I miss being around people. Any tips? (DF, email ).
Q: For the last three years I have been in college fulltime, embarking on a new career path. I’ve loved every day of it, even the difficult assignments and challenging exams. I’m graduating this summer. Prior to this second college stint, I worked in a sector I didn’t enjoy and had five jobs in seven years. Each time, I just got bored or felt that the company wasn’t right for me. However, since going back back to college, I have realised that my earlier career was the problem, not individual companies within the sector. I had that hunch all along, but college has confirmed it for me. However, I now fear that employers will see me as an unsettled individual who just jumps from job to job? Any tips on how I make sure this doesn’t hold me back? (DR, email ).
In this column, we continue our series breaking down the START answering method that will stand to you in one of the most common type of interviews, namely the competency-based interview. In the first column in the series, we explained how START stands for the five key steps of an answer – Situation, Task, Action, Result and Them.
Q: Every time I go to an interview, I am conscious of the fact that I move my hands far too much when speaking. Face to face it doesn’t appear too bad, but in online interviews it looks crazy. I can see myself in the screen gesticulating and waving like a mad thing, going like a windmill, but I just don’t know how to stop. Any tips on how I can get those hands back under control? (EF, email ).
Q: It was a very unusual job interview, I felt. Every time I told a story in response to a question, they pushed me to elaborate more on the result of the story. I didn’t really know what to say. A story is a story. I told them what I did and gave a general idea of how it went, and I felt that should have been more than enough. I didn’t get the job. Any thoughts? (EF, email ).