Ep 21: The Real Reason Two Consultant Interviews in One Week Can Be an Advantage

Okay. Welcome back to our Ace Your Consulting Interview podcast. I am here as always with Becky. Hello, Becky.

Hello. Great to be here.

Yes, it is. Okay. Let's get going. So first up, we've got a question of the week, which is a question posed by one of our academy students. What question have we got this week, Becky?

Oh, the question this week is, I have 2 interviews in the same week. What should I do? Aha.

So do we think this is a good thing or a bad thing to happen to you?

I mean, it probably feels like a bad thing, but on the whole it's a good thing, right? You've got two opportunities to get a job. I know.

Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because you're in the zone anyway. You're applying and you're practicing and you're prepping. So. Why not? It gives you a backup option. And they're in the same week, so it's not even like they're 3 weeks apart. Because sometimes people are like, oh, I really want the second job, but I've got the job that I don't want the interviews for first. I've got the interview for that first, so how do I tell them to hold off, or will they hold the offer for me? Whereas if it's a few days in between, you're not really going to have that problem at all. In some ways, it's quite good because you're in the zone, you got the flow, so you're just gonna get 2 chances. But, but it does add extra work and extra stress.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think the reality is whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's happening. That's true.

It doesn't really matter.

Um, you're just gonna have to get on board with it and work out how to navigate it. And, and this happens because, you know, we've got a student this week who's had exactly this thing happen because that, you know, she's gone for a job in a trust, they really want her. Somebody else in a different trust who also really wants her got wind that this was happening and they snuck their interview in the day before because they really want her and they want her to say yes to their job. I mean, that— how lovely to be that wanted, but also quite stressful. Um, so, okay, so how, how do you tell people to navigate this?

Hmm, well, I think part of this difficult bit is having to navigate so many pre-interview visits, 'cause it's already quite a lot. It depends how many people they give you the details of or the names of, but if you're having to meet 5 people on one panel and 5 people on another panel in the same 2-week timeframe, that could be quite stressful. So I think you need to prioritize that though. I think you don't want to say, right, well, I'm not gonna bother meeting these people From the panel because I just don't have the time. It's another reason why you want to start prepping before 2 weeks' notice though, because as we talked about in a previous episode, because yeah, this is a lot to do. It's going to be a lot to do and it's going to be quite overwhelming, but you do want to make sure you do all the pre-interview visits because otherwise you're not really giving yourself a good chance at one of them or maybe both of them because you're just spreading yourself too thin. So don't drop the pre-interview visits. Mm-hmm. The bulk of your prep is going to be similar. So the bulk of just thinking through the milestones that we go through in the academy, the bulk of your USPs, your examples are going to be the same. But then some of the kind of senior-level thinking stuff might be different. And obviously the job-specific knowledge will be different because you want to tailor the projects that you're choosing, the metrics, the ways to measure quality, the challenges of the service. They're going to be tailored to each place individually. And really, a good interviewee will be able to tailor their answers to what they know about that team. And so, you're going to have to switch, be able to plan for both things, and be able to switch how you're thinking about your answers from place to place. So, I think that's probably another big challenge of it.

Yeah, I think you'll have a basic core of knowledge examples that will be relevant for either place. But if there's some nuance around the way that the job's set up in, you know, one or other of the places, then you've got to tailor your answer to that. And, you know, when you're in the interview for, you know, job X, job X has got to be the job of your dreams. That's true, yeah. And you've got to really focus that. You've got to let them, you know, believe even if you don't really believe it, for that half an hour, that is the job of your dreams, and you're going all in to get it.

Yeah.

And then you'll have to switch the focus tomorrow, and job Y is also the job of your dreams. So, there is a bit of, you know, skill around preparing for the two, making sure that you understand what the particular requirements are for each one, what they need from you as a new consultant, and making sure that you're going to deliver that You know, whichever one you're going for. So, it's not easy, but it is absolutely doable.

