Do You Have an Interview Strategy?

Are you doing an interview just because you’ve been asked? Unless you have very little else going on in your life, there should always be a real reason for giving up the time to do an interview, with the preparation it involves. You should approach it from a strategic perspective. If you run a business, you should think how you can use an interview to raise your profile in the sector or make your service offering sound more attractive than that of the competition. If you are a book author, you should aim to remind us of at least one of the titles. If you work in the public sector, you should be ready to justify your budget to the voting public, or should you perhaps be using the opportunity to make readers, viewers or listeners aware of a new local service that is available? If you work for a charity, what could you say that would be likely to generate new donations? In other words, don’t feel you must be completely reactive, and only follow the interviewer’s agenda – because she or he might not ask you the right questions, and you’ve wasted the opportunity!