Jobs & employment blog

  If you’re currently preparing for a remote job interview, you may be feeling concerned that it could be more difficult for you to assess whether the opportunity is the right one for you. After all, when interviewing remotely, you won’t have the opportunity to meet the people you’ll be working with face-to-face, visit the organisation’s offices and generally get a feel for the...

    Are you wondering why this title is in quotation marks? Well, that’s because it’s not just your friends and family who may want to know why you are thinking of leaving your current job. And, while it can feel easy enough to answer when someone close to you has asked, it can be far harder to articulate your reasons when it’s an interviewer posing the question, and when the...

  There are many reasons why you may have gaps on your CV. You might have spent your time away from the workplace to look after children, you may have been studying, travelling, caring for a relative or looking for a job. Career gaps can also be caused, of course, by redundancy. Most people have some sort of gap in their career history, and, as our CEO Alistair Cox explained in a...

  Let’s face it, no-one likes failure, and for some it’s a horrible word that raises their anxiety levels. I’ve read inspirational quotes such as, “I’ve learnt more from my failures than I have from my successes”, but is it really something we all want to experience and do we really want these circumstances dredged up in the interview room? Surely interviews are the place to highlight...

  Nothing quite beats that feeling when you walk out of an interview room. The thorough preparation, interview nerves, and the fact that you’ve had to talk yourself up for the best part of an hour, can really take it out of a person – so it can be quite a relief when it’s over. That is until you start to wonder how the interview actually went. This limbo period...

  On the face of it, answering the common interview question, “So, tell me about yourself” seems easy enough. After all, you just have to talk about your background, and this is a topic you know better than anyone else. What could possibly go wrong? Well, to be frank, a lot can go wrong. Many perceive this to be one of the easiest interview questions to answer, however providing a...

  Whether you are an experienced developer or a self-taught programmer, if you’re looking for a new job, you’ll almost certainly be faced with a technical interview. Some may find these interviews daunting and so preparation is key to your success.   To help you prepare for your technical interview, today we’re speaking with James Milligan, Director at UK and Ireland and...

  “You try something, it doesn’t work, and maybe people even criticise you. In a fixed mindset, you say, ‘I tried this, it’s over.’ In a growth mindset, you look for what you’ve learned.” Carol Dweck, Stanford University Psychologist Why adopting a growth mindset is more important than ever before At Hays Spain, we review the performance of new colleagues after their first three...

During my career I’ve seen many candidates struggle with a common interview question when they shouldn’t. It’s a line of conversation that provides them with a great opportunity to impress the person leading the interview. Instead, I’ve often found that they mistakenly believe that the reply is an easy one and gives an unsatisfactory answer without stopping to think. That’s why I want to...

  You know what your best interview performance looks like, and that wasn’t it. Despite all of your careful interview preparation, the points that you wanted to make just didn’t come across in the right way. You felt nervous and uncomfortable, you went blank when asked questions, and you struggled to build a rapport with the interviewer. It may feel as if all of your...

  With it often being one of the first questions asked in a job interview, how you answer, “Why should I hire you?” could really help you set a positive tone for the rest of the meeting, whilst engaging the interviewer in what you have to say from the outset. So, it’s important to understand that the way you respond to this interview question will have a huge bearing on the extent to...

  It can feel like something straight out of a nightmare. You’ve prepared extensively for your job interview, got into the right frame of mind, and walked into the room feeling confident. But suddenly, to your horror, your mind has gone completely blank when asked a question. What causes our minds to suddenly go blank?   We’re all human, we’ve all experienced this to some degree...

  If you’ve found yourself in the position of being made redundant, don’t be afraid of communicating it clearly on your CV and in a job interview. When addressing your redundancy on your CV, include any relevant and appropriate background information, such as the department or organisation needing to downsize, and ensure you highlight your key achievements in the role. ...

  When preparing for an all-important job interview, you might think that the most important thing to equip yourself with is what you’re going to say when answering specific types of interview questions. Something that you may not appreciate, though, is that the interviewer won’t necessarily only be paying attention to what you say – they’ll also be actively looking...

  Congratulations! You’ve landed an interview and could soon be taking the next exciting step in your career. But there’s a problem. The interview is scheduled at 3pm – exactly the same time as an important client meeting – a meeting you’ve spent weeks preparing for. Even though many interviews are now increasingly being conducted remotely, it suddenly dawns on you that you’ll need to...

  If you’re actively looking for a new job, it’s more than likely that you will have applied for multiple opportunities, and therefore may well be interviewing with multiple different employers. It’s also likely that during one or all of these interviews, you will be asked by the interviewer if you are currently interviewing with any other employers. Although this is a seemingly...