Congratulations!
You’ve made the cut and been asked for an interview.
The key to doing well in interviews is preparation. Here at Elevate Recruitment, our next few blogs will deal with tricky questions and how to answer them.
Some potential employers like to ask difficult questions to see how you react under pressure and how prepared you are or to understand your thought processes.
The key is to stay calm, take a moment to collect your thoughts. You can ask a clarifying question if you need to.
The first ‘tricky’ question we’re going to tackle is:
Why are you leaving your current position?
The most acceptable answers here should be positive reasons based on advancing your career or moving forward in your life.
This is not the time to dwell on any negative experiences you had in your last role or to bad-mouth your last employer.
Examples:
- I am interested in developing my skills further in (something this job includes), and this job provides an opportunity to use my current areas of expertise but have room to grow.
Or
- I’ve enjoyed working with a great people at my current employer but working for this company and this opportunity in particular, fits well with the direction I’d like to take my career.
Or
- My current role has been a fabulous experience, but growth is limited because the company is relatively small. To continue to develop my skills, I need to look elsewhere, and this opportunity looks very interesting to me because it would use my existing skills but still have opportunity for growth.
You can take the opportunity to share what you’ve learned about the potential new company and demonstrating your interest in the opportunity. Talk about the culture of this company, and how you feel it’s a strong match with your strengths and experience and it’s a place you’d like to work.
In our next update we’ll answer the one we all dread: ‘What is your biggest weakness?’
