How to deliver interview presentations and tasks
Interview presentations advice
There are lots of different tasks that might be required of you during an interview process. Here, we focus on one of the more predictable tasks – the presentation. Depending on the brief, this could be relatively easy to prepare and a fair opportunity to showcase your abilities.
Presentations can either be briefed in advance or given on the day, with a small amount of time to prepare and then deliver. But, don’t panic.
Remember – the subject matter will be something related to the job. So, there are only a certain number of things that you need to prepare. The preparation that you are already doing will probably cover it.
Think about what they have asked and how that relates to the Person Specification for the job. That should keep your content on the right track to support your selection.
How to succeed in interview presentations
Most importantly: Ditch the list of bullet points!
The objective is to demonstrate your suitability for the role in a superior way.
I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to ditch the lists of bullet points.
Once you have ditched the list of bullet points, you can focus on developing your content.
If, when writing the slides, you are tempted to introduce lists of bullet points, then, please go back to stage 1 about the ditching of bullet points.
Seriously – make one point per slide and illustrate it briefly with a few words and/or an image or chart. That should guide you to elaborate on it whilst speaking. This has another advantage: You are far less likely to read out the content of the slide. That makes the presentation look and sound more effective.
How to prepare presentations about yourself
Like any aspect of the selection process, it’s about matching yourself to the Person Specification. Cover all of it unless guided otherwise.
With a presentation, you get the freedom to elaborate on the right things. Tell stories about your successes. The format could be:
- What you did.
- How you did it.
- The results.
It all depends on the Person Specification. If it’s short, you might want to take each point in turn. This guarantees that you are easy to score against the criteria. If it’s long and repetitive, you might want to group the points, deduplicate, and pick a more interesting presentation structure.
Remember the specific question you were given though. Always answer the brief that you were given. Give suitable detail during the presentation and then come back to the brief and summarise how you have answered it.
How to prepare presentations about the company and its situation
This may take the form of ‘How would you help us to …’ or ‘What would be your recommendations for …’
The key here is to think about the audience for your presentation: The interview panel. Like any presentation, you will be trying to give them what they want. You won’t know a great deal about them at this stage. If you can research them, such as on the company website, LinkedIn, or anything they have published, then that will help. It won’t guide you in exactly what to say, but it will give you some insight into their interests, priorities, and challenges.
Think about the balance between ‘playing it safe’ and introducing radical ideas. You want to show that you can make a difference. But, the audience here will decide whether or not to offer you the job. So, think about how conservative or otherwise you want to be. There is no right answer here – it will depend solely on the subjective views of the interview panel. That is what you are trying to judge.
You should present authentic ideas in relation to the question. I once answered an interview question about how I’d change the sales team by saying I believed they needed support rather than radical reorganisation. I knew fully that the interviewer didn’t agree, but would not want to take the job unless they were prepared to allow me to do it my way. You are not trying to get every job. You are trying to get the right one for you.
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