During today’s class we discussed job interviews and in groups prepared a list of interview questions we would expect to be confronted with in a professional interview for employment. We then acted out an interview role-play scenario which was a lot of fun, to say the least. It exposed a lot of us to the “not so professional” way to conduct yourself in an interview. For eg. slouching body language, general laziness, unprofessional mannerisms and what “not to do” ie. call your mother… haha… as literally demonstrated by one of our classmates. Hilarious.

Although I’ve experienced many interviews in my time for various jobs, I must admit they don’t seem to get any easier. I get extremely nervous every time. I feel nowadays and with the recent job interview I’ve had for a hotel and also a causal position in a retail store, I walked away from these interviews feeling fantastic and had a good feeling that I did well.

I think you can usually gauge whether or not you nailed it or not based on the body language and response from your employer during the interview. However I’ve had interviews where I really had no idea if they wanted to hire me or not so I guess it depends on the situation.

My most difficult and challenging interview was back in 2007 when I had been accepted for a recruitment day at Virgin Australia (then Virgin Blue) back in Melbourne for a cabin crew position. This was a full day of intense behavioural tasks and assessments which consisted of a 5 minute spot interview to see how much you knew about the position. Then you sat at a large table of other candidates (all nervous as hell) and we had to complete a team task where everyone had to show that they were working as a team to the observing panel. This meant that we were being watched closely to see how we were interacting with others in a team scenario, whether we were overpowering, not listening to others, or not contributing at all. After this we presented this task to the class as a mini presentation. Then we would find out if we were invited to continue on to the second half of the day where we would have a 30 minute two panel interview. Last but not least was a role-play where we acted out a customer service complaint scenario. Long day indeed I’ll never forget it!

So all in all quite a lengthy process but through this and my then 8 year career at Virgin Australia flying the skies, I understand why this process was so crucial for hiring the right kind of people. These intense behavioural questions and observations were essential for the role.

I guess it works the same in any industry. Interviews are the process of an employer finding out who you are exactly and they want to believe that YOU are going to make a huge contribution to the business. If you don’t meet their expectations on interview day then you probably won’t get hired. Therefore interview preparation is essential.

Today’s class was a good refresher for me when it comes to interview techniques and what not to do. I took away from the tutorial the understanding that interview’s in creative media industries are probably very different to the ones I’ve experienced in predominantly customer service roles. An interview in creative media is an opportunity for you to really demonstrate who you are as an individual artist and what you’re passionate about. That’s all they want to see. Your skills are outlined in your resume, but you need to expose the real you to your employer and convince them that you are the number one candidate for the job. This is why it’s important again to start networking early on in this course, you need to start getting a name for yourself, attend workshops and events and gather as much information from the industry as possible.