Whether you’re green at the interview game, or a seasoned veteran, there are a number of things you need to know to ace your next finance interview.
The foundation of any successful endeavor is preparation. So prepare as if your professional life depended on it.
After all, you’ve worked hard to secure the interview, so why not take the extra step to hit it out of the park.
Know Your Professional Brand
To succeed in an interview you need to know your professional brand. Your professional brand is a compilation of purposeful choices that you’ve made throughout your life to get you to this moment. Understand what makes you credible for the role (schooling, past work or industry experience), how you’ve learned from past mistakes and what makes your career story compelling. By knowing who you are, you help your prospective employer understand where you might fit in the organization and what value you could add.
Know Your Resume
Anything on your resume is fair game. As recruiters in the finance and accounting industry we are always surprised when people can’t answer a question about their resume. Knowing your resume allows you to communicate with confidence, enhancing your chances of building rapport and turning the interview into a two-way street.
Know the Company
Your prospective employer wants you to connect your skills to the company’s products, services and challenges. Research using LinkedIn. If you know any past or current employees of the company even better. If not, google to learn as much as you can about any challenges or successes it’s facing. Ideally, you would also research the person interviewing you and find commonalities in work or industry experience. As one hiring manager said to us, “Get informed to get hired.”
If you want to do well in your next finance interview, know your resume inside and out. Research the company and understand how your skills and past work experience can add value to their current situation. Most importantly, take some time to define your professional brand. If you position yourself as someone who makes purposeful choices, then your prospective employer understands that you’ve thought carefully about your next step and how it can be mutually beneficial – and this makes you appealing.
