I know that doing a mock job interview is intimidating. Let’s face it, who really wants to watch themselves perform during an interview with all the “um,” “like,” and “you know” comments we all make? Yes, I understand the anxiety, but let me share two facts with you:
- When employers rate the importance of job candidate skills on their hiring decisions, communication skills consistently top the list. Specifically, verbal communication skills rank at the top. (NACE Job Outlook 2011, released November 2010)
- When students use practice interviewing programs – where verbal communication is the focus – at career centers, they do better in the job market than students who don’t polish this skill.
What does this mean? When I combine these two facts, it seems that verbal communication skills count quite a bit during job candidate selection. The good news for World Campus students is that you can practice interviewing using an online video job interview resource called InterviewStream to increase your verbal communication skills. And you can do this from home, 24/7.
If you invest the time to perfect your resume to secure an interview, it only makes sense to equally hone your verbal communication skills to land the job. To me it doesn’t add up to do one without the other.
