This is an All-Ears English Podcast episode 2190.
Rob from the Business English Podcast on three smart strategies for interview success.
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A job interview can be high stakes and high stress.
Today, I talk with Rob Rudge from Energetic English about the three key things that we can do
to increase our chances of success and to make ourselves stand out from the other candidates.
Listen in today.
Hello Rob, welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you on today.
Hi Lindsay, hi, it's great to be here. Pleasure for having me on.
Yeah, nice to meet you for the first time. It's always exciting for me to meet other creators in
our ESL Space, English language training space. So good to have you.
I'm going to start by introducing you Rob to our audience.
So listeners, today I have Rob Rudge on the show.
Rob is an ed tech entrepreneur specializing in business,
English content courses, and training for non-native English speaking professionals.
As a passionate entrepreneur with a sales and marketing edge,
Rob helps businesses and individuals bridge the gap between native fluency and effective
professional communication. Okay, Rob, what does that mean?
What do you do? Tell us what you do in the nutshell.
Yeah, so in a nutshell, basically we're helping non-native professionals communicate
with more impact, more fluency, and more confidence,
and see how that trickles into their professional lives.
Love it. And tell us about the name of your podcast.
Tell us about your show, first of all.
So yeah, I'm the host of the business English podcast.
And we're focusing on tactics and techniques and phrases for professionals to
immediately deploy after hearing the show in their working environments.
Yeah, I think the key piece is immediately deploy, right, Rob?
Yeah, in the business English space, we don't have time to take six months to learn something new.
We need to immediately go out into the working world and use what we have just learned.
So specifically today, Rob, we are talking about interviews.
What is your basic idea of why interviews are so tricky?
So challenging.
It's a great question.
I, I, I, personally, just a personal take.
I think they are one of the final frontiers for professionals.
We've had an explosion of sort of AI assistance in the last 18 months,
so it helps with documents and CV writing, covering letters.
But in the interview itself, there is no assistance.
It doesn't happen in real time, so it's on the professional.
So it's one of those final frontiers.
I also think the so that they are a very important point for a professional as well,
because it's an inflection point, I would say, in their lives.
You can have massive shifts in your professional and personal life
through a successful interview, changes in location, finances, social life, everything.
So interviews have a profound effect on us, I think.
Well, I like those two points.
In an interview, there's no place to hide, right?
AI is the prominent.
We can rewrite our resume with AI probably.
We can rewrite a cover letter, but we cannot hide behind AI when we get into that interview.
And on top of that, it could be the most consequential
30 minutes of your life.
So not to make the stakes any higher.
That's it.
That's it.
Yeah.
It's a big deal.
Okay.
Okay, I like this.
So we're setting the stage, interviews matter, then broadly, what is your philosophy
on how to succeed in an interview?
And Rob, we're going to get into your three tips.
But is there any overarching philosophy that would summarize your approach?
Yeah.
I would say about prior planning and preparation,
prevents poor performance.
I think it's like six peas or something.
Yeah.
And that's exactly it.
SunZoo quotes, I don't want to butcher it, but something like all bottles of one,
before their thoughts, sort of thing.
And if you prepare for an interview,
you really increase the chances of being successful within that interview,
predicated on your preparation time, your preparation style.
So that's what I wanted to share with you today, Lindsay.
Yeah, I agree.
So preparation is key.
Everything else can drop off, but if you have the preparation,
you are then able to be present another P word.
And make it happen, make the connection.
At all our English, we really promote human connection.
It's all about human connection for us.
So if the preparation has been done,
it's just you and the interviewer, interviewer, connecting.
So Rob, I would love to hear three key actionable tips
that our listeners could take away
to how to make that interview successful.
Those consequential 30 minutes.
What would be your first tip of how we can do it?
Yeah, I think we're using up all the P words in English.
I know, I would say profiling.
You've got to profile in order to have a good idea of the company or role
that you're interviewing for.
There are countless individuals that go into an interview
with a loose understanding of the company or the role that they're interviewing for.
