Ep 5: How To Nail The Timing Of Your NHS Consultant Interview Questions

Welcome back to our ACE Your Consultant Interview podcast. Becky and I are here again to have a chat about interview prep tips and advice. And as always, we are going to start with our student question of the week. So Becky, what question do we have from one of our Academy students this week?

Okay. This week's question is, I'm struggling to keep my answers to time. I've got lots to say, but most of the time when I practise the question, it's coming out at 5 and a half minutes or 6 minutes. I don't want to cut anything out because I feel like I'd be sacrificing some detail, and I don't want to rush. What should I do?

Yeah. So, I would say it's definitely better to be coming from a place of being too long than being too short, I think. Because I think when people start practising, They find they go either way. So either you can't stop yourself talking or you just answer and it's a 60-second or 90-second answer. And the problem with a 90-second answer is you, what you say might be fine, but it's actually really hard to score that many points in 90 seconds. And if your competitors are taking their full time, then it's much easier for them to score higher than you. But on the, on the other hand is talking for 5, 5 minutes, 30, 6 minutes.

Yeah.

It's very likely to be too long. And you can't— there's no exact science as to how long an interview answer can be, but we estimate and we advise in the Academy that your interview answer should be 3 to 4 minutes. That's based on our experience of coaching 1,500 people, but also on some maths, knowing the average number of people who will be on the panel. It's likely they're going to ask you 1 or 2 questions each, depending on how many they are. It's probably 40 minutes for your interview. So, If you work out some maths, it's going to be on average 3 to 4 minutes. They're not likely to be timing you in the interview, but if they feel that you're talking for too long, like this person who feels that they're just rambling and it ends up being very long, then the panel might cut you off in the middle of your answer. They only have that fixed 40 minutes. And because it's a substantive interview, you have to get the same questions as everyone else. They will have to ask you all the questions, and therefore they're going to have to move on if you're talking too long. They have to move on to the next question. And And when you get cut off, it means you're not getting to say everything that you wanted to say. It also throws you off your game because you think, are they cutting me off because it was a terrible answer? Which it might be. It might be because it's bad. It might also be because it was good and you've said enough. But it's actually better to get a feel for what 3 to 4 minutes is. Now, with this person whose answers are 6 minutes, it's likely that it's not a case of thinking, well, you don't need to say that point, or you don't need to say that point. Usually, the things that you're saying are fine. It's just you're not being concise enough with the words that you're using. And so actually, you have to be a bit ruthless with yourself about timing and cutting out some of the padding around your points. And the easiest way to do that is just to be militant with yourself when you're practising and practise with a stopwatch and just say, if you've got 3 points that you're going to say, if you're still on point 1 and it's 2 minutes into the answer, then you need to move on. You have to just stop. And if you practise that enough times, you'll realise actually what you need to be able to do to get your answer into 3 to 4 minutes. So rather than letting yourself talk for 6 minutes, stop yourself at 3 minutes, and then you'll see, okay, that's how long I've got. And I, I think that's the best way to, to cut it down.

Yeah, I think it's really useful just to get used to what, what that time actually feels like, you know. And as you say, practice with a stopwatch initially, and then, then do it without a stopwatch and just see if you can still get the timing approximately right. And I think the other thing is, you know, you need to get used to being able to draw out specific points in a succinct way that gives maximum value without a ton of waffle all around them. And so this is about understanding, you know, what your unique selling points are, what your examples are, and having them at your fingertips with the detail in the forefront of your mind so that you can just pull out the aspects that you need to demonstrate the points that you're trying to make within each interview answer, and then you can give a bit of breadth, some depth within each point, and then wrap it all up within 3 or 4 minutes. It is absolutely possible, but it does take a bit of planning, and it takes a bit of practice so that you can be concise with your examples. And that you can get just a feel for the time, because you clearly can't have your stopwatch on the desk in front of you when you're in your interview, because that would be weird.

It would be weird, although I guess you could do it in an online interview. They wouldn't, they wouldn't know necessarily, but you get a feel for it anyway, like you say. And no one just naturally knows how to do a 3 to 4 minute answer, so if you're not timing yourself and just expecting it to be fine, I mean, it's not going to be because no, no one is going to have a natural ability to do that.

Yeah, and it's interesting because lots of our students just initially are unable to gauge the time, and they, they say to us, you know, in coaching sessions, how long was that? And they're often surprised either one way or the other by, by the answer that they get. Um, so it is important to just spend some time practicing with the stop clock, um, to just kind of Get that sense of what it feels like.

