Gentlemen should wear a suit (not a sports jacket and slacks) with a white shirt and tie. Ladies should wear equivalent business attire with an appropriate length skirt and closed toed shoes.
Please be conscious of trying to be relaxed and, most importantly, prepared for your interview. While interviews are typically anxiety and stress filled, for you to be most successful you should do your best to simply “be yourself.” The Search Committee needs to see the ‘real’ you and you should do your best to understand who they are and what expectations they have for both you and the club.
The KOPPLIN KUEBLER & WALLACE Search Executive will facilitate the interview and will start with asking you to provide the search committee with a brief narrative of your career history, which should be NO MORE than about three minutes, and which should simply touch on highlights of your career record; we’ll ask follow up questions if desiring more in-depth descriptions of a career move. Please work on this narrative in advance of your interview, as it is your ONLY opportunity to make an outstanding first impression. Following that, we’ll have a series of questions probing your leadership style, career accomplishments, competencies, and so forth.
Your ability to successfully and effectively convey your strengths in your primary competency areas is critically important and should be a significant focus of your preparations prior to the interview.
Please consider how you’re going to make the most effective, successful impact on the group during the interview. Remember that to be effective, you must respond to questions by looking at the Committee while conveying your answers. Eye contact is very important, as is smiling. Equally as important is keeping your answers concise, to the point and, when possible, no more than about 30 seconds to a minute in length. Using specific examples to relate your personal experiences to answer certain questions is also very helpful. And, again, please know that we’ll start the interview by asking you to provide a short (two to three minutes summarized) narrative of you, your career and WHY you are in front of us today. Please think about and practice this response in advance of the interview as well. MOST IMPORTANTLY, stay with facts. If offering an opinion, stay with what you truly believe in (not what you think they want to hear) as they have to ‘see’ the real you in these responses; if a fact, make sure that it is true and accurate as we’ll likely verify it.
You should come prepared with a list of questions for the Committee, many of which may be answered during the interview process before you have the opportunity to ask them (meaning, make sure that you have in mind all the questions you have about the Club, membership, governance, club financials and any other issue of importance to you).
Finally, the Committee will have your resume, so you do not need to provide another copy for them. If you have a portfolio or other information that you’d like to share with the Committee, we will do so at the end of the interview so that it doesn’t become distracting during the Q & A part of the process.
REMEMBER: You can rarely, if ever, be too prepared!