Interview Presentation Hints and Tips

With so many hiring processes now being completely digital, it's never been more important to really nail an interview presentation. We caught up with Leif, one of our Associate Directors, to find out his top tips for making sure your presentation is on perfect form!

There are countless opinions out there on how to deliver the best presentation, ranging from the obvious to the absurd. To keep things simple, I’ve chosen three points that cover the key characteristics I’ve observed first-hand in winning presentations over the past 4 years. These cover design, content, and execution, so provide a strong framework for you to build a winning presentation.

Design

Just like you should make sure your appearance is presentable for an interview, so should your presentation look dressed to impress. But isn’t designing a PowerPoint so much more difficult than throwing on your best shirt?

Here lies the problem - we’re not all creatives. We don’t have hours to spend obsessing over whether to choose a Sans or Serif font (always Sans right?), or whether to choose bullet point or arrows. So here’s a fool-proof method to getting the presentation design right every time: brand the documents you make to match the business branding.

Add their logo at the top. Use a colour picker to take the brands colours. Pinch images from the website. All these assets are out there, freely available, and have been signed off by the internal brand guardian of the very people you’re trying to impress. Thus, you achieve three things:

Content

Throughout your presentation (and work life in general for that matter) the single biggest action you can take to boost your credibility is making sure to include tangible facts, figures, and percentages to back up your point. These should be drawn from both the data available to you for the task, and your own experience/wins/losses.

The comparison can be demonstrated like this:

“I would undertake conversion rate optimisation to increase revenue.”

Vs.

“I would implement X campaign to increase conversion rate, in order to generate an additional £X of revenue within X months. In my current role I implemented Y, which resulted in a Y% uplift in conversion within Y months, successfully generating Y revenue.”

You can see that the second option, even without any actual figures in it, sounds much more credible and impressive.

The second element of this point is to ensure you write the figures down on the actual presentation. Having a string of numbers and percentages thrown at you can often be disorientating for the listener, especially if you plough on whilst they’re still trying to process the figures. Always take the time to include them written down on your presentation so they can be easily read and digested.

Be tangible. Draw from data. Use your experience.

Execution

I advise all my candidates to add an extra “why me?” slide at the end of their presentation. After what can be quite a content heavy, attention stretching 20 minutes, it’s often a nice release to end on something a bit more light-hearted.

In this slide it’s appropriate to outline what you could bring to the role, and why they should choose you (e.g. 5 years ecommerce experience, have managed large teams, project managed a re-platform) but also to add something to warm everyone up again before you finish – let them know if you make a cracking cuppa, or if you’re a serial snacker who’s always dishing out treats - you get the idea.

Remember that a presentation is as much about your personality and how you come across, as it is the content. The people sat across the table want to feel like they could work with you on a daily basis. Work relationships are some of our most intense. We spend up to 8 hours a day speaking and cohabitating with each other, often under stressful or demanding circumstances. We want to feel like these people would make our work life easier and more enjoyable, rather than weighing us down.

With workplace culture and employee happiness/wellbeing such a prominent topic over the last few years, it has genuinely never been more important to try and quell the nerves and deliver the heck out of the amazing content you’ve created. So, take a deep breath, relax, and let your personality shine through.

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