Agreed. Okay, so let's go on to the golden example of the week. So, this is an example that a student's given us. And this week, the example is about, tell me about a time when you've had a conflict with a colleague. So, I'm going to give you the example, Becky, you can tell me what you think. So, the example is this. I was on call and I was getting repeated— so on call for a specialty. I was getting repeated calls from the emergency department about a referral that they'd made to me. It was a patient that I did not need to see. And I told the ED reg when they were calling that I didn't need to see the patient, but he kept calling and calling. And so I escalated it to my consultant, and he told the ED consultant about the correct pathway, which was not for me to come down to see him in ED. What do you think?

Okay. I mean, look, I suppose the first thing to say is, on the plus side, this is a common example, right? We can all imagine this happening. It's happening up and down the country hundreds of times a day. So that's fine, and that one of the things that we want from this kind of conflict with a colleague example is that it's something fairly common that we can identify with. I think there are a couple of things in here that I'm not so keen on. So the first thing is this student did not manage to sort this out on their own. So actually what they had to do was call in their consultant who, you know, basically waded in, put the foot down, told the ED consultant that, that they were in the wrong, and that was the end of it. And I think what one of the things that we want from this conflict example is to show that you personally can de-escalate conflict. So you, you need to be able to nicely de-escalate conflict, um, in a way that You know, gets the right outcome for the patient, um, and maintains your professional working relationship with your colleague. That's really key. Um, and I, you know, I think we can all imagine how, you know, how the ED consultant feels when, you know, the specialty consultant has phoned them and said, stop haranguing my junior.

Um, yeah, it's not really the look that we're going for.

No.

Um, it kind of flags— it flags your junior status. Or how you see yourself. And yeah, like you say, you're going for a consultant interview, so it's not— it's like, well, can you come and I'm going to call you and you're coming and sort it for me? So, it's not really what you want to showcase about yourself.

I think the other thing is these conflict examples are actually better if the person is a bit annoyed at you, and then you manage to de-escalate it beautifully so that everything's sorted out and you end up friends. Not friends, but good colleagues. And this scenario kind of feels a bit more like I'd totally had enough of this ED consultant and I just wanted them to stop, so I called my consultant and he told them to stop. And I think, again, it's not the kind of flavour that we're going for. We just want you to be able to show that you're entirely reasonable, you're able to de-escalate this, You recognise why conflict arises, because we're all stressed and we've got competing priorities and probably too much to do, and that you can sort it all out in a calm way independently.

Yeah, because if you're showing an example where you're annoyed at someone else, it makes you look kind of intolerant and irritable, and you think you're better than them and aren't. Getting annoyed at someone else's performance isn't what you're trying to do here. And the thing is, It's distracting. It distracts the panel. And what you want is for them to focus on what you were talking about, Becky, which is, isn't this person great at de-escalating conflict, and aren't they going to be great when they're on my team? But actually, if instead they're thinking, oh, why is Tessa getting so annoyed with the ED reg, or whatever, and is she going to be really grumpy when she's faced with some sort of minor situation? That's distracting for them.

Yeah.

And so, you just want to make it as clearly about conflict. And when you take out you being annoyed at them, and just have it that they're annoyed at you, It's just a much safer example to use.

Yeah. Look, in your interview, you want to come across as the colleague that everyone wants.

Yeah.

So, you've got to be, oh, I really want that person on my team.

Yeah. And you were mentioning that one thing at the end is that they said, we were doing the right thing. We were the right pathway. And I think— It's very common that people like to show that they were right. So again, it's a distraction because it's not actually about you being right or not right in the conflict. It's about you being able to resolve the conflict and get on with someone. So I think I would avoid the desire to show that you were really right all along. And it's common people do that. There's a debate about care, but in the end I was right. They didn't want to do the scan, but in the end I was right. And the in the end I was right part is not relevant to this. You could add it later on if you wanted in the answer, but But actually, that's not the point, and you're much better to spend the time talking about your de-escalation skills than the, I was right in the end anyway.

So, this is a question that one of our students had. How can you ensure that you are delivering safe, efficient, and effective care? Tessa, how are you going to answer that?

