The Interview Question You're Wasting (Plus the Clinical Governance Trick)

Most candidates spend weeks preparing for their hardest interview question and then completely waste the first one.

Before we get into today's episode, the Ace Your Consultant Interview Academy waitlist is now open. If you'd like to get structured help with your consultant interview prep, then click on the link below and join the waitlist. In this episode, we're going to look at how to answer that first question, tell me about yourself, really well. We're going to look at how to deal with questions about clinical governance and also how to use signposting effectively. in your interview answers. All right, let's get going, Becky. So today we are going to look at our student question of the week. This is a question from one of our Academy students. So what question do we have that is up first this week?

I've been told that my tell me about yourself answer sounds too much like I'm just reciting my CV. How do I make it more compelling?

I think the first thing to say is it's not— it will feel a bit like you're giving them a lot of information in this question, and that's okay because you are, but they're also expecting it. So I don't think you're trying to like make a compelling storytelling kind of event, but there's definitely something in this. Reciting the CV is not what they're looking for, and often when our students first start trying to answer this question, they just do a chronology of their CV. I graduated in med school here, I did my intern year here, and then I did my training here, and then I did a fellowship, and that is That is definitely not what you're trying to do in this question. If they want to know where you went in all your jobs, they could look at your CV, and that is what your CV is for. It's a bullet point list of all of your achievements, jobs, whatever it is. But the interview is beyond that. It's trying to give them a curated version of what are your career highlights, essentially. And so, definitely move away from the idea of it being a chronology, even if they ask the question in the way. take me through your CV, they don't mean literally take me through from the moment you did your A-levels to now. So remember, it's a curated version of that.

Yeah, I think, yeah, move away from the temptation to do chronology. And I think, so, use a structure. So, we really like the PERM structure. And the first thing that comes in that, they say the P is for passion. And what we really encourage our students to do is to make some sort of connection with the panel right from the moment they walk into the interview by giving them the reasons why they're passionate about this job. And so that means 1 or 2 sentences about why this job is your dream. So it might, you know, you might have worked here before, you love the team, you love the the clinical work, you feel well supported, whatever else it might be. Or it might be, this might be a new place, but you've had, you know, great vibes from the people when you've met them during your pre-interview visits, and you feel a real connection, you feel you could thrive here. So it's about creating that instant rapport with the panel when you walk in so that they are sitting there thinking, oh wow, you know, Becky really wants to work here. So, and they're all, you know, they're already kind of getting the warm fuzzies about you before you've even said anything else. So, that's the first thing.

Yeah. And it's also, you know, that this question is coming up because it's pretty much always the first question. So, it should be something that you feel you've spent a lot of time prepping and you feel confident about, and also that you're ready for whatever wording they ask you because sometimes it can be worded in different ways. So just be prepared, be prepared for how to tailor it, be prepared for how to do it at different lengths depending on what they say. So we say this question, when you practice, it should be 5 to 6 minutes, but you then need to be prepared if they say, well, take me through your CV in 2 minutes, that you're not going to freak out, that you'll be able to adapt. So you have to be versatile with it, but you have to practice the core so that you know how you're delivering it. And then anyway, even if you only get to give 2 minutes now, you'll be able to pull out other parts of it to use it. elsewhere in your interview. So definitely worth practicing. Um, and yeah, forget about the bullet point CV, try and think of a different way of expressing it. So if you're looking at education, what are your education highlights? This is where your unique selling points come in, which is why we do this as the first Academy milestone, is knowing what your unique selling points are, because that's part of what you want to bring out in this answer.

Yeah, absolutely. And just be really well-versed in all of the things that you want to get on the table in that first few minutes. So, you know, there'll be something about your clinical experience, but, you know, not your core training stuff, the skills that you're bringing to them now that are different or key for the role. Something about your education, as you say, anything that you've done in the research sphere, and then, you know, think about your sort of more management projects. So if you've done QIPs, Or audits or any kind of service improvement, or you've taken on a management role, then you should be able to describe those things in a couple of sentences as part of this answer. Then they're just getting this real sense of you that you are a well-rounded professional that can add something to their team across multiple domains.

Yeah.

And really, you know, we should be able to Or somebody should be able to prod you awake in the early hours of the morning and say, tell me about yourself, and you can just deliver it.

That's something we haven't tried in the Academy. We should do that.

We could start calling people.