Yeah, and definitely, yeah, you just, you can make a plan for what you'll say to one when you get offered the job about asking them, you know, you can be honest at that point. I've got another interview in 2 days, would you be able to hold the offer or something like that? You just make a plan before for what you're going to say and also which one you want, because let's assume you're going to get your choice of both, um, and you just need to try at that point and be as transparent as possible. Um, just before we move on, what do you think you need to tell people in advance that you've got 2 jobs in 1 week?

I think it depends entirely on your relationship with the, with the places. Um, I think I mean, we had one candidate who was going for 2 jobs at once. They were geographically fairly close to each other. Everyone knew everyone.

Yeah, that's a good one.

They all wanted him, you know, all of that. So, he was incredibly honest about it, and he navigated the whole process with finesse, got offered both jobs, took some time to think about it, Took the one he wanted and remained friends with everyone.

They all still love him. It was an amazing achievement.

It was, yeah, it really was. I think if you don't particularly— if you don't really know them well, if they're places that you haven't trained and you don't particularly have a relationship with them, then I think I would probably just play it fairly close to your chest.

Yeah.

And, you know, just tell them afterwards when they ring to offer you the job. I think it's okay to protect yourself in this. You know, it's nice to be honest as much as you possibly can, but if it's going to affect your job, you know, chances—

That's true. You don't want them being like, oh well, Becky doesn't really want this job, she's got another interview anyway. And, um, yeah, you don't, you don't want it to muddy the waters.

I think with the best will in the world, they are humans on the interview panel, and whilst they are going to be scoring your answers, if they're sitting there thinking, Well, you know, Tessa did say that she really wanted to work, you know, in the other one. Um, you know, if they're wavering between, you know, a 4 and a 5, they're probably going to give you a 4, aren't they? Because they're already feeling a little bit cheesed off with you. Um, and everyone likes to be wanted, so if they think that you don't want them, they're probably not going to feel as warm and cuddly towards you. So, I think just, just be a little bit careful around that.

Yep. And it's not— and also know that you're not alone in this situation. It just, it's the way it happens. You wait years for an interview and suddenly you get 2 at once. So you aren't the only person or the first person in that situation.

Absolutely.

Okay. So next up, we've got our golden example of the week. This week, we've got an example of a conflict with a patient. So the conflict that we've got is, I saw a 34-year-old lady with an acute exacerbation of her chronic knee pain after After taking a history, undertaking a thorough examination, and reviewing her blood tests, I concluded that no further intervention was needed from the A&E team and she was suitable to be discharged back to the care of her GP. I offered her a pain medication review and suggested that she request a GP review, which would also include a referral to the chronic pain team. The patient was not happy with this course of action and very upset that she was being sent home without a diagnosis. And without resolution of her chronic pain. What do we think about this, Becky?

On the whole, I like this example. I'd like to do a bit of sort of tailoring of it a little bit, I think. So I like it. See, so it's a bit long-winded for me at the moment, and we've talked before about how what we want with the golden examples is for you to be able to deliver the story in, you know, 30 seconds or so. So, you know, maybe you could say something along the lines of, um, an example of a time when I had a conflict with a patient is when I was managing a lady with chronic knee pain, um, and I gave her the diagnosis, and the, the conflict arose because she was going to need to be referred to the, uh, the complex pain service, and therefore we didn't actually get to a point where we'd resolved her pain that day. She was unhappy about that. Could probably even do it even more succinctly than that, but just deliver it in a couple of sentences if you possibly can, because then actually we can all relate to this. You know, patients want an outcome today. It's not unreasonable. And probably this lady's in pain, that makes her feel a bit upset. People are never at their best when they're in pain, and so we can all understand how this conflict arose. So it's relatable. And then you can just walk the panel through what a lovely conversation you had with this lady afterwards about, you know, recognising that she was in pain and, you know, coming to some sort of resolution about the conflict. What do you think? Does this land well for you as an example? Yeah.

I think, like you say, very relatable. Patients not happy when they leave ED or any service really, because we haven't sorted their problem. So I'm sure it could be cut down to make it less wordy. Because a lot of that, the detail given is not helping anything, and it's just taking up time in your answer that should be focused on conflict resolution. So I think if you Yeah, I agree. If you tightened it up, I think this could be a great, relatable, reasonably common example that you can then get down to, right, how do you handle these sort of challenging situations with patients and families?

