Career Coaching FAQ
Q: Is it appropriate to have my Career Coaching sessions at my house?
A: We have a firm belief that your home is a comfort zone that may have other distractions that effect your ability to process our important lessons. We also like to take you out of your comfort zone and create a situation that is as close to a real life interview as possible. For these reasons, we recommend you don’t conduct your career coaching at your home.
Q. Are there negatives to having family members sit in my coaching sessions?
A. To answer job interview questions the best, you should talk about yourself in ways that promote your chances of securing employment. Sometimes talking like this is foreign and unfamiliar to begin with. We all have an ‘inner critic’ who tells us we aren’t as good as we are making out. This inner critic works overtime when family members are in the room and stifles any chance of you actually verbalising the great things you have done. There is a reason people struggle identifying achievements. Its this inner critic that downplays our achievements and tells us to get back to be average. Average doesn’t win jobs. Once you have completed our coaching program we provide you with a comprehensive document pack which is the written version of the coaching, that your spouse will find extremely useful. We would also be happy to tailor a package that would suit your spouses requirements.
Q: How many one on one sessions will I receive?
A: This depends on you CTAS entitlements, below is a run down of our individual meetings.
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CTMC for Tier 2 or RSL: 1 x initial coaching session + 1 Mock interview
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CTMC for Tier 3, medical, MIER and redundancy: 1 x initial session, 2 x face to face Mock interviews and life time ability to access any of our national network of coaches for practice interviews prior to real interviews.
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Privately funded:
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Top: 1 x initial session, 2 x mock interviews
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Ultimate: 1 x initial session, 2 x face to face mock interviews and life time ability to access any of our national network of coaches to do practice interview prior to real interviews.
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Q. What are the common interview questions that get asked?
A. If you Google ‘job interview questions’ you’ll get thousands. There are some questions that seem to be evident in many job interviews. Beyond these it gets down to job specific questions, whether about leadership, communication, technical ability, Supervising skills, etc.
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Tell me about yourself.
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What are your strengths?
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Tell me two weaknesses of yours
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What is your 5 year career plan?
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Tell me about a difficult customer.
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What motivates you to try your hardest?
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What do you now about our company?
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How have you demonstrated initiative?
Q. How do I handle the question on salary expectations in an interview?
A. This is e very sticky questions, if you give a salary figure that is higher than the employer wants to pay then your chances of winning that job are hurt badly, if you give a figure that is too low then you will get the job but not be paid a salary that is commensurate with your responsibilities. I went through this in an early interview after I discharged, I did not go to the interview with an idea of what salary I wanted or could expect. All I knew is that I wanted this job.
When asked, “what sort of salary expectation do you have if you won this job?” I tried to deflect giving a figure by stating “Money is not my motivating factor for this role, it is the opportunity to work for a large organization such as yours and the opportunities to further develop my skills in a long term career, that is my main motivation” I thought that would do it but, nope, they said “that’s great but can you please give us a figure that you would be looking for?” I of course froze and said that I did not really know to which they again stated that they wanted a figure.
I gave them a figure that I thought was at the lower end as I wanted the job and the interview continued on. Sure enough, a week later I received a call stating that I was the successful applicant and that the salary was set at exactly the level that I had mentioned in the interview. A few months after starting this job I went to an industry networking function and found speaking to peers that even though I was in a higher profile job that I was being paid $10-15k less than my peers. Although I was rewarded for my performance in this role with pay rises and bonuses, the employer did not say “Ross we know that we are not paying you the going rate so we will move your salary up”.
The moral of this story is that employers want to get the best employee at the best price possible as the reality of the corporate world is making or saving money is the only goal.
What I learnt from this is that I need to research industry salary standards for the role interviewing for, then have a salary range not set figure so that there is room for yourself and the employer to move if you are the preferred candidate.