How to prepare for a job interview

Without sufficient preparations, interviews could become the most nerve-racking events for job applicants. Therefore, spending ten or more hours on the preparing is reasonable. In fact, effective preparations can make more competitive, which leads you to the success of job hunting. How to achieve this goal? Here are the steps you should follow.

First of all, know how to answer questions effectively. Avoid giving answers in less than thirty seconds but keep your speech length no more than three minutes. Too short answers are useless. Wordy responses are merely boring. Thus, answer questions briefly unless your responses are really insightful. In general, one and a half to two minutes is about right. Furthermore, what you say is critical. Give up generalities and abstract topics. Instead, provide specific examples. To do this, apply the following patterns into your answers. First, make an opening statement corresponding to the questions in ten to twenty seconds. Second, explain the statement by providing a little more background in another fifteen to twenty seconds. Third, provide several examples that prove your opening statement. Without examples supporting your point, your general statement will not be readily accepted. This part of your response should last about one minute. Finally, wrap up the former information in a quick summary. A speech without an end will only confuse your audience. By giving an impressive ending, you can set a remarkable tone for the rest of the interview. This kind of 4-step response not only answers questions effectively but also brands you as a perspective, bright and capable applicant, which attracts the interviewers and leads to the discussion of your strengths.

Secondly, list your proficient skills. Be sure to write down examples of your accomplishments for each skill. By doing this, you can easily recall them in the interview. In the examples, include some facts like dates, numbers instead of generalizing key points. Since you should not describe one skill for more than two minutes, the amount of information presented is limited. Hence, try your best to pack each skill with according facts in a short rich response.

At last, role-play for the interview. Role-playing can strengthen your confidence and unconscious competence. Before you start, find a list of general questions for interviews, which contains mutual questions like "What do you know about our company"(asked by the interviewer), "How is one evaluated in this position"(asked by the applicant) and so on. Then ask a friend to act as the interviewer and begin the simulation. While you are talking, learn how to be enthusiastic and confident. Meanwhile, practice strong handshakes, proper gestures, eye contacts and so forth. When you get embarrassing, analyze and realize your weaknesses. Then overcome these jitters by repeating practices until you feel natural and spontaneous. Eventually, you should become a composed talker, ask insightful questions and give meaningful answers.

If you follow these three basic guidelines, you are just about guaranteed to success. Once you have confidence, your speech will flow smoothly and your interview performance will be brilliant. Consequently, you can leave the interview in style and impress those interviewers in surprise.

Four major internet communication methods

Communication efficiency has been highly improved since internet was introduced to the public. The world is brought much closer than ever before. Among various internet communication media, email, forum, instant message, and VoIP are widely adopted nowadays.

Email messaging is the most popular internet communication method. Acting like traditional post offices, email systems maintain massive user mailboxes and deliver messages from one to another. Users can receive, read and respond to messages simply through desktop software or web browsers. A sender can send an email to its receiver anytime, anywhere. Within minutes, this email will be “dropped” into the receiver’s mailbox and ready to be picked up, even if the two persons are thousands of miles apart.

On the other hand, popularity and simplicity lead to the vulnerability of email communication. Since email addresses are publicly reachable, anyone can send email messages to anyone else if they have the correct addresses, which induces an intractable problem – spam or junk mail abuse. Even though spam-filters are utilized and anti-spam laws are implemented, the problem persists and spam continues to burden email systems.

Forums, which have a bulletin-board-like interface, are known as online discussion groups in the internet world. Users can start new topics or post responses to a particular topic in a forum. Forums are considered valuable business resources that establish customers-helping-customers communities. In addition, forums, which make collaboration much easier, are typically applied to long-distance education systems.

However, due to anonymous accessibility, forums can also suffer with spam abuse. Moreover, without moderation and supervision, forums can potentially develop unfriendly environment, which downgrades their reliability.

Unlike email messaging and forum discussion, real time conversation can be carried out by instant messaging. Users can send text messages to others online and receive instant replies. Eliminating long time delay happening in email messaging and forum discussion, instant messaging can speed up the rhythm of our interactions.

But this “instant” fashion brings parental anxiety when children make “friends” online. With insoluble obstacles for confirming personal identities and perpetually emerging security holes, instant messaging sometimes can become a hazard.

Via VoIP (which stands for “Voice over Internet Protocol”) service, people can also practice real time conversations. A VoIP user can make voice call to another VoIP user or any landline user in the world. Presently, VoIP service becomes a low cost alternative of traditional phone call service, especially when long-distance calls are demanded.

Nonetheless, VoIP qualities radically depend on internet bandwidth. Hence, VoIP services sometimes fail to provide clear calls due to poor network traffic conditions.

Although all of the methods above have their shortcomings, internet did bring us a revolution of communication. And we know this revolution is still ongoing. As more new technologies are introduced, cons of these innovations can be overcome and new inventions will appear successively. Thus, evaluating the many options and choosing what works best for us carefully and properly, we can enjoy leisure but productive conversations in our information expanding era.