Hello, here's Tessa. No, let's go to their houses. We'll just get up in the night and go around their houses, shine torches in their face. Tell me about yourself. Yeah, okay. And the other thing is, this question's really important because it just sets you up so nicely for the rest of the interview. If you do this well, they'll know your best bits. They'll know that you really want to work there when you do your P well, like you said. It's a great start. It's potentially a great start. So, it's worth putting the effort in. Okay, let's go on to the golden example. So, this week we have a duty of candor example from one of our students. So, the example is this. I saw a patient in clinic with newly diagnosed colon cancer, but they had also presented 3 months before with multiple skin nodules, and the biopsy had been sent as routine. The same time as they were diagnosed with colon cancer, there was also a biopsy from months before that was processed as showing cancer, i.e., a potentially delayed diagnosis. What do you think?

Yeah, a delayed diagnosis of cancer sounds, you know, bad.

Bad, yeah.

Um, so I think that it fits the bill for a duty of candour example. Um, and it sounds like, um, our interview, uh, candidate was not the person who been in any way involved with the delay, and so therefore they are the right person to deliver the duty of candour conversation. And I think that that makes it a good example. Yeah. So we need there to have been harm, and we need you to have not been the person who caused the harm.

Yeah, which sounds like it here. I feel like it could be slightly tightened because it's a bit of a long explanation, and a bit— because what they're saying is, They saw a patient with newly diagnosed colon cancer, and while they were seeing them, they realized that there was also a diagnosis of skin cancer from 3 months ago that should have been conveyed, like they should have been told about this already, but that diagnosis had been missed. That probably, I mean, maybe that's not the tightest way to say it. I could probably do it a bit better with some practice, but I think it felt like it was quite long and a bit like trying to follow what was going on. But in the end, that diagnosis was supposed to have been picked up, I think, and it was only picked up by chance 3 months later.

Yeah.

And so, it's a delayed diagnosis of the skin cancer. And the important thing here is to say at the end, to reflect the question back. So, you say the story, and then you say, it was my role to do duty of candor. And that way they know, okay, you're answering the question, you're doing duty of candor, and then it's a nice clean line between the story and then going on and doing duty of candour. And so if you can structure your examples like this, this is the story, I realised I'd made a mistake. This is the story, it was my job to do duty of candour. It just draws that line so you can then go on, and everything after that is about the duty of candour process, and that's the part where you're going to be scoring most points.

Yeah, and then remember that part of this duty of candour, um, answer should include, you know, what it was like to have that conversation. You know, how did it land? Was the person really angry? Were they accepting and valuing of your honesty? What did it feel like? What have you learned from that? And then there should also be a phase in that duty of candour answer about, you know, what happened next. So there should be some sort of investigation, some learning, and then closing the loop with feeding that back to the patient and your reflections on that process. And those are all of the ingredients for a great duty of candour answer.

An excellent summary. Yep, good. Okay, so we think this is a good example, just with a bit of tightening up, it will be excellent. Let's move on to our interview question of the week. This is a question that one of our students has been asked in an interview recently. What question have we got this week?

So the question is, tell me about your approach to clinical governance. How do you meet the clinical governance agenda in your day-to-day practice?

So it's quite a broad question, and something around clinical governance. I think it could be easy to sort of get quite stressed at this question because it's not asking you a specific thing, it's asking you about a massive area of medicine and healthcare. And so you really need to work out how to narrow it down. I think the best answers that I see reference that there's 7 pillars of clinical governance without naming the 7 pillars. Because I think if you try to remember the 7 pillars in a stressful interview, that then becomes the thing that you're most worried about, and it's not necessary. So you can say, there's 7 pillars of clinical governance, I'm going to focus on 3 in this answer. And then I would pick 3 elements that are— 3 of the pillars that you can talk about, and that you know something about them with. And then, you know, you get the choice. And they're so broad that I'm sure you've got something to say, and this is where you come back to your USPs. So I'd probably pick 3 pillars where you can bring in one of your USPs.

Yeah, I mean, actually, I think if you can just kind of quell your nerves a bit, this is— this question is actually a bit of a gift, because you should have prepared something related to clinical governance. Ideally, you probably would have thought through your USPs and Because we're getting you to think of projects and things that you've done, there will naturally be some clinical governance components to that. So, you know, for example, if you've written a guideline, then that is probably an example that you can use for clinical governance in terms of managing risk. You may have done an audit as part of, you know—

Yeah.

Starting, you know, that guideline writing. You can talk about that too. Maybe you've done some teaching for the department on a new process or a new bit of kit or whatever it was, you know, that's an example of something that fits under the clinical governance agenda as well. If you've done anything that involves patient co-design, absolutely, this is gold for the clinical governance question.

