The Apprentice Interviews… lessons for job-seekers

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Last week saw the remaining 5 candidates on the BBC‘s popular The Apprentice television show go through a gruelling round of interviews with four of Sir Alan Sugar‘s high-flying business associates.

Watching Apprentice hopefuls being put through the wringer by a cohort of seasoned business leaders certainly makes for entertaining television, but have you considered that it could also help you in your job search? 

While the process on the TV is extreme, and doesn’t mirror your average interview scenario, there are still valuable lessons for real-world job seekers looking to secure employment in one of the most competitive labour markets in decades.

• Be prepared: it’s astonishing on a programme like The Apprentice that some of the candidates don’t do their homework before the show. Knowing as much as you can about the organisation and job you’re applying for before interview helps you stay calm and composed under fire. It also helps you to anticipate awkward questions so you’re not thrown by them.
• Know your application inside out: you should not be surprised or flustered when an interviewer plucks out a fact or statement from your CV or application form. Remember what you said in your application, and be prepared to provide more information on any aspect of it when asked.
• Don’t tell them everything: your application is a sales document that’s selling you. It’s your opportunity to highlight your strengths, play down your weaknesses and to guide the interviewer to specific areas of your career that demonstrate your suitability for the job. Throwing down everything can make your application confusing, introducing irrelevant detail that can prove counter-productive at interview. Tailor your application to suit the specific job.
• Candidates aren’t the only ones doing their homework: while your application can help steer your interviewer’s questions, you need to remember that while you’ve been doing your homework on them, they’ve also been checking up on you. So don’t be shaken if they throw in a questions from left field about an aspect of your career not mentioned in your application.
• Let your personality shine through: while maintaining a calm, composed and unruffled demeanour is a very positive thing to cultivate at interview, you don’t want to come across as an automaton either. You need to establish a rapport, connect with your interviewer on a human level and let your personality come across.
• Stand out for the right reasons: with so many applications landing on employers’ desks at the moment, it’s more important than ever to make yours stand out from the crowd — but you want it to stand out for the right reasons. By all means get as creative and innovative as you like… as long as you stay focussed on the positives. Avoid going for shock-factor: it will almost certainly flag your application for the wastepaper basket.
• Don’t be afraid to admit to your shortcomings: nobody’s perfect — and coming across as "too good to be true" can actually have a negative outcome at interview. Don’t be afraid to put your hands up and admit to mistakes… just make sure you highlight how you learnt from them, and what steps you’ve taken to make sure you never make them again.

Being able to perform well in an interview situation is something that will stand any job seeker in good stead, and the more practice you get, the easier it becomes. If you treat every interview as a learning opportunity, a chance to refine your technique and hone your skills, pretty soon you’ll stop dreading them.

Look at it this way: every interview you do moves you one step closer to securing the job you want.

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