I did a couple of lessons on job interviews with my final year marketing students this week which worked quite well, so I thought I'd share the activity with you. The aim was to give them some practice in answering the classic job interview questions ("What's your biggest weakness?", etc.).
During the first lesson, I got the class to give me some examples of classic interview questions. We then looked at some short videos (downloaded from YouTube) which give advice on how to answer such questions. CollegeGrad.com has an excellent series of Interview Tips, each lasting around one minute. Here's an example:
This video from Monster on Classic Job Interview Questions is also very good.
I then told the class that they had to choose a sector they would like to work in (marketing, advertising, PR, sales, purchasing, ...) and prepare a short 30-second elevator pitch which they would deliver at the start of each interview. I also gave them this list of questions and this article on speed interviewing to help them prepare.
At the start of the next lesson, I divided the class into interviewers and interviewees. I gave the interviewers this grid to evaluate the interviewees. I then paired one interviewer with one interviewee and told them that each interview would last 5 minutes, beginning with the pre-prepared elevator pitch. After 5 minutes, the interviewees moved to another interviewer (it helps to arrange the tables in a square with interviewers on the inside and interviewees moving round the outside).
After 5 interviews, I stopped the activity and got the interviewers to give me their marks for each candidate, which I put on the board—the student with the best score gets the job! We then discussed the strengths and weaknesses of individual candidates and I gave the class some feedback on mistakes I'd picked up.
The next step would be to reverse the roles and repeat the activity. In fact, it's probably best to do this over two lessons. You could also have longer interviews, but five minutes worked quite well.
