The Sunday papers are full of interviews with celebrities, people making the headlines, someone with a book or film to promote. Interesting people or so you would have thought. However they seem to want to come over as an ordinary Joe not unlike you or me but in doing so they give little insight into their world or the real them. Occasionally the papers publish a piece not written by a journalist and not about someone famous but written by a member of the public about some life changing event that happened to them. These pieces are always interesting. After you have read one you feel that you have been given an insight into their life and personality.

We assume celebrities are more interesting than they are and we assume most individuals are not that interesting. This is relevant when it comes to recruitment. Sometimes you read a CV that mentions an experience or event that makes you want to invite the individual to interview just so you can learn more. However the way interviews are structured often excludes the opportunity to learn something interesting about the candidate.

As a mentor I encourage those applying for posts to work on their CV/application form to make it standout and give an interviewer something to explore. Good interview technic is to relax the candidate at the outset by asking them to say a bit more about  something non work they have referred to in their application rather than going straight into the set questions.

So I work with people on their CV as away of improving their chances of getting an interview by revealing something interesting about them. This leads the interviewer to explore with the candidate  something more revealing about them than what they did in their last post.

It always proves harder than I imagined to get this information out of people as they frequently claimed to have no experiences or non work skills that anyone would find interesting. So I ask them where they went for their holidays, if they have any hobbies , what did they study at Uni. One person I was mentoring felt he didn’t do well in interviews because of his strong, “foreign” accent. On further discussion this person who grow up in the former Yugoslavia spoke 9 languages at least 4 fluently.

This changed the perception that his English was, “poor”. I discovered another individual and his wife had been skydivers until they had children but had given it up in favour of safer skin diving! An admin worker with potential to be a manager but lacking confidence had recently been on “ holiday” with a friend to the favelas or slums of Rio as part of  voluntary work with children. She lived with a local family in what most people would regard as a dangerous place run by violent gangs.

My point is that in my role as mentor I often discover individuals are far more interesting than you might have assumed. That this information from their hidden life told a potential employer a lot more about them as a person than their work history.