Surrey Community Marketplace

We will be interviewing in 30 minute slots from 9am to 11am. Please arrive by 8.45am. It is likely that there could be absence on the day, which may mean you end up with only three candidates.

We will need to keep strictly to time. We suggest you spend 20 minutes in interview mode, and then 10 minutes for some coaching/feedback.

Normal lessons will be running throughout, so if you find you’re with a young person that’s really not engaged and you can’t string it out for 30 minutes, you can finish early and the young person can return to normal lessons.

A briefing sheet is being issues to all Year 11s ahead of the interview day. It includes a list of the interview questions that we will be using. Whilst you don’t normally know what you’re going to be asked, we wanted to give the students a good chance to prepare and ease their nerves, so we decided it was a more worthwhile exercise if there were no sunrises for them!

As part of the process, this month Year 11 have all been presented with a range of job adverts and asked to write a letter of application for one of them. These letters, along with some brief information about the students’ academic potential, will be available to you on the morning. You can refer to information in their application letter in your interview, but it’s accepted that you won’t know the role, and they may not actually be interested in that role, so we’ve tried to come up with some sample questions that can generic enough to apply to all of them. We’ve also tried to use questions that don’t rely on previous experience, as many of them will never have worked before.

Please make the interview realistic, but also be supportive – encourage the young people to think of examples of things that they may have done that may not seem immediately relevant to a work interview. Please make your feedback constructive, supportive and encouraging. We are trying to build these young people up rather than knocking them down. Equally, if you have a student that isn’t engaged, you can point out that the exercise may well have been more beneficial had they shown more interest, but thank them for their time nonetheless!