Yeah, and remember, this is about how you de-escalate conflict.

Yeah.

And we want you to be able to demonstrate that you are a person who can de-escalate conflict on your own, in the moment, Without needing to rely on the help of anyone else.

Yeah. Great. Okay. So we think good example, tighten it up, and it's a good one to use.

Yes.

Okay. Now we're going to look at the interview question for the week. This is a question that might come up in anyone's consultant interview. So the question that we've got this week is, what support will you need coming into this role? So I think this is also reasonably commonly asked, or versions of it. Which is thinking, sort of acknowledging that you're coming into a new team, new role. Maybe for some of the candidates, it'll be their first consultant role. For most, it would be their first substantive consultant role anyway. So, yeah, it's quite an open question though, and maybe easy to fall into a giant hole with. What do you think the best way would be to approach it?

I think what you need to show in this example is that you are A nice, normal human. Somebody who's going to come into a new team and take the time to settle into this new team, so that you can be a solid, valuable part of the team, and not somebody who's going to come in, you know, upsetting people. So, I think there needs to be some recognition of the fact that there's a settling-in period. You know, so getting to know the team, getting to know their priorities, understanding who they are, you know, what are the, you know, the goals, the challenges in this department and this team, and recognising that probably, you know, if you're a new consultant, you've got some, you know, stuff to learn around what it actually means to be in this role. So I think that that's the first bit. I like there to be some acknowledgement of limitations, and that settling-in period that recognises that you're coming into an established team, and you've got to put in some work to make that work. Does that kind of— is that a reasonable starting point?

Yeah, I think so. It probably depends which role you're coming from as well, because if you're coming from a reg role, what you want to avoid is showing that you have sheer terror about taking on this role, and, you know, you're really worried, or clinically you don't have experience of this, or Because that's a common thing to go to is clinically, I'm worried about this. So you want to avoid that because that would be— they know that it's your first consultant job, but you don't need to kind of throw yourself under a bus. So I think, and conversely, if you're in a substantive consultant role already, you're actually in some ways trying to show the opposite, which is that you're not going to just bulldoze your way through the team and be like, I know what I'm doing here. I've been a consultant for years. Because that's going to be annoying and they're going to be worried about how you're going to integrate into the team. So, it's showing a little bit of vulnerability and also a bit of understanding of the dynamics of the role, of the transition. So, yeah, I think just think about where you are now and something that would be relevant, but not throwing yourself under a bus.

So, I think there could be kind of 3 parts to this, ideally, because we like a kind of 3-part answer.

We do like a 3-part answer.

It's our whole thing. So maybe there's that kind of recognition framed around, you know, where you're coming from, you know, what's the role. Then maybe something around, you know, a particular thing that you might need some support on, you know, whether it's, you know, if they've asked you to do a particular project like setting up a new service or something, and you can talk to them about your vision, and, you know, you recognise that you know, you'll need some support with a particular aspect of it, or maybe, you know, talk about one of your USPs and, you know, something that you've already done and you'd like some support to build on that. Is there anything else that you would add to that?

No, just thinking about your weakness, that because we get our students to prep their weakness, and I do think that this is a version, could be a version of your weakness. which is the easiest thing is to pick, 'cause either you pick one area that you'll need support in and 3 ways that you can address that, or you're addressing that yourself along with their help, or you pick 3 different areas that you need support in. I think the risk of picking 3 areas you need support in is just like oversharing, over-vulnerable, over-negative.

Sure.