And the way that we teach our clients is to break it down in a grammar way,
which is the past, the present and the future,
where you're looking at a company's past,
what's their origin story, what do they hold dear,
and then moving it into the present, looking at what's going on now,
what are their current operations and projects,
are they mentioned in the media, what's happening right now.
And then into the future, where do they want to be in six months?
Will the role that you're interviewing for have adapted or evolved
within that six, 12 or 18 month period?
And the magic point here is to position yourself as the enabler,
as the stepping stone between the present and the future.
And once you have that good understanding of the profile of the company or role,
you can talk to those points in the interview.
Oh, 100%.
I love that framework.
The past, the present and the future,
and positioning yourself right as the bridge between the present and the future,
and you become in the interviewer's mind,
a part of the future of the company.
Also as a business owner, very small business,
but a business, the idea of someone coming in and knowing a little bit
about the history of a company is, of my company is very profound, right.
It kind of helps you relax and say,
this person really cares.
They're not just here for themselves or their own means,
they're salary.
They know what's happened in the past,
because even companies that have been around for a few years,
there's a history to that company, right Rob?
Yes, absolutely. There's a history to it,
and they have a vision,
an understanding that vision, and stepping into what
either they would like you to be,
is an excellent value proposition from your perspective,
if you're going for that job.
Yeah, and one side question there related to that.
Sure.
If, how can we find,
because it's not always directly on the website,
where this company wants to go?
If we can't quite build the whole picture in our minds before we get into the interview,
or there's certain probing questions we can ask to then place ourselves
between the present and the future,
or how do we find this information out?
Yes, an excellent, excellent question.
The idea of looking at adjacent businesses,
no business is linear,
sorry, no, no business is by itself in an industry, for example.
If you were looking at e-commerce, for example,
you could look at adjacent e-commerce businesses
and see who's further ahead, and potentially you could do some looking into the crystal ball,
and seeing where they'd like to be in the future.
100%. That makes sense.
So look at the industry, look at where their competitors are potentially going,
look at disruptive technology that's entering their space,
where AI is entering every space,
probably including our space as well.
And then look at how you can place yourself right in the middle of that to move the company for
utilizing that technology, right?
Not working against it.
Okay, I like that. So that would be the first tip, Rob,
profile, past, present, future. What would be your second tip?
This one's not beginning with P, thanks for linking.
So we have examples going into an interview prepared with Siload or grouped examples.
And what I mean by this is you will probably be asked a number of questions within a category,
greatest achievement, failure, have you ever had to deliver bad news?
And there are about six or seven groups of questions that you can reliably prepare yourself for.
And having a good idea of how to answer these in the moment under the heat of the interview as
gaze is a good idea because as you know, you're in an interview, the stress levels are up,
and your mind can go blank. So really drilling these examples, space repetition,
you know, all the stuff we used to learn vocabulary, drilling systems, you know, developing that
recall is really important. So thinking back to the first point about profiling the company,
you're starting to align these two things. You're looking at their future projections and you're
looking at your CV and past experience. And you now start to develop very relevant examples
that slot nicely into the interviewers. Yeah. So there is a level of forethought in preparation here
of strategy of alignment, making sure your answers are obviously they are honest, they're clear.
But maybe you have a number of strengths and you could choose any of them. You're going to choose
the one that aligns with placing yourself again in that present to future position for the company.
I like that. Do you think that I'm not sure what you think about this, Rob? The questions,
those buckets of common questions are different across the UK, the US, Canada, Australia,
other English-speaking markets. Do you think they're different or do you think they're the same
similar? I think at a at a at a general level, they're probably rather similar. You know, have you
been in a difficult situation at work? Have you broken bad news? But then down at the tactical level,
the what you were doing may differ. You know, the essence of the question, though, will probably
be the same friction, difficulty, team work, leadership, all this stuff. You could probably group
into about six or seven different categories. Okay. Yeah. And then of course, probably they vary
somewhat by industry too. And I know that Silicon Valley became famous for kind of crazy questions,
like if you're an animal, what animal would you be? Or just intelligence has Rubik's cubes,
all this Rubik's. Right. So I'm sure it depends on what industry you're in as well. Okay.
