Introduction
The job interview is one of the quintessential elements in the process of obtaining a new career role. It has forever been known to be extremely important for both aspiring employees to show their capabilities and their character, and also for employers to gauge who among these potential employees is best suited to the role which they are seeking to fulfil. A study by Prickett et al (2000) demonstrated that the first impression provided initially at a job interview tends to be the single most important factor in the hiring process.
This first impression can, and often does, lead employers in their decision on who gets the job. This fact is clearly the motivation on why we were tasked with practising our interview skills together in groups in class. We were separated into groups of 4 and had to prepare a job role for which each of us would be interviewed by the rest of the group one by one, and it led to some great feedback and experience.
Gibbs’ reflective cycle, as summarised by Jasper (2003), encourages not only a clear description, but also critical analysis of a situation, and encourages projective thoughts on what one would do should the situation happen again. This is an extremely effective way of not only looking back at an experience, but also recognising what went well and what did not, and crucially, how one plans to improve in future.
In today’s blog post I will be using Gibbs’ reflective cycle to evaluate and analyse how my interview went and more importantly, how I will use the feedback from my interview to improve in future interviews.
Description – What happened?
The first step of the interview process was of course, the preparation. I took this task seriously and really wanted to think about what career choice I wanted to go for. I am a guy who wants to diversify his skills and portfolio within the sports broadcasting topic, and thus I didn’t know whether to interview as a journalist, a presenter, or a cameraman. These are all areas in which I am interested, but eventually I decided to go for the cameraman route. This is because during my placement so far, I have been used as a cameraman during the Belfast Giants’ ice hockey matches. This has been fantastic experience for me and has opened my eyes to the prospect of pursuing it full-time. I felt as if the fact that it is the area in which I have the most experience so far would mean it would be easiest to interview in this area. I prepared in the week leading up to the interview by recalling certain experiences I’d had, crucially practising at implementing the STAR technique.
The interview itself was standard. I came back into the room when the lecturer called us back in, straight away remembering to smile and look approachable and friendly while approaching my groupmates for the interview. I shook hands with each of them and asked how they were, and answered happily when they returned the question. I sat down and the interview began. The questions were very good and I answered them to the best of my ability, implementing the STAR technique when I was asked a question about a situation where I had to contribute effectively to a team. I used my experience with the Giants for this, recalling a time when we were without one of our main cameramen, and therefore I went out of my way to try and pick up some of the slack that he normally would, tapping into my deepest zone of creativity to pull out some beautiful shots for the vision mixer. This got very positive feedback from my vision mixer and meant we had some lovely shots for that game after the team had been stressing at the absence of our usual main man. Throughout the interview I made sure to be very self-promotional as a study by Paulhus (2013) found that self-promotion, i.e. speaking highly of oneself often leads to positive evaluation in interviews in Western culture.
The process wrapped up with the feedback section. The girls took their time to fill in the feedback form which I would later go on to evaluate and take inspiration from.
Feelings – How did I feel during the process?
When I was trying to figure out what job I should be interviewing for, I was feeling quite stressed. I found it hard to decide between all my different interests and which avenue I should be going down. This stress didn’t last too long thankfully, as once I started prioritising the area where I had already gathered the most experience, it became a fairly easy choice. I felt secure in my choice of pursuing cameraman work.
On the day, before the interview started, I felt myself become a bit nervous. I never really get nervous before interviews, but the fact that this is as practise for a potential ‘proper’ career and not some part-time job at Tesco, mixed with the fact that it was in front of my friends and classmates, made the experience quite nerve-racking for me. I started to remind myself that I had properly prepared for this and had gotten speaking to some other classmates who hadn’t prepared so well, and that helped to ease the nerves a bit.
Once I started the interview, my nerves had disappeared. My interviewers were very welcoming and once I got into my flow of comfortably answering questions, I felt like I couldn’t be stopped. The fact that I was able to implement the STAR technique when asked a question about a past experience added further to my relief as this was the particular area I was intending to perfect in the interview.