Okay, so this is a classic senior-level thinking question, and what's important is to flag initially the difference between Me delivering safe, efficient care, and the service delivering safe, efficient care. So, I would be very— I would think about the wording of the question, because sometimes it is about you personally. How do you ensure you stay up to date versus how do you ensure we are delivering quality care? The wording of this question kind of overlaps both, because it's how can you ensure you are delivering safe, efficient, and effective care? So, if it was me, I would probably go to the service as a whole. How can you make sure we're all delivering safe care? because that's much more senior level. Because I can say, well, I deliver great care because I always know the up-to-date guidelines and I deliver up-to-date guidelines. But the question is, well, if I'm not on a shift, how do we make sure that the whole team is delivering from up-to-date guidelines and that all our patients get care that's evidence-based rather than just my patient on my shift? And so, I think a step back is better if you have the opportunity to. So, safe, efficient, effective care, All of these things go back to the CQC pillars, which are around making sure we deliver quality care. What is quality care? And it's all of these elements. And that's thinking about flow. So, how do our patients get good flow through the service? How do they get evidence-based care? How do we deal with complaints? Are we responsive? Do we have good leadership? Are our staff happy? So, there's lots of elements to delivering safe, efficient, and effective care. I don't think you're going to be able to cover them all in this question, but I'd probably pick a few things to focus on, ideally things that you've done projects on. So if you know you deliver safe care by making sure patients are discharged in a timely manner from your service, and you've done a project about that, then it's a great time to bring in that USP to illustrate how you've been a part of ensuring that. Discharge times improve. So, I think you can pick which elements of it you want to showcase. The best combination is something that you know is relevant to the service, to the team you're applying for, and something that you have experience doing. But in reality, you probably can't do that for all points, but that's what you're aiming for. And so, different degrees of that should be the points that you pick.

So, yeah, you could think about a metric, you could think about You know, I've done a project on reducing our waiting time for clinic, and we did this in, you know, 3 different ways. And our, you know, initial waiting time for clinic was, first of all, a year, and after my intervention, it's now 3 months, you know, whatever it was. So there's a metric, there's something that's clearly measurable. I guess if you're, you know, if you're in a specialty where you have your own particular outcome, measures and complication rates, like maybe you're in a surgical specialty, you might want to talk about your own personal complication rates, if that's something that you measure regularly. For most people, it's going to be more about service, and then, you know, it could be something about evidence-based medicine, but it won't be just about you necessarily. It'll be, you know, actually, this is how I make sure that the department is practising off the latest guidance and evidence. I went to a conference and learnt about X, then I wrote an SOP, and then we delivered it at departmental teaching, and now everyone's doing it. That kind of thing, just to show a bit of breadth across that answer.

And I think different aspects of this question are very commonly asked as senior-level thinking questions. How would you improve flow? How do you know we're delivering quality care? How can we make sure our service is safe? So, different elements. And then some about you. How do you stay up to date? How do you know you're doing a good job? And it's worth thinking about appraisal here as well. Appraisal is a way for each person to be checked on an annual basis to make sure that they are delivering care and their CPD's up to date and so on. So, yeah, it's important to remember that as well. Tips and tricks. Yep. So our tip and trick for today is thinking about practice and actually say your answers out loud. So I know we talk about this a lot, Becky. So what's your advice to people about practising?

My number one piece of advice about this is just do it. So actually practise. Don't just talk about, I really need to think about practising. So practise. And when I say that, what I really mean is, Practice out loud. There is no substitute for, for practicing out loud. Even writing out whole answers is not the same. And I think actually, if you want to understand, you know, how to time things, structure things, deliver things, and see, see how it lands and how you come across when you're saying it, you absolutely must do it out loud. Now, ideally, that would be, you know, recording yourself, watching it back, maybe getting somebody else to watch it back. And that's obviously what we do every day in the Academy for our students. But I think really just getting used to saying it out loud, even first of all, what you could do is, you know, talk to yourself in the car on the way to work. And that could be a way of practising out loud.

Yeah, it's really— people really don't want to do it because it's so— it feels so awkward and they think they're going to be terrible. And so, you just put it off because you don't, you just don't want to. Um, but it, yeah, definitely doesn't get better by waiting.

No, I mean, let's face it, it's mortifyingly embarrassing recording yourself, uh, doing an interview answer. It's even worse if somebody else has to watch it. Um, but actually, the first one is always the worst, and it definitely does get better. And there is, that is the single best way to improve your chances of being good on the day.

Yeah, because what's even worse is waiting and waiting and waiting and then doing it out loud for the first time in front of a panel of the chief exec and 7 to 10 very important people when your career depends on it. So, definitely better to just get started. Great. Okay, I think we'll wrap up there. So, thank you. Pleasure chatting to you as always. And next week, we're going to be looking at whether you can use being a good team player as one of your unique selling points. So, look forward to Seeing you again then.