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Stand Out in Job Interviews with Great Video Tools
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If you have a remote interview, it’s a great opportunity to bring in the special touches that only CueCam, Video Pencil and Shoot can provide through your Apple devices.
You can elevate your responses to interview questions with drawings, images, screen shares and even video, all without slowing things down by asking for Zoom sharing permissions.
Don’t Gesticulate.
Communicate!
Michael’s story
I understand that I’m a white man with a posh British accent, with good grades and a degree in Physics, so my job interview advice should be taken with more than just a grain of salt.
I go into any interview situation with a lot of advantages. Nobody is consciously or unconsciously making negative assumptions about me, they listen when I talk and I have a million invisible privileges that most people don’t have.
So it might surprise you to hear that I found it almost impossible to find my first job after university. Not because I suffered a a lot rejections, but because I was too afraid to even try. I had my degree but I’d barely scraped through with a third, and I had a lot of other insecurities. Even with a pretty well-stacked deck, things still felt impossible. This was deeply entangled with an experience I talked about in my recent Live Event, but to summarise here, when your own mother rejects you at a young age, it leaves you with a pretty deep-seated fear of rejection.
I ended up having to ask a friend for help. Instead of coming over to coach me, he called a couple of agencies (this was long before the age of AI-powered online recruitment databases). He ended up pretending to be me on the phone. So I just had to keep up the ruse when they called me back. Once I was over that first hurdle, I soon turned my data entry job into a more technical role and I was able to start growing professionally.
This is all to say, I understand the fear of judgement and rejection that goes along with putting yourself on the line when you need a job.
I was desperate to find a way to make things easier next time, so I asked my Grandpa, a Churchillian CEO of a West German key manufacturing company, for his interview advice. He handed me a little leatherette binder with embossed metallic text saying something along the lines of “Interview Advice for Executives”.
Two pieces of advice from that binder stuck with me.
- It’s not an “interview”, it’s a meeting to find out if you can help each other.
- Your CV or Resumé is the meeting agenda. You can use it to structure the meeting and guide the conversation towards whatever you want to talk about.
I don’t believe you have to be a high flying executive to benefit from either of these ideas.
Take it from Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. Here he clearly articulates the need to get out of the usual power imbalance of a job interview and “flip it”.
https://youtu.be/zyRcKnthjMY
This isn’t a one-way thing. You’re not just proving that you’re good enough to do the job. They need to prove that it’s worth your while taking the job.
The second piece of advice, where you’re guiding the agenda, is where video tools come in.
Structure your interview meeting
When you structure your CV (I’m just gonna call this a CV now because I’m British), put things in the order you want to talk about them. Create an agenda that allows you to talk about things that cast you in a good light. You might make different versions depending on the job you’re going for.
So if you want to talk about your academic achievements, start your CV with your education and add bullet points for the good things you did.
Keep going and make sure that first page provokes all the questions you want to answer.
I’ve been a manager myself, so I’ve done a lot of interviewing. How does it work from the other side? Usually HR will send you a stack of CVs which you’ll glance over, then they book in a few interviews and you forget about it until 10 minutes before the candidate arrives. You grab their CV from the pile and give it another quick look, and that’s about all the preparation you do. So you really are taking cues directly from the CV. Usually when a company is hiring it’s because the team is massively overworked, so it’s very unlikely they’ll have had time to do any more preparation than that.
Make sure you have a good few things you can talk about confidently and guide the interviewer to those points with your CV.
How does video come into this?
Because you’ve structured the meeting, you can prepare some extras to bring in over the course of the conversation. You can remind yourself what you want to say and come prepared with images to illustrate key points.
Start by setting up CueCam Presenter on your Mac. Install Video Pencil on your iPad. Install Shoot on your iPhone. See the following guide for information on how to do this.
You’ll select CueCam as your camera and mic in your meeting software.
A crisper image
Most candidates will be using their laptop’s ugly built-in camera. So when you start your meeting looking crisp and clear using your iPhone’s camera, from a flattering angle and making eye contact, your chances are immediately improved.
Eye contact
Using CueCam’s “Program Feed” with your Zoom window lets you see your interviewer on your phone screen, right next to the camera. This creates the illusion of eye contact and frees up your laptop screen.
Sketching with Video Pencil
If you want to clarify something on the fly, you can grab your iPad and start sketching any time.
You can smoothly slide out a space to draw using CueCam’s “Blank Board” feature, available in the Share Bar.
Exploiting your agenda
Since you know roughly what you’ll be talking about, and in what over, you can create a smart script in CueCam.
If you want to refine your answers to the most likely questions, you can create cue cards for yourself to trigger your memory.
Here’s what that might look like.
All the notes will appear directly on your iPhone’s screen so you can flesh out your talking points while keeping your CV concise. You’ll be able to see your interviewer the whole time.
So what appears as “Developed prototype of new lettings system and gained approval from the local Council” on your CV would be fleshed out with bullet points in your own notes.
In the third slide I’ve added a picture to help illustrate something that otherwise might be too difficult to explain.
You don’t need to interrupt the flow of conversation to bring in graphics like this, and you’ll appear picture-in-picture.
Navigating your “slides”
We don’t want to give away the game by letting your interviewer realise we have a prepared presentation. Everything we say r show needs to feel like a natural part of the conversation.
Usually you’d be hitting “Next”, “Next”, “Next” to run through a script, but in an interview, you might need to jump around more.
In CueCam’s presentation mode, you can open the sidebar to instantly jump to any card.
Since the card previews don’t give you a lot to go on when you’re just using the teleprompter, you might find it easier to stay out of presentation mode and select the card you want before pressing “Start” (or Cmd+R).
You can exit presentation mode again with Cmd+. (Cmd+period).
It’s possible to get more advanced by using deep links to card with something like Keyboard Maestro or a Stream Deck, if you’re comfortable with that.
Here’s how you could present a particular card by pressing different Stream Deck buttons.
Don’t go overboard.
Don’t be like me with my first overproduced, deeply confusing CV, just because you’re trying to be invulnerable. Keep the bells and whistles to a minimum or things will start to feel gimmicky and distracting.
If you want to show a quick video then ask permission first! (And make sure “Original Sound for Musicians” is enabled or they won’t hear anything).
A little touch will be more than enough to stand out. It’s unlikely any other candidates will have the ability to even sketch something or bring up a picture the way CueCam lets you.
Practice!
Please don’t launch into an important job interview with an unfamiliar set of technical tools.
Use CueCam’s recording features to run through your talking points and make sure that everything will work the way you need it to.
Even better, call up a friend on Zoom (or whatever the company interviewing you will be using) for a more realistic run-through.
You can start practicing even before you’ve applied for any jobs.
And, with CueCam, you might even start looking forward to your next job interview!