But if you picked one area, And then three ways that you think you can handle it. That could potentially be a good way of answering it. So, for example, if your weakness was take. So some people will say like they can't. They don't know how to say no, so they take on too much, and then in the end they missed a deadline because they'd taken on too too much, and they let someone down. And so now they do X, Y, and Z. And in a way, you could flex that into what support you'll need. You say, you know, I have a tendency, you have a tendency to take on too much. It needs to not be a secret flex. So you need to have some vulnerability. You know, you have a tendency to take on too much and you're going to be obviously wanting to make a good impression on everyone when you start. But in the past, you had an experience where you took on too much and you actually ended up missing an important deadline for a research paper or whatever it is. And so you've tried to set boundaries in place. And so it's, the balance of wanting to get involved and stuck into stuff, but being able to know when to say no. Do you think that's too much overshare on this, Becky, or do you think that could work?

Basically, it's just about not throwing yourself under the bus, isn't it? So, recognising that you've got an area for development rather than you're somebody who's got this great yawning gap in there. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't want to list all of the things that you're really worried about, um, because it's not the time. It's the— in your interview, it's not the time. You'll have plenty of time to get settled in and, you know, sort yourself out in the job. So going on to, uh, tips, our tip and trick of the week, um, what, what tip and trick are we going to be looking at this week?

Okay, so the tip and trick this week is Don't spend your time in the run-up to the interview reading multiple NHS reports. Spend your time practising.

Yes, because they're long, aren't they? There are pages and pages, and then they link to other reports, and it just goes on and on and on and on and on. And then you start to panic that they're going to ask you about one of a particular report. Tell me about page 47 of the something report. Now, I do think there are some reports that you do need to know about. We've kind of, for our students, we've got our Deep Dive 5 course, which basically summarises the key things that they need to know. So I'm just thinking about what reports we've included in that. So I think you do need to know about the 10-year plan, the NHS 10-year plan, because I think that's coming up quite frequently.

Yeah.

I think you should know about the Leng Review, about PAs because, well, it depends what specialty you work in, but if it's relevant to your specialty, I think it'd be good to know because that's quite current. What else? Auchinden.

Auchinden often comes up.

Maternity CQC.

Yeah. And you can reference that in your answers if you're talking about training and so on. You know, the team that trains together is safer and all of that. I think it's useful to be able to reference that. Darzi comes up.

Darzi, yeah, because there was a recent Darzi.

That's probably it. And it's probably, you know, useful to know things like, you know, the GIRFT criteria for your specialty and stuff like that.

Right.

But I think, you know, I had a student earlier on this week who said to me, I mean, you know, I got hold of the board report for my hospital and I was trying to get through that ahead of the interview, but I'm finding it really hard to find the bit about my specialty. And we had a bit of a chat about it and it, you know, the issue is this is 841 pages long.

What?

And I was like, okay, I think you just need to stop. Don't do that. Because actually, the risk of this is that you spend so much time, I've got to read this, I literally have to read everything, and then, you know, you get to 3 days before your interview, you've never practised an answer out loud. Yes, that's bad. That's so harmful for your practice. And actually, the thing that's best for you is to, you know, if you're one of our Academy students, you'll be working through your milestones in terms You know, defining your USPs and all getting your examples up straight. Once you've done that, the best thing that you can do to prepare for your interview is to practice answering out loud. Get used to how it feels. And then once you're good at, you know, answering questions that you've thought about for a few minutes, get somebody to fire questions at you and you just do it. That's the thing that will strengthen your practice more than anything else, not reading 1,500 pages of stuff that frankly you don't understand anyway.

No. And also they don't really ask questions, tell me what you know about this report. It's usually more like you say, you get to drop it in. So you can say, well, if they ask you a question about PAs, you can say, well, I know in the recent Lang Review they said X, Y, and Z. And so, it's more context rather than a specific grilling, but you should know the essentials, but you don't need to know the nitty-gritty of them. It's just a few key ideas from them. So, yeah, don't waste time. It's an easy distraction, but it's not going to help you. You might feel better temporarily, but it will not help you for your interview.

Yeah. I think in the moment, it feels less awkward than practising out loud, and that's probably why people do it, but it is not the answer.

No, get practicing. Okay, cool. Well, we will wrap up this episode there. Thank you very much, Becky. Pleasure as always. We have lots more next week, including looking at how to use the CQC report for your trust in your prep. So I will see you there. See you soon.