Demonstrate You Are The Best Man/Woman For The Job

Employers employ not as a social service, but primarily because that they have a need in their organization and they are looking for the right people to fix it. The general notion in Nigeria is that you need connections or "long leg" to get a job, especially high paying jobs. While that may not be entirely untrue, the fact remains that very few organizations would want to be saddled with misfits in the name of cronyism. In the competitive marketplace, only the best candidate is good enough.

A serious business owner knows that business and pleasure do not mix well. Filling positions in is company with relatives and friends is a recipe for heartache and business failure. Practitioners of mediocrity are mainly employees in decision-making positions who do not have a stake in the company's bottom line. Business owners that have goals look for people who will deliver those goals.

Employers go to great lengths to get the right man/woman for the job. They take out expensive adverts in major national dailies and hire consultants in their search. Their is a dearth of skilled manpower in many sectors of the economy, especially Oil & Gas and Telecommunications. Companies in this sector have taken their search beyond the shores of Nigeria, advertising in foreign media and holding job fairs abroad targeted mainly at Nigerians in diaspora and Nigerian students abroad.

It is now left to the interviewee to demonstrate that he/she is the person the employer is looking for. You have to prove that you have what it takes in terms of skill, charisma, and people skills to drive team cohesion and deliver superior results.
Everybody invited to the interview, based on CV, have what it takes to clinch the job, so having experience is not enough to clinch you the job. It is now left to each candidate to prove that he/she has an edge over other candidates as the preferred candidate.

Beyond raw skills, what you can do is be personable and professional. Smile, look the interviewer in the eye, and engage in a two-way conversation. Listen carefully, respond thoughtfully, and don't digress into personal details. Interviewers need to be convinced that you will be able to fix their problems and help their company achieve its goals. One of the best ways to answer interview questions is to use your career success stories. Career success stories are tales of the defining moments in your career when you overcame significant challenges to succeed. These stories create a memorable impression and give the listener anecdotes about you that identify your ability to handle the tasks at hand, solve complex problems and provide a solution

Personal examples from the recent past demonstrates your unique ability to solve problems. When you tell success stories, you illustrate how you went about handling a difficult situation at work. At some point in your career, you were faced with what seemed to be an insurmountable problem. If the problem continued, there would have been unpleasant consequences.

Rather than sit back and watch things fall apart, you took initiative and implemented a plan to solve the problem and bring about a positive result. For each appropriate interview question, relate it to a similar situation earlier in your career, talk briefly about how you handled it, and highlight the results. These stories demonstrate to the interviewer that you have specific experience in dealing with similar situations.

The key to any interview is to make the connection between your unique abilities and related situations in the new job through your success stories in similar scenarios. By demonstrated how you showed initiative in a sticky situation in your current job, you convince your prospective employers that when the chips are down, they can count on you to rise to the occasion.

Although it may be a new industry or function you are pursuing, there are many similarities to the day-to-day challenges and opportunities. Your career success stories bridge the gap. Basically, your prospective employer has a need. You are demonstrating that you have the job skills, people skills, initiative and drive to anchor the position and maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

If you can demonstrate this and drive this point home successfully, then you are the man/woman they have been looking for.