As RomeoStevens said, practice is your best bet, but even better is to practice with people who have a decent grasp of what prospective employers and HR people will be thinking while interviewing you.
There are surprisingly many community centers that offer direct training programs for finding good jobs and winning interviews, and they almost always include at least a little bit of interview practice. Up here in Canada, they’re almost always free thanks to government funding, but for U.S. it’ll depend on the local specifics, I’d wager. However, you want to be looking at the very local stuff, i.e. town/district or community newspapers, the city hall’s list of community organizations, the local section/version of the “yellow pages”, and so on. These are the places where you’re most likely to find or learn about the kind of places / community centers that offer these training programs.
But again, the key point is practice and experiments with good feedback (most honest feedback is good feedback, but much more so if the other person(s) are experts in this, which is much more likely in the aforementioned community centers).
Live practice, as RomeoStevens mentioned, was definitely on my list of things to do to improve interviewing skills. Your advice about seeking out direct training programs was something I did not even consider, so thank you! That would indeed seem very helpful.
Indeed, it’s something I had not considered until I was urged to try it and did it, and it proved extremely effective. My interview skills went from the equivalent of “Hurr Durr my resume iz shitty but plz hire me I need job!!!11one” to “Greetings. I have here an enticing offer that shall certainly prove beneficial to all parties involved. If you would please look at these numbers, I believe I can demonstrate how to arrange something that will exceed your expectations.”
Definitely glad I took that course. YMMV, but at the organization I went to they had very impressive satisfaction ratings and job-finding rates (which is probably the entire reason why they are surviving solely on government funding, since the government is probably getting more money from the additional employment than they are spending on these programs, judging by how impressive the numbers sounded).
As RomeoStevens said, practice is your best bet, but even better is to practice with people who have a decent grasp of what prospective employers and HR people will be thinking while interviewing you.
There are surprisingly many community centers that offer direct training programs for finding good jobs and winning interviews, and they almost always include at least a little bit of interview practice. Up here in Canada, they’re almost always free thanks to government funding, but for U.S. it’ll depend on the local specifics, I’d wager. However, you want to be looking at the very local stuff, i.e. town/district or community newspapers, the city hall’s list of community organizations, the local section/version of the “yellow pages”, and so on. These are the places where you’re most likely to find or learn about the kind of places / community centers that offer these training programs.
But again, the key point is practice and experiments with good feedback (most honest feedback is good feedback, but much more so if the other person(s) are experts in this, which is much more likely in the aforementioned community centers).
Live practice, as RomeoStevens mentioned, was definitely on my list of things to do to improve interviewing skills. Your advice about seeking out direct training programs was something I did not even consider, so thank you! That would indeed seem very helpful.
Indeed, it’s something I had not considered until I was urged to try it and did it, and it proved extremely effective. My interview skills went from the equivalent of “Hurr Durr my resume iz shitty but plz hire me I need job!!!11one” to “Greetings. I have here an enticing offer that shall certainly prove beneficial to all parties involved. If you would please look at these numbers, I believe I can demonstrate how to arrange something that will exceed your expectations.”
Definitely glad I took that course. YMMV, but at the organization I went to they had very impressive satisfaction ratings and job-finding rates (which is probably the entire reason why they are surviving solely on government funding, since the government is probably getting more money from the additional employment than they are spending on these programs, judging by how impressive the numbers sounded).