Understanding job criteria for interviews

To understand and prepare for questions about essential job criteria, you need to think about what's required for each element, so you can be sure of giving good answers.

Skills

Each essential skill is an indicator of tasks and performance requirements.

If you're going for work in a job you know well, you'll understand the needs of the job. If you're not fully familiar with a type of work, but have similar skills, it's usually worth asking about the work so you can make the connection with your own skills.

Skills criteria

Most jobs list their sets of skills like this example:

Essential skills

• Communications
• Interpersonal
• Problem solving
• Teamwork
• Sales
• Customer service

The reason for listing job criteria in this way is to define the key roles of the job to applicants. That's also the best way to break down the specific needs of each job so you can analyze what's required for your interview.

The right person for this job is an experienced retail worker, or someone who's done very closely related work. The nature of the job is usually a good indicator of its practical needs.

Systematically go through each of the skills.

What levels of communication are required? What sort of interpersonal skills are needed? What sort of problem solving skills are involved? What are the team roles in this work?

Communications skills

Communications types can vary, a lot, between jobs. You can identify your job's needs from the people you communicate with in the role:

• Customers
• Sales managers
• Other staff

The forms of communication you use are:

• Verbal
• Written
• Email
• Sales meetings participation
• On the job communications

You'll be asked to demonstrate your communications abilities by example.

Pick a good example of your work where you use all your communications skills effectively.

Note: In all interviews, communications skills are very important. How well you answer your questions is also used as an assessment of your skills.

Interpersonal skills

This is a customer service and sales job, so obviously, interpersonal skills are important to the job.

Be warned: 'Interpersonal skills' also means in the workplace with other employees. It relates to workplace relationships.

So in this case 'interpersonal skills' works on two levels.

The skills required are:

• Customer relationships
• Working with people
• Handling relationship issues and situations
• Maintaining good working relationships
• Being supportive of a good working environment

This job requires a mix of examples to illustrate how you work with customers and staff, and an experienced person in this field will have several good examples which illustrate how they conduct themselves.

Problem solving skills

Every job has its own set of problems, and employees have to know how to handle them.

In this case, the interviewers need to see an example of problem solving which matches the requirements of the job.

Select an example which shows direct relevance to the position.

The more clearly related to the requirements of the job, the better. (Use the STAR technique to explain the problem, the actions required, the actions taken and the result, like a story.)

Teamwork

Team skills are an obvious need in any workforce. Your experience can help you with this skill requirement. Select a team role in which you made a positive contribution, and explain how you work in a team. Show what you do within the team environment, like 'assist trainees', or 'fill in for team members on a needs basis' or any other positive contribution.