I love that. So come up with your siloed examples. Common one here in the US, at least, is what is
your weakness? And that is always kind of a bit of a mind trip to figure out how to answer that.
Any thoughts on how you approach that question? And is that one of the buckets in the UK? Would
you say, yes, it would be, yeah, your strengths and weaknesses are definitely people call it
a cliche question. And I think the weakness question is, is, is a really important one,
because we've had clients before that categorically say, well, you know, I don't have any weaknesses.
And I think that's a really poor answer, because it shows self-awareness and all this and
this ego challenges. And so there should always be an answer, but it should, I would say,
it should be a positive negative, not something like, well, I really hate working with people.
It needs to be something manageable for the company. Like, you know, I'm a perfectionist,
it's slow, you know, that can slow me down. And then with anything negative that is displayed
in an interview, I would always say that you must balance it. So I can be a perfectionist,
it slows me down, but I am now setting deadlines. So you're balancing this negativity in the interview.
Right. So not just an awareness that of the weakest, but actively doing something
and that level of self-awareness to fix this issue or to make it more of an adaptive skill for
the company, a skill that will help the company. I love that idea. Yes. Okay. Love it Rob. What would
be your third tip for us today? The third one in chronological order is, are the questions
at the end of the interview. So something that goes a little bit like, you know,
I'm saying thanks for your time today. Do you have any questions for me or the panel?
This is a magic moment in an interview. And the answer is always yes. It is never
no. You should always have a question for the interviewing panel. Yeah. And this question needs
to be something that shows you have done your research, something that shows that you are
interested in the role. So we have this new Monic ask. So it needs to be about the role. It
needs to show interest in personal development and demonstrate knowledge, ASK,
to really craft a good question. Because it's essentially them being in control, the interview
will or the panel being in control for the entire interview, which can be between 45 minutes and
90 minutes, I think is the length of the average professional interview. And then right at the end,
they hand you the microphone before you walk out the door. And I think it's a really good position
to be in. So craft the question and it can save a dodgy interview as well, a good quality question
to finish. Right. Do you typically recommend that people go with the questions they've crafted
ahead of time or take a chance and come up with something that they've developed throughout the
interview? What do you think is more advised? Yeah. I would go with something that you have
taken a time to research beforehand, again, the origin story or something into the future,
looking back through the company's history and asking maybe how that decision was made or,
you know, how could you better learn from these situations? It just demonstrates that you're
looking again, you're reinforcing that you're paying attention closely and you care about this
interview. And that you've done that research prior to the interview, right? You've gone the extra
mile and believe it or not, a lot of people don't, right? They don't do these things and just doing
these simple things will set you apart, right? Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. I love that, Rob. Any final
piece of advice for our students, our listeners who may be applying for a job 100% in English,
maybe in an English-speaking country or maybe it is a position that will require a lot of English,
you know, within their company and their home country? Sure. I think you said it right at the
start, actually, Lindsay, it was about alignment is just make sure that you're aligning yourself
in a very authentic way with the job. But if you, there's a lot of bad advice out there about
memorizing your phrases and things and if you have a bad day or, and if you're relying on your
memorization, it's going to fall off maybe with the stress and a difficult question. But aligning
yourself with the company, aligning yourself with your own experience and bringing those two together
is a very powerful position to go into an interview with. That is such a good point, Rob. I mean,
we can tell when someone is speaking from the head, a line that they've just memorized,
wrote memorization versus the heart, where they actually believe in the mission of the company
and they feel it on that deeper level. And it doesn't really matter exactly how they word it,
they're going to get the message across, right, Rob? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, couldn't
it be more than brilliant? Fantastic. Thank you, Rob, for being on the show today. Can you tell us
a little bit more about your podcast where we can find you and how often you publish episodes?
Sure. We're pushing episodes on a weekly basis, normally on a Sunday evening,
Monday morning, depending on where you are in the world, ready for the work week heads.
We're at the BusinessEnglishPodcast.com and you can find us on most of the distribution channels out there.
All right, good stuff. Well, thanks for being on and we hope to have you on Allers English
again soon, Rob. Take care. Right, so thanks for having me. Thank you, bye. Bye.
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