Training interviews realistically is possibly even more critical than any other form of public speaking. The interviewee’s job is at stake. Hence, it is critical to leave a good impression, which means you need to be prepared.
We are pleased to release a first set of resources for trainers to leverage the power of Virtual Orator to help prepare job seekers for interviews.
Premade Scenarios
We’ve introduced the first resource addon for Virtual Orator with interview scenarios. These scenarios contain all the settings required. These scenarios are based in the office that is part of the Venue Pack 1 addon. The pack includes the speech files for the virtual interviewer. You, as the trainer, control the scenario to maximize the benefit and optimize the questions.
To build the scenarios we research across the web to find out the interview questions to include. Broadly, we found questions that we categorized into:
- Usual – questions everyone knows are coming
- Common Hidden – these are considered common questions, but the web doesn’t talk about them much so they may be overlooked.
- Common Unexpected – common questions that frequently catch candidates by surprise
- Hard – questions consider difficult to answer well
- Situational – these questions are relevant for some people and job types
As a trainer you have access to all of these, by individually, by type, or just all of them together.
Watch the video for a few examples of the interview questions:
We have also provided some scenarios that use questions from across those groups to make some typical interviews. These premade scenarios are ready to go sessions where you can just load and go. They should work for almost any situation and there is some variety so you can put your training interviewees through their paces multiple times without it feeling repetitive.
Making your own
The scenarios provided are a great resource to hit the ground running with training interview skills. They are also only a starting point, not only for Virtual Orator’s support of interviewing skills, but for your own usage as a trainer. There are several ways you can make your own interview scenarios.
Adapting the scenarios
The Interview Pack 1 addon provides 5 premade scenarios that use portions of the 69 questions that are included in the pack. This resource provides plenty of possibilities to making scenarios that fit your client’s needs.
- Change up a premade scenario by adjusting the venue, seating position, adding silent onlookers, or changing the formality of the situation
- Change the questions that are used by changing or expanding the “audience speech” settings. Add situational questions that fit, select different variations of questions, or just have more variety to choose from during the session as the trainer.
Adapting the resources
The functionalities required for the Interview Pack to work is already available to you as a trainer. Audience Speech is a feature you have at your disposal to create all kinds of situations, like Q&A in a presentation and of course interviews.
You can record your own questions using yourself or others you know. Create scenarios based on your recordings. There is a section in the Trainer’s Guide that comes with the software on how to do this.
If you are daunted by that, contact us. We can provide extra questions from the same person as in the resources or get recordings with other voices.
Getting the Interview Resources
The new Interview Pack 1 is available for all our multi-user license holders. They can be retrieved via our Installation Management dialog in the Help menu, where you can install the addon.
In order to leverage it the most though you will need the newest version of Virtual Orator 0.13.6. The update is available via the built in system and all new customers will get this version or newer automatically. After installation and a quick restart of the app, you will have the a new Resources menu item. Here all the premade scenarios will be available.
Don’t have Virtual Orator yet?
We’d love to hear from you on what interview related features you would like to see next. Add a comment below or hit us up on socials.
Dr. Blom is a long time researcher in the VR field. He is the founder of Virtual Human Technologies, which applies VR and avatar technologies to human problems and helping better understand people. Virtual Orator exists largely because Dr. Blom wishes he had had such a tool instead of the ‘trail by fire’ he went through learning to speak in public.
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