My positive feelings mostly remained throughout the feedback process, as most of the feedback given was extremely positive. The couple of small things that I could change I felt were certainly doable. However, there were a few other areas in which I personally think I wasn’t strong enough.
Evaluation – What was good/bad?
The most important element of Gibbs’ reflective cycle is the evaluation process. As stated by Gibbs in 1988, “it is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience, it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost”. Let’s do some evaluation on what occurred in my interview. I have attached a link below to view my feedback from my group for you to reference throughout this section.
Most of the process was extremely positive for me. It allowed me to see what it is like to complete an interview in the broadcasting world and gave me an insight into how I can adapt to different questions given to me about this sector. My passion for sport made it an interesting topic to speak about in general and my experience so far gave me a great foundation to base most of my answers on. Of course, my university degree experience was also pivotal in this process as well. The feedback provided to me by my peers was great and I am very happy to be told that my extensive vocabulary and general politeness helped in this process, as Lipovsky’s (2006) studies showed that use of an extended vocabulary, good self-presentation and politeness when being interviewed is highly important to employers.
However, as with all evaluation, I need to point out the negatives as well. The process really pointed out to me how little experience I have in the sports broadcasting sector when it really comes down to it. The fact that the area where I have most experience is the limited camera work I have gathered during my sub-100 hours of placement so far is terrifying and shows me that I NEED to start making my own journalism and getting whatever experience I can get in whatever area of sports I can get, or else I will get left behind.
I feel that I also could’ve been a bit more expansive on my general passion for sports and my experience playing and watching sports throughout my life, rather than just relying on work experience.
Analysis – What else can you analyse from the process?
Looking at my interview analytically, a couple of things are clear. Firstly, it is clear that throughout the process, while it is good that I was well-prepared, I may have been a bit over-prepared. This is not in the sense that I had come with too much answers or anything like this. What I mean by this is that I got myself too worked up about this whole thing and should’ve been a little bit more relaxed. Davies and Bansel (2005) explain how students feel guilty when they aren’t able to ‘maximise their time’. This makes students feel like they must take every opportunity to work and build their portfolios, making sure not to waste any time. I believe this clearly implies to my situation here. I was trying so hard to maximise my time and was too caught up in trying to be perfect and could’ve been better had I been more relaxed.
Secondly, I think it is clear that my general likability, coupled with my friendly and excitable approach did have a positive impact on my interviewers’ evaluations of me. I relate this to a study by Rivera (2015), who found that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates to evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. This explains why my peers had such perfect feedback for me and clearly didn’t pick up on some of the negative feedback that I have for myself in my performance.
Conclusion – What is your action plan going forward?
To conclude, from this experience I can take a lot of positive and negative feedback.
My peers had a lot of positive things to say about my performance, which was lovely to see. I noticed some negative aspects which I will be working hard to improve on.
I have been practising my interview skills further with my family at home, and am constantly looking to improve on the key details covered in this post, and will definitely be looking for more experience to have a more diverse set of answers in future interviews from here on out.
Works cited
Davies, Bronwyn, and Peter Bansel. “The time of their lives? Academic workers in neoliberal time (s).” Health Sociology Review 14.1 (2005)
Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford: Oxford Further Education Unit.
Jasper, Melanie. Beginning reflective practice. Nelson Thornes, 2003.
Lipovsky, Caroline. “Candidates’ negotiation of their expertise in job interviews.” Journal of Pragmatics 38.8 (2006): 1147-1174.
Main, Paul. “Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle”. Structural Learning, https://www.structural-learning.com/post/gibbs-reflective-cycle. Accessed 16 November 2023.
Paulhus, Delroy L., et al. “Self‐presentation style in job interviews: The role of personality and culture.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43.10 (2013): 2042-2059.
Prickett, Tricia, Neha Gada-Jain, and Frank J. Bernieri. “The importance of first impressions in a job interview.” annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL. 2000.
Rivera, Lauren A. “Go with your gut: Emotion and evaluation in job interviews.” American journal of sociology 120.5 (2015).