Sarah struggled with structuring interview answers until she took Tessa Davis's Interview Academy. The month-long course with peer feedback and coaching sessions taught her to pause and think for 20-30 seconds before responding, a habit that helped her land her dream job.
You did brilliantly. Well done. I'm really pleased to have had you on the first course. You were, you were— Yeah, no, it's been really, really good. Yeah, so I'd had one locum interview prior to joining the academy, and I'd attended another interview course just a few days before doing that one. And I'd really struggled with my structure, particularly for my first opening answer. I think I spent about a week obsessing over, and there wasn't time in that interview course to actually go over that question individually and kind of build on it and work on it. Well, Tessa, I'd followed you on Twitter for a while, so I think it was there that I saw it advertised, and I really liked some of your little bits that you put on Twitter beforehand, your advice about how to give presentations. So when I saw you were doing the Academy, it looked like it was a style that was going to suit me quite well, as it's something that was spread over the month and I could kind of do little bits here and there and keep coming back to it and have that constant support rather than the one-off course I'd been to before where it was All day, and it was very intense, but then there was no one to go back to and ask questions afterwards. The Facebook group appealed to me as well, having that support group of other people who were going through the same thing. I think the coaching sessions were really good because it put you on the spot and made you answer a random selection of questions, literally like it's going to be an interview. The main thing that I think I got from the coaching sessions was that any question that was going to be thrown at me, to pause, take sort of 20, 30 seconds if needed to think about what I was going to say and try and structure the answer. So I think that's what I found most helpful about the coaching sessions, having a group of people that were going to give me honest feedback about my answers and help improve them. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to, to anybody. I think it's definitely an investment that won't just cover me for one single interview, it will cover me for that period of time that I'm going through in life sort of trying to get a substantive job.