Yeah.

So you can, you can fit that in. And I think, you know, depending on where in the interview this question comes up, you can use this as an opportunity to showcase your USPs that you haven't yet had the opportunity to share. You can give them a bit more detail on, you know, anything that you want them to really know about you that's amazing. So I think just, you know, hold it together, think of the 3 points, and actually treat this as a really nice opportunity to kind of go where you need to go in the interview in terms of getting your USPs on the table.

Yeah, panic is not your friend. But also, I think you're right, which is that this question probably comes later on in the interview. So, it is actually, what you're saying about the USPs is a great point, because you will be coming to the end, you'll be realizing there's things that you didn't mention that you wished you'd had, and because it's so broad, you can pretty much fit any of your USPs into here. So, yeah, it's a good checking point, and there's a few questions like that towards the end of the interview, where you start to think, okay, this is it, I'm about to leave the room, I need to get out the things that I want to say. And so just tailor it to bring in the things that you want to bring in.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, any of these type of questions— clinical governance, EDI to an extent, trust values, probably values, that's exactly the one I was thinking of— you know, you can fit multiple different things in there. You can go lots of different ways on those questions. So you should use those to get things out that you haven't yet had the chance to discuss.

Great. And then we're going to go on to our tip and trick of the week. So this is about signposting in your answers, because we kind of push students a lot to signpost in their answers. What is it that we're trying to do when we talk about this?

So I think that this is what really makes your interview performance feel polished and professional and gives the panel some confidence. And it also gives you some confidence. So we're trying to make you sound organised and prepared to keep you on track and for the panel to know where that you're— where you're going with your answer so that they're not feeling stressed throughout the answer as well.

Okay.

So I think it's really worth having, you know, some structures and there's a couple of structures that we particularly like. One of them is the 3-point structure. So You know, like we were talking about just now, you know, you could, in this clinical governance question, you could say, so there are 7 pillars to clinical governance. For the purposes of this answer, I'm going to look at 3. So I'll be focusing on audit, clinical effectiveness, and research. And then you give them a couple of, you know, a sentence on the first one, a sentence on the second one, sentence on the third one. Then you come back. So in summary, I've discussed audit, clinical effectiveness, and research. It makes you sound like you know what you're doing, and then the panel can literally just be sitting there kind of ticking off the points that they wanted you to hit.

Yeah, it'll make you feel better, it'll make them feel better, and so it serves a dual purpose. And yeah, they're just human beings and their minds might wander. They Particularly if they're interviewing a lot of people, they've listened to the same question being answered, you know, 5 times or whatever. So you're just making it really easy for them. And if you— yeah, when you say the 3 points at the beginning, they'll write them down and then they'll be able to keep up with where you are in your answer, and you'll feel so much better as well. So it can feel a bit forced if you do this with every question. You can feel a bit like, oh, but I'm always saying 3 points, or I'm always saying this. I don't think it matters. I don't even think it matters if the panel noticed that you're always saying 3 points, because in the end, it improves your score, improves your confidence, and you're more likely to give a spread of points. So I think even if you literally said every single question, I'm going to answer this with 3 points, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, and then did that the whole way through, I still think if it helps you to have that structure and you feel more confident, which I'm fairly sure it will, then it's worth any sort of weirdness that you might feel or that the panel might feel about how you're structuring your answers. So yeah, I'm a big fan of using a structure, and this is definitely the easiest one to use.

And I also think for people that are going to take a piece of paper and a pen into their interview, and we think that's a good idea, what you can do is just take a pause after they've asked you the question, Write down your 3 points, just a bullet point, a word. And then when you get to, you know, that third point and you're thinking, I can't remember what the third point was, you can just glance down at your paper and go, oh yes, that's right, it was research. And then you just give them 45 seconds or a minute on research, and then you just end it like a pro.

End it like a pro. And as well as you can recap your 3 points, don't make the recap too long. It's literally just naming the 3 points that you've said. And you can just reflect the question back at them. So these are— that's how I use clinical governance in my practice, or, you know, just a very short end, because you don't want to then start answering, adding on. Sometimes people add on an extra section in the summary. The summary is just signposting, it's not developing points or anything like that. So a succinct summary that clearly signposts that you've answered the question is adequate.

Great.

Okay, I think we'll wrap up there. Thank you, Becky, for another great episode, and I will see you next time.

See you soon.