The Best Techniques to Win the Panel Job Interview

0:00 Hey, everybody, it's Andy, back for another week to help you build a career you love. Today we're gonna talk about the panel interview. I get this one every week at Live Office Hours, people wanna know, "Andy, what do I do to ace the group interview? How should I handle it? Is there anything I need to do differently?" The great news is I've got a couple of techniques that you can employ during the interview that will absolutely set you apart from all the other job candidates.

0:27 Now, one great thing about a panel interview as far as your preparation goes, I've already given you all the techniques you need to know as far as how to prepare for a job interview, whether it's the phone screen, an in-person interview with one person, or the panel interview. Your preparation, the steps you should go through, getting your responses in order, getting your questions together, all that stuff's the same. All that stuff's the same, you've just got a few more people to research as far as who's backgrounds you need to know, understand a little bit about them and what they do, so there's just a little more homework to do.

0:59 But when you get in the panel interview, the techniques to make sure that you win it have more to do with inclusion and developing connection with everybody in the room. You wanna get everybody in that room to say, "We want to hire her." So, the way that you do that, there's two techniques. One is when the employer, or the interviewers ask you the question. The other one is when you get an opportunity to ask your questions and all of this is gonna be aimed at connecting with everybody and being inclusive.

1:29 So, first technique is when you receive a question, whatever the question is, you wanna make sure that you're focusing your response on everyone. The biggest mistake that people make is they lock in on the person who asked the question, or they lock in on the most senior person. You don't wanna do that. When somebody asks you a question, regardless of who it is in the session, you wanna make sure that your first few seconds or your first 20 or 30 seconds, you're locked in with that person, you're responding to that particular person with your answer, and then you wanna move on to the next person or the others and you wanna hold their gaze.

2:04 You wanna make eye contact with them, you wanna give them a few or 10 or 20 seconds of your attention with the response and then you wanna move on to the next person. Depends on how many people you have, it also depends if you have people on the audio or on the video, as well. Sometimes there can be people in different locations, but you wanna make sure that you are making a connection with everybody and the easiest way to do that when you respond is to hold their attention.

2:29 Please make sure to do that. That's what fosters that inclusion, that's what fosters that inclusion. Now, when you get the opportunity to actually ask your questions, the biggest mistake that people make is that they lock in on their boss or the more senior person and they tend to ask that individual all the questions. You wanna make sure that you have questions that you've identified where you're gonna include everybody in the room. Now, if you've had a chance to see in advance who's gonna be in the room, should be a lot easier as you prepare your questions, but if you've prepared your questions the way I've outlined in one of my Live Office Hours, which is how to ask your questions in a job interview, you will be ready to cherry-pick questions from your list and designate them to the appropriate people.

3:14 So, the trick here is you wanna make sure that you ask some questions of the superiors or your direct boss, and you wanna ask questions of every other person. If there are people in the session that are holding the same position, perhaps you're a sales person and you're interviewing with the vice-president of sales and two support engineers who support sales calls and a marketing administrator and so on, if you've got multiple people with the same job title, there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking them a question collectively.

3:44 So, "This question is for the engineers. I would love to get both of your opinions on this." That's still inclusive. So, the point is just making sure that you're including everybody in your responses and in your queries. So, just deploy those two techniques. Do everything else the way that I've taught you in the 400 other videos and podcasts and articles that are out there, you'll be in great shape. If you're loving this, make sure, click the thumbs up.

4:12 Make sure you're subscribed to the YouTube channel so you can get my videos every week, plus attend my Live Office Hours and if you're watching this anywhere other than the Tips for Work and Life Blog, or my YouTube channel, hop over to those sites for much more on job searching and career development. Until next week, have a great one.