A successful medical career is entirely dependent upon results at interview.
The interview is a highly competitive process that may favour certain personality types, but the key to success lies in thorough preparation.
QUESTIONS ASKED AT THE MEDICAL INTERVIEW
How are interview questions decided?
Fortunately, with the traditional interview, the types of questions that you are likely to be asked are fairly predictable. Naturally, for senior medical posts, questions may be more difficult, but the preparation should be similar for whichever post you are applying for.
Typically, the format of the traditional medical interview will be as follows:
• Questions about your CV and medical career to date
• Questions about your portfolio
• Questions that test your motivation. Why this job? Why this area? Why should we choose you?
• Questions about audit and/or research
• Questions about NHS (e.g. MMC) and management topics
• Questions about medicine (e.g. recent articles read/recent advances/medical knowledge)
• Questions that test your generic skills
• Questions about your interests outside of medicine
• An opportunity for you to ask questions.
At least one interviewer will choose to run through the candidate’s experience to date, and this is often the opening enquiry. This question gives the candidate an opportunity to provide a quick summary of their medical career and experience to date whilst enabling them to relax ahead of potentially more difficult questions.
This will be followed by questions from other interviewers that will focus on all other aspects of their CV, their motivation, their understanding of health policy, knowledge of relevant literature, education and ethical issues.
At interview, each panel member will decide in advance which questions they are going to ask. Interviewers may have their personal favourite questions that they consider to be ‘discriminatory’. It is considered good interview practice for the same questions to be asked of each candidate (although this is rarely adhered to rigidly).
(After Chris Smith and Darryl Meeking)
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
