🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

This video, part 2 of a series, focuses on the interview process itself, as well as a number of general principles of interviewing well.

The video is focused on the example of an entry-level academic faculty hire, but a lot of the concepts are more broadly applicable to interviewing for many types of position both inside and outside academia.

Please reshare if useful 🙏

Part 1 covering the interview context, can be found here.

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Interviewing Well Part 2
📌 (0:12) Interviews & General Principles
📌 (0:20) Interviews Complement Other Activities Like Talks
📌 (0:36) Attitude Matters, But Be Authentic
📌 (0:48) Question: What Drew You To This Role?
📌 (1:16) Question: Balancing Priorities
📌 (1:51) Question: How Would You Lead Activity X?
📌 (2:27) Soft Skills Question: Challenging Past Experience
📌 (3:00) Soft Skills Question: Hypothetical Scenario
📌 (3:32) Question: Internal and External Service
📌 (3:59) Question: Where Do You Want to Be in 5 Years?
📌 (4:34) Teaching Discussion Topics in Interviews
📌 (5:13) More Teaching Discussion: Bridging Divides
📌 (5:39) Show You Understand Teaching Realities
📌 (5:56) Balancing New Innovations with Practicality
📌 (6:26) Research Discussion: How You’d Run the Group
📌 (6:59) Dealing with Combatative Panelists
📌 (7:42) Past History Questions
📌 (8:04) General Principles of Interviewing Well
📌 (8:16) A Mixture of Experience and Theory
📌 (9:21) Practice Makes Perfect
📌 (9:56) Open But Never Threatening, About Other Options
📌 (10:28) Interview Skills Are For Life and Generally Useful
📌 (10:44) The Interview is About More Than the Specific Role
📌 (11:10) Remember to Enjoy the Process!

Full Video Notes

The Interviews Themselves

• Guidance for the Interviews: Beyond the talks you give, you’ll spend a lot of time in interviews and individual or group discussions. There are a range of key things you should keep in mind for these interactions.
• Attitude: Be enthusiastic and excited but don’t go overboard.
• Typical Panel Questions: Why This Role?  what drew you to apply to this role, why do you want to work at <organisation X>? Answers that encapsulate how your goals and principles align with what’s being done at the organisation, especially if different to other organisations, are great.
• Typical Panel Questions: Balancing Priorities: how would you balance the tensions between research, teaching and service. Even better if your answer can identify synergistic activities that contribute in more than one of these categories…
• How You’d Embark on Flagged Major Role Activities: the organisation may have a key couple of roles intended for this position: for example to bridge a disciplinary divide across two different parts of the university – these should be obvious from the detailed position description, and you should be ready to talk to how you’d go about doing this. 
• Soft Skills Questions: you may get asked to recount a past experience where you didn’t handle something as well as you could have, and what you learnt from it, and what you’d do differently. There is lots of good material online around ways to approach this. 
• Soft Skills Questions: you may also be given hypothetical scenarios and asked what you would do, such as managing a problematic student or staff member, managing an industry collaboration where you’re going to fail to make the next major milestone.
• Service preferences: how will you contribute internally and externally to the uni? Eg. Lots of behind-the-scenes committee service, or highly visible public figure promoting the university?
• The 5 / 10 Years Time Question: The cliched, where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years time question. Make sure there’s substantial growth and progress baked into your answer.
• Teaching Discussion in the Interviews: You might talk about any interesting teaching modalities you’ve used and your experiences: flipped classrooms, hybrid in-person / online delivery, asynchronous course delivery, and so-called lectorials –  hybrid lectures-tutorials. You might get asked about your strategies for keeping students engaged and interacting.
• Bridging Teaching Divides: Talk about any experience you’d had bridging the divide between undergraduate teaching and high level university research, and the divide between theoretical learning and grounded learning driven by actual industry / societal problems.
• Flag Your Awareness of Teaching Realities: It’s important to make the panel very aware that you are aware of the tension between exploring interesting new teaching methodologies with the realities of teaching: the time consuming individual interaction strategy you’ve used with a postgraduate course with 14 students likely won’t scale that well to teaching a unit with 500 students.
• Research discussion: how would you run and resource your group
• Things to Be Prepared For: interview processes can get challenging and occasionally even somewhat argumentative. There are a few things you should be ready to address calmly and competently.
• Combative Panelist: you may strike a panelist who simply has a problem with the general research area you’re in. Be prepared to calmly discuss the field, you can defend it but also discuss any potential weaknesses as well. The other panel members or panel chair should stop it getting out of hand: at the same time, they may be interested to see how you handle challenging questions.
• Past History Question: the panel may be interested in a particular role you’ve had in the past, and ask you to go into more detail on what it involved

General Considerations

• Mixture of Experience and Theory: A junior applicant wont be expected to have experience in everything, and it’s ok to highlight some research or teaching they’ve been reading about and want to try but haven’t yet had substantial experience doing. But you also don’t want the entire interview to feel like you’re talking about things that are only theoretical to you with no real experience: balance is key here. You don’t want the panel to come out making the comment, “it felt like they were answering every question by quoting from a book on ‘how to be an academic’”. It’s like that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin William’s character schools Matt Damon’s character on how not everything can be learned from books, you have to have experienced some of it. 
• Practice makes perfect: mirror, with family, friend or a colleague, film yourself. Practice short concise answers and also longer more detailed ones. Practice recovering from a tough question and discussion, or a bad answer.
• Be Open But Non-Threatening About Multiple Options: Good candidates will have multiple options and the panel will know this: never threaten, but you can consider being open that there are a small number of interesting opportunities you’re investigating, if it comes up in discussion.
• A Lifelong Skill: Interviewing well is a crucial professional skill, which you’ll benefit from for the rest of your life, and crosses over to other activities like giving great presentations of any sort.
• The Interview is About Far More than the Specific Opportunity! The panel and those you interact with will often remember you, even if you don’t get the role. Often completely unpredictable opportunities will come back to you again years down the track, because you engaged in the process.
• Good luck!