Student Leadership Positions Provide Experiences Required for Success when Interviewing

I’m sure that friends and family are constantly encouraging you to get involved with extracurricular activities.  They probably tell you things like “it’ll look good on your resume” or “employers are looking for that kind of stuff”.  While all that’s true, you need to understand from a practical sense how involvement in extracurricular activities, and more importantly holding positions of leadership can benefit you.

These days, many employers leverage what’s called Behavioral Interviewing techniques.  In its simplest form, this means that they will ask you questions about prior experiences in an effort to assess your future potential.  The premise being that past performance is a valid indicator of future performance.  Additionally, these questions will seek to better understand your level of aptitude regarding highly valued behaviors, competencies and/or characteristics.  Things like Innovation, Leadership, Communication, Critical-Thinking, Problem-Solving and Conflict Resolution skills, just to name a few.

Classroom and other academic experiences can provide a forum for displaying and/or developing these abilities.  However, student leadership positions offer a much more robust and diverse environment resulting in a greater test of your skills.  When an employer begins his / her question with “Tell me about a time when you…” you’ll benefit from having more than just group projects and lab partner horror stories to reference.  Here’s another tip; when responding to these behavior questions, be sure to structure your response using the STAR method.  This stands for:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

The combination of a well-structured answer and a robust and vivid scenario as supplied through your involvement as a student leader should not only impress the interviewer but also demonstrate the diversity of your experiences thus far.

For additional resources on preparing for an interview check out these sample interview questions.

Post by: Dave Cofer

Dave Cofer is President/CEO of Cofer Consulting Solutions, a firm specializing in attracting, developing and retaining young professionals.  E-mail Dave at David.Cofer@CoferConsulting.com.  To learn more about Cofer Consulting Solutions, visit www.coferconsulting.com.