One of the ways that B2E Consulting has adapted to these unprecedented times we find ourselves in is the provision of free virtual webinars to help our Consulting Community to stay connected, develop and to share knowledge.

Since April we have hosted 23 webinars covering a range of topics and we have been joined by over 500 consultants and clients! We kicked off with a digest of the government support available to consultants with Ian Busby. The next 3 webinars from Hugh Abbott focused on how to optimise your ability to find a new assignment, using LinkedIn, a methodology and a focus on reviewing your CV.  We enjoyed a trilogy of webinars from Simon Rickman on the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Home Working. Next up was a fascinating session on AI from Marina Borozna; and Richard Samworth followed up with a session on Sustainability in Project Management. Over June we enjoyed a Data and Analytics webinar from Simon Berkeley, looked at Blockchain with Aruna Koya and Nathan Allchin led a session on Target Operating Models.  We completed our summer with sessions from B2E Principals – Ian Busby (on Organisation Design), Stephen Green (on Procurement), Smriti Singh (on Digital solutions for the NHS),  Hugh Abbott and team (RPA) and a session on designing an exponential organisation with Tony Manley. Our Autumn schedule included the return of ever-popular Simon Rickman with his 7 Habits of Resilience; Sacha Visram’s  journey in starting a mobile phone network; a very information session on Libor with  John Martin; a chatbots demonstration from Liam Ryan; and were introduced to TRIZ by  Ketan Varia. Our last session of October was a very important session on working from home cyber-securely with Dr John McCarthy.

Many thanks to these B2E Principals, Alumni and other B2E friends for sharing their experience and case studies with our community.

We’re finalising our schedule of webinars to take us through to the end of the year and our next set are available to book now.

1. Leadership Behaviours To Deliver Successfully In the “New Norm” | Wednesday 11th November | 12.30

Frank Rodgers will share his experience of delivering critical IT programmes and his thoughts on the leadership behaviours that will be key in the post-Covid world where hybrid working will be the norm. Click here for more details and to register.

2. Leading The Agile Organisation | Wednesday 18th November | 12.30

B2E Principal Dr Kiran Chitta will share his insight into how agile leadership can be assessed and developed using digital psychometric tools. Click here for more details and to register.

3. Graph Databases – the Key is in the Relationships| Wednesday 25th November | 12.30

Roger Gordon – the Founder and CTO of iThinking, a consultancy focused on graph databases and startup technology – will provide a hands-on demonstration of Graphic Databases and how to run ML and AI algorithms to bring out hidden data patterns for exploration and hypothesis generation. Click here for more details and to register.

4. CV Peer-Review | Wednesday 2nd December | 13.00

An opportunity to join this small group working session with B2E’s Hugh Abbott.  Click here for more details and to register.

We look forward to seeing you (virtually) at one or all of these free events and we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on future topics of interest.

About the author, Maninder Murfin

Maninder is a Partner at B2E Consulting and has been working for B2E for the last 5+ years.

B2E is a ground-breaking, innovative and employee-owned consulting company helping clients to deliver their transformation and change programmes.  Prior to working at B2E Maninder spent 9+ years as a management consultant with Accenture mainly working on Business Change / Transformation & HR Transformation programmes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the urgency around digital transformation. The ability to quickly derive insights from data and use them to navigate the uncertainly is no longer a nice to have, but a matter of survival. At the same time, businesses are expected to do more with less and stretch existing resources further, ruling out expensive options such as building custom analytics products or hiring more data scientists.

In my recent webinar with B2E consulting, How to Harness AI Without Writing Code, I proposed two complementary approaches for business leaders to navigate this challenge and use analytics to thrive in a crisis.

The first approach is to use off-the-shelf analytics software instead of custom builds. Such software solutions cater to specific business functions (sales, marketing, finance, or HR), are often tailored to industry-specific needs and include built-in integrations for most common data sources. This approach lowers the cost of development and maintenance, reduces implementation time from months to weeks, and brings the benefit of vendor’s support with training and adoption.

The market for data and analytics solutions is mature and offers a broad range of options. For example, a company looking to add the power of artificial intelligence to its sales function will find 73 analytics and BI platforms, 24 sales data intelligence solutions and 15 sales performance management solutions on Gartner Peer Insights. (Gartner Peer Insights is a free resource, and it can also be used to develop a shortlist by comparing features and customer reviews).

To help my clients select the right solution for their business need, I ask these questions:

• What solutions are your peers and competitors using to solve this challenge?
• Who else in your organisation is tackling this challenge? What software solutions have they tried?
• What are the critical capabilities for you (e.g. deep industry or functional specialisation, breadth of functionality, built-in integrations, or access to 3rd party data)?
• Can you experiment with multiple vendors and products?
• How will the new product fit within the current system architecture and your other IT and business transformation initiatives?

You are likely to find a suitable and cost-effective off-the-shelf solution when your business need is not unique or core to your business model. For example, a pharmaceutical company may not need to develop custom machine learning algorithms to support decision making for marketing and sales teams. As a lot of its peers have similar decision support needs, the volume of demand has been sufficient to trigger development of off-the-shelf solutions.

Example: Aktana, a platform that provides AI-enabled decision making support for pharma marketing and sales teams. More than half of the world’s top-20 pharmaceutical companies use Aktana to quickly evaluate mountains of data, extracting what is relevant and valuable at the time of decision. During coronavirus pandemic, Aktana helped their clients quickly adapt their brand strategy to the volatile market situation by reprioritising sales activities and keeping their sales reps informed about new government policies.

The second approach is to use modern data science and machine learning platforms that serve enterprise-wide business needs. These platforms are cohesive software applications that offer a mixture of basic building blocks essential both for creating many kinds of data science solutions and incorporating such solutions into business processes, surrounding infrastructure, and products. They help business leaders adapt to changing environment by deriving insights from data across the enterprise.

Data science and ML platforms no longer cater exclusively to expert data scientists; they also meet the needs of business analysts and line-of-business employees with intuitive, easy to learn and no code interfaces. Whilst making expert data scientists more productive, they also empower the people closest to the business challenges (business analysts, finance, or marketing specialists) to ingest, share and explore data.

The democratisation of who can explore data and create models will dramatically increase the number of people analysing data and, as a result, improve the speed with which a business can move. Increased analytics capability will improve business leaders’ understanding of both the external environment (e.g. the behaviour of clients, competitors, regulators) and their internal resources (e.g. products, services, employees’ networks, knowledge and skills), and help them focus their capabilities on meeting emergent customer needs.

Example: Dataiku DSS is a collaborative data science software platform for teams of data scientists, data analysts, and engineers to explore, prototype, build, and deliver their data products. In February, it was positioned as a Leader in Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and ML Platforms. For business analysts, it enables to prepare data via a powerful visual interface, create and share datasets, charts, and dashboards in a single click, and experiment with more advanced features (like machine learning). For data scientists, it frees up time for high-impact work by reducing repetitive tasks and making it easier to share insights and status updates with peers, stakeholders, and project managers.

The challenges businesses face are significant and varied, but the means to solve them are largely present in existing internal and external data as well as in the ideas, observations, knowledge, and networks of individual employees. Off-the-shelf analytics solutions and modern data science and ML platforms empower these individuals to put that data to work on an unprecedented scale, all while keeping the costs manageable.

We are in a historic period of economic and social disruption.  The IMF is predicting a 6.5 percentage point drop in global GDP for 2021. Coupled with uncertainty around vaccine timelines and coronavirus mitigation actions, it is clear that organisations will continue to face big challenges in the next few months. However, the companies that adapt to these challenges and harness the power of analytics now will thrive and become the high performers of the future.

About the author, Marina Borozna

Marina is a Director at Pragmata Consulting and has recently partnered with B2E to deliver data and analytics services to their clients. She helps complex global organisations derive value from their data by converting business challenges into use cases and identifying, sourcing, and deploying best in class analytics solutions. Her past clients include top-10 global pharma companies, healthcare technology solution providers, as well as oil and gas majors and financial services institutions.

This series will provide a way to evaluate if the Blockchain concept is relevant for your business or client.  It will include examples of successful use-cases, and also some not so successful ones, as well an up-to-date, summary of the current landscape.

I have been working in the technology architecture & delivery for twenty years.  Over the last few years, I have taken in a keen interest in the Blockchain concept,  gathering information from a range of experts, in economics, and in technology, and from a range of consultancies that provide a Blockchain offering.

This first post will focus on the fundamentals (with no technical jargon) of how to evaluate if the Blockchain concept is relevant for your organisation, and what are the possible benefits.

To Blockchain or not to Blockchain? That is the question.

What is Blockchain and do I need it?  

Does your business benefit from transactions involving multiple parties, both internal and external to the company, where provenance, and tracking is critical to those transactions?

Finance, Insurance, Supply Chain, Tax, Identity and Customs are good examples of industries where this is the case.

Yes, my business meets that criteria.  Does that mean I have to use cryptocurrency or tokens, and have an ICO to use Blockchain?

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are single use-cases of the Blockchain concept.   

An initial coin offering (ICO) is used to generate investment in a platform, or app, which gives the investors a return on investment in the form of selling those “coins” at a later stage, for a higher value.  This is of course, IF the platform succeeds.

Risks around Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or ICOs should not impact your evaluation of the Blockchain concept for your business.

The learnings are definitely useful but are not always applicable.

Tokens, or cryptocurrency, are not a requirement for the implementation of the Blockchain concept.

How can the Blockchain concept benefit my business?

To understand the benefits, let’s dive in a little deeper.  As outlined in the Verge, there is no universally agreed upon definition of Blockchain.

It’s a concept in its early stages and there is as yet no implementation (or use) of the concept that has been standardised.

The Blockchain concept adds a lot of value when trading or transacting with parties, where tracking or provenance is required.

To transact legitimately, parties need a way to “know” you are the owner of the goods, that they are genuine, and that the funds are available, as well as a trusted distribution mechanism.  For the funds part, the method is to use a list of transactions that have taken place, i.e. a list or a ledger has been used.

Simply put, the Blockchain concept is a mechanism to enable trust, across the whole network, so that trades are legitimate by design, using a shared or “distributed’ ledger.

A “shared” spreadsheet is a good analogy

Imagine the shared ledger to be a spreadsheet.

The logic for adding legitimate transactions to the ledger, are applied by using “macros” on the spreadsheet. Certain parties, or “nodes” on the network, have their own copy of the spreadsheet, and every time a change is made, every nodes’ copy is updated according to the rules programmed into the macros or “smart contracts”.

“Blocks” are complete entries added to the spreadsheet. i.e. Rows.

The blocks are similar to Row 1, Row 2 etc.

Certain aspects of Row 2 are dependent on Row 1, for instance, like a cumulative count on the spreadsheet i.e. a chain of rows, or blocks.

To add Row 3, the macros would run on the data entered, to ensure that it was legitimate, and then all the nodes’ copies of the spreadsheet are updated.

If I tried to delete Row 1, then Row 2, and Row 3 would be impacted, so it’s not easy to delete Row 1 without updating the subsequent rows.

Hence the Blockchain concept doesn’t lend itself to the deletion of these entries, or blocks easily. It is seen as an immutable data store. (More about compliance later).

The spreadsheet can be permissioned or public

“Permissioned” – Some rows in the spreadsheet, or certain cells in the rows can be protected, so they can only be seen and changed by certain parties.

“Public” – The shared spreadsheet does not have any protected parts.  Every cell is visible and can be updated by everyone, according to the logic applied by the macros.

The Blockchain concept is again simply the use of a “shared” spreadsheet, or ledger, to ensure legitimate transactions.

Blockchain is a concept, so you can use it how you want…. with tokens, without tokens, permissioned, public, 1 node, 5 nodes or 1000 nodes.

Hold on a minute! Spreadsheets and databases have been here for ages, why is this different to existing systems?

The difference comes in when updating or adding a row to the shared spreadsheet. Before it can be changed, every party on the network has to come to an agreement it is correct i.e. Row 2 is dependent on the agreed state, after Row 1.

I have thousands of users on my network, it will take ages for everyone to verify every single transaction. That’s ridiculous

With the Blockchain concept, the “rules” as to who can add or update; and what is legitimate, and what is not, are automatically enforced by the “macros” on the spreadsheet.  These “macros” or “smart contracts” are basically software programs that allow logic to be applied on updates to the spreadsheet. The scaling has been an issue with various projects, but now there are enterprise scale examples, working in the real world.  More on that later.

What’s all this decentralisation about?  Why is everyone talking about “power back to the people”?

Fundamentally, because no one party has ownership of the ledger or shared spreadsheet, it is decentralised. 

Let’s consider a “Clearing house” before and after the Blockchain concept. The clearing house is essentially a central store or entity that provides a level of trust to the whole ecosystem.  It gives the merchant confidence that an organisation has the funds to pay for an item when they purchase an item or service.

Before the Blockchain concept:

The clearing house and the “agents” that are “trusted” act as gatekeepers who check the transactions follow certain rules and are reconciled.  To transact, the clearing house or the agents would have to approve the status of a single organisation’s funds.  If they didn’t approve it, the transaction would be declined.

There is clear potential for false positives and misuse.

After the Blockchain concept is implemented:

Any entity could interact with any other entity, with or without agents. Provenance, tracking and reconciliation would be ensured by design using the macros or smart contracts as the logic.

No one would be able to manipulate the data without following the rules of the whole ledger, and without everyone knowing, or a huge discrepancy. If a transaction doesn’t follow the rules in the smart contracts, or there is a discrepancy somewhere in the shared spreadsheet, then the update (transaction) is simply not completed.

The Blockchain concept is effectively automating what the checking agents and gatekeepers do for the “clearing house”, using every one’s input.  It is a decentralised form of “trust” for the financial transactions.

Another example

It therefore follows, that for transactions where provenance is key, let’s say for an example for a Medical license –  it cannot be faked, if we had a “shared” spreadsheet listing Medical licenses.

Yet another example

The Art world is another great use-case. A transaction between a seller and a buyer directly, or via an agent needs a certain level of “trust” that the item being sold is authentic and will be delivered to them on payment.

This trust has three key elements: provenance, a delivery tracking element, and a financial transaction. Provenance can be determined by the whole network of parties with access to the data store, i.e. is the painting authentic?  When tracking is transparent, there is confidence in the delivery, and therefore the financial transaction is completed, with the correct rules to determine tax & fees.

What’s the benefit of all this?

Shared “trust” equates to higher consumer confidence and of course, less criminal activity.  On the internet, especially, this is a key value add.  Provenance is so transparent that no checking services are required.  Genuine transactions occur, every time.  Of course, all this depends on the concept being implemented properly (although “properly” remains to be defined or standardised).

The value add also applies to tracking physical items.  All you need is a barcode, or some other tracking mechanism on a physical product, and connecting it to the shared spreadsheet, or ledger will provide a tracked product through the supply chain.

Summary

As demonstrated in the examples above, the Blockchain concept, as a trust mechanism adds value, not just internal to the organisation, but also to the whole ecosystem, or market.

Notably the most successful projects have been multiple organisations working together to build the “shared” spreadsheet, or ledger. A key aspect of it being shared, means it has to be implemented very carefully, by any organisation or cohort of organisations, to bring out the real value for the consumer, and the ecosystem.

If you think your organisation or client could benefit from using the Blockchain concept, but aren’t sure how to implement it or realise the value, contact us here at B2E. Also tune in to my next blog in the series where you can see it in action, using a scaled case-study. 

About the author, Aruna Koya

Aruna Koya is a B2E Principal who has spent 20 years working in the IT industry, starting as Software Developer then Department Head & Delivery related roles, progressing through to Director level.

Her most recent projects have seen her working to design and develop Blockchain solutions using Hyperledger, in the private, permissioned format for Enterprise solutions.

A few clients have asked me recently how we identify top interim consultants and attract them into our network, and it got me thinking about what really are the core personality traits that make someone successful in consulting, and more specifically in Interim Consulting.

The characteristics that immediately spring to mind for me are: professionalism; expert knowledge; organisation; good listening skills; and being a team player.  These are traits that I saw time and again in my time at Accenture and still see around me within the B2E team (most of us have a consulting background).

I wanted to dig a little deeper though, and see what singles out excellence in “Interim Consultants” specifically over and above their Big 5 or niche consulting firm rivals.

To be a successful interim consultant, you need to be a risk taker and cope well with ambiguity.  For half your working life you may be looking for a new role!   You need to be extremely confident socially – not only do you need to win allies quickly at the client site, you also need to constantly grow your network in order to be successful at winning new roles.  You need to be clever but in a pragmatic way, and draw quickly on past experiences.  You also need to fit in well with existing teams and get things done rapidly.

Pip Henderson, one of our Service Delivery Partners, helps clients to find the optimum resources for their transformation programmes; she manages the consultants through the hiring process and well beyond, and is often co-located at client sites with our interim consultants.

So I asked Pip for her thoughts on who is most likely to succeed in interim consulting.   She told me, “Interim consultants need to be confident and hard-working, and able to hit the ground running.  They need to be experts in their field.  With the best, it’s often the case (and great for all parties) that they can extend the scope of their own initial contracts, by either taking on new projects, or at the end of the initial role moving into a different project or programme at the same client.”

We are often asked why, and in what way, interim consultants are any different from a Big 5 Consultant or Niche consultant (at the same rate)?  Pip says “they are self- sufficient and often more experienced and still they bring consulting methodologies from the Big 5 or elsewhere.  It helps when they have done this stuff time and time again in different client environments.”

I’d really love to hear more on this topic.  If you are a Hiring Manager who has had experience with interim consultants, or if you are an interim consultant yourself, why not message us with your thoughts on the characteristics that are key to being a successful interim consultant

To find out more about how B2E Consulting can help you achieve transformation in an agile and cost effective way, please visit our website www.b2econsulting.com or give one of our friendly team a call.

About the author, Julie Crawford

Julie joined B2E in 2015 and is one of our Capability Managers.  In this role, she sources the best people within our community for a variety of business & technology consulting roles.  Prior to this Julie spent 7 years with Accenture specialising in Strategy, CRM and Process change, with a specific focus on the Travel Industry. She went on to lead the EMEA Hotel Solutions Group and later the UK Meetings and Events Department for Carlson Wagonlit Travel over a 7-year period.

Talk to anyone from our team here at B2E Consulting and we all extol the importance of our ”Community” – the sharing of a similar grouping and purpose amongst our consultants.  And we are always looking for ways in which to enhance our B2E Community.

Our aim is not to bombard you with role alerts for our latest opportunities.  Our goal is to help you further your wider career as an interim consultant – and that could be through one of our roles, but it could also be through one of our other Community offerings.

We blogged about the power of our B2E Community earlier this year and talked about some of the other elements we offer such as our dedicated Community Manager ; our knowledge-sharing, content sessions; our articles and our networking drinks and socials.

We are delighted to now share details of another important free Community asset here at B2E – The Role Exchange (also known as the RX).

So what is it?

The RX is an Artificial Intelligence application that searches the UK major job boards every night for relevant interim consultancy roles that would be of interest to our Community and puts them into an easy to use format to reduce the time you take to search for a relevant role.

At B2E we gain no commercial incentive for collating and categorising these roles into a useful toolset – we are happy to help you find your next interim role whether it is one of our roles or via an alternative Job Board.

Just click this link and search through the 16 sub-categories to find the relevant interim consulting roles that have been sourced and grouped in one easy place for you to look at.  You’ll be asked to register if you’ve not used the RX before.  Then follow the details to the original advert on the Job Board where you can apply directly for the role.  (Note : In the majority of cases, B2E Consulting is not responsible for filling these roles (although our roles are also on there), so we will not be able to provide you with updates on the status of your application.   That will be the responsibility of the organisation who is advertising the specific job role.)

So.. click away and let the RX take away the hard work of looking for your next interim consulting role….

https://www.b2e-rxchange.com/

https://www.b2econsulting.com/data-protection-policy/

About the author, Nicola Smith

Nicola is a member of the B2E Account Management team & has been a homeworker for the last 3+ years with us, as well as a regular homeworker for other clients, juggling work and family life. Her background is in People & Change Management having worked as a consultant at Accenture for 12+ years prior to starting a family.

When it comes to applying for jobs, a good CV is your golden ticket. It opens doors, and it gets you in front of hiring managers. But to do so, it has to be well constructed, designed with a purpose, and compelling, too.

Gone are the days when a CV was simply a list of past jobs and accomplishments. Now, it’s a calling card, a piece of branding that communicates who you are. Let’s look at 5 things to think about when writing a CV…

1. Your Story

This is perhaps the most important aspect of your CV: your story. When writing your CV, think about how each part ties together to create a story that people can buy into. You want each job to clