If you’re a careers adviser reading this, chances are you’ve conducted a mock interview at some point. It’s straightforward enough. You prepare your questions for the student according to the type of interview and the job they’re applying for. You brief the student, run through the questions, making notes on the student’s answers, and then spend some time discussing how it went and where they might improve their performance.
In general, it’s a fairly simple exercise, and students (assuming they aren’t scared off completely!) usually find the experience pretty useful, if only slightly less painful than a trip to the dentist! Some of you might have also ventured into the realms of video interviewing, as we have here at Manchester…
But at peak times of year the demand for mock interviews might be so great you just can’t meet it.
Or students (or more likely, graduates) might be off campus and not able to come for a face-to-face interview.
Or a client might need to arrange a mock interview at very short notice and you just can’t fit them in.
Or they might want to have more than one shot at practising their answers to those “killer questions”.
That’s really where virtual interviews come into their own. [cont...]
[...cont] A number of university careers services in the US have licensed mock interview software, which students can then access via their website (usually only with a valid uni login). One US-based software company describes how their virtual interview software, Perfect Interview, works:
“A professional interviewer appears on your computer screen and asks questions based upon your profile. [You are asked to complete a profile when you register.] You must answer each question on the spot, with the optional Quick Cam Pro® camera automatically recording everything you say and do. You can play your recorded answers back for immediate feedback, or save them for later review.”
You can even e-mail your interview file to your friendly careers adviser. I’m currently having a play with trial versions of two US software packages, “Perfect Interview” and “InterviewStream“, and so far, I’m impressed!
OK, so that’s what they do in the US, but how long before something like this is available in the UK? Well, I’ve heard on the grapevine that one institution here already uses some software along these lines, and may have even developed it in-house, so I think I’m going to put my detective cap on and see if I can learn more!
But until then, I’d like to leave you with a link to what might be the next best thing – the BeMyInterviewer website, which features videoed interview questions from such well-known figures as Duncan Bannatyne (Dragons’ Den) and Ruth Badger (The Apprentice), among others. After each question, the interviewer tells us what kind of answer they are looking for, rather than giving us a ‘model answer’. The website claims to be ‘interactive’, but it seems to be conflating interactivity with multimedia. It is essentially an interesting and well put-together video-based resource, developed by Jobsite, but it lacks some of the important functionality of the US mock interview software.
