Using your CV to answer interview questions

You already know how useful your CV can be when you’re looking for a job:

• It stores your job history, education details, and skills in one place.
• It demonstrates your worth as a candidate to employers.
• It attracts recruiters through the use of searchable keywords and phrases.

But did you know that it can also be a helpful tool when formulating answers to interview questions? Here’s how:

Explaining who you are and what you want

Your personal statement is a paragraph that appears near the top of your CV. It includes your status (for instance, engineering graduate), your skills (such as marketing or sales), and the type of job you are interested in (for instance, entry level accountancy role). Your personal statement can be tweaked to reflect your suitability for each job that you apply for, placing a focus on relevant skills and aspects of your experience.

When you are asked questions such as:

• Tell me about yourself.
• What are you looking for in your next job?
• Why do you think you’re suitable for this job?

your personal statement provides a great place to start from. You don’t have to repeat it word for word. Instead, adapt your personal statement to suit the question.

Mapping your career history

It’s always advisable to have a basic CV that lists all of your:

• education details, including school, further and higher education, vocational qualifications, and in-house training courses
• work history, including every job you’ve held or business that you’ve run
• skills, developed both in and out of work
• hobbies and interests

As you apply for each job, you can then tweak this basic CV. When it comes to your career history, decide which jobs are relevant to the role you’ve applied for and place more focus on these.

With this tweaked job history in hand, consider what progress you’ve made in your career up to now and how this makes you a relevant candidate. It might also be useful to memorise a list of those roles, even if you take a CV into your interview. This prepares you for questions like, ‘walk me through your CV’ and ‘how has your work experience prepared you for this job?’.

Pinpointing your skills

Your suitability as a candidate goes beyond your work experience and qualifications. Employers want to know that you have not only the technical skills needed to carry out the job, but also the soft skills, such as teamwork, communication, and leadership. Whereas technical or hard skills are often suited to a particular job, soft skills are generally transferable from one role to another.

With each new job application consider what skills you have developed through:

• education, for instance, research or computer programming
• work, such as time management or carpentry
• hobbies and interests, for example, organisational skills or graphic design

and how these skills match with those listed in the job description. This will make it easier to alter your CV to demonstrate your suitability for the role. Increase the searchability of your CV by adding a skills section that lists both hard and soft skills.

In an interview, awareness of your skills can help you to answer questions such as, ‘What makes you more suitable for this job than other candidates who have the same work experience and qualifications?’ and ‘What skills do you bring to the job beyond your technical knowledge?’.

Talking about your qualifications and education

Your qualifications section shouldn’t simply cover your school, further, and higher education. This is also where you should list training you’ve received in the workplace. You might think that your qualifications should speak for themselves, for instance, you have a degree or a vocational qualification in a relevant topic. However, it’s worthwhile considering how your education makes you a relevant candidate for the job:

• What skills did you develop during your education?
• What was the motivation for choosing those courses?
• How has your education turned you into a relevant candidate?

Putting some thought into this area will help you answer questions such as, ‘How is your degree subject relevant to this job?’ and ‘What did you learn about yourself during your apprenticeship?’.

Final Thoughts

The key to a good performance at interview is preparation. An important part of that preparation is considering the type of questions you may face and deciding how you will answer them in a way that demonstrates your suitability for the job. Your CV provides an excellent place to start that investigation.