Your 2 Major Goals
So, hopefully you've viewed the tutorials and downloaded the
free handout and understand the idea that you need to focus on
your two major goals of
- Selling Your Skills To Match Their Needs
- Gaining Rapport with the Interview Panel
It is critical to your interview success that you stay
focussed on these outcomes. As doctors, we are
generally rubbish at selling ourselves. The idea of an arrogant
junior doctor or consultant that you sometimes see on TV
medical shows just isn't somebody I recognise - either at work
or at any of the training courses that I do.
Now, it may be that I only get a certain type of person
coming for interview training courses, and that there are a
whole load of arrogant doctors out there who think that are
naturally talented at everything and don't need training on
anything - but I don't meet those people, even in may day
job.
When you talk to medical interviewers, they always bemoan
the fact that many great candidates don't sell themselves well
enough - either on paper or in person.
The interview or selection process is a game. I don't like
the game and I wish there was a system that flawless, quickly
and cheaply selected the right medic for the right job - but
there isn't. The better selection systems are more protracted
and expensive. Medics are generally cautious about adopting any
new changes and the costs are prohibitive.
So, like it or not, we are going to continue to have mickey
mouse selection systems, which aren't fair and aren't perfect.
You have two choices -
- You can either take the stance that it should be fair
and that you will just believe that it is so and the
perfect interviewers, who have been extensively trained in
selection theory and have been paid to turn up to these
interviews to take up the honourable role of selecting
which junior doctors are going to turn up on a training
programme or consultant post that will have no impact on
their day to day working life
- or you may think that if the system is unfair, then you
should take it upon yourself to study the system, work out
where the flaws are and make sure that your medical
interview preparation is designed
to exploit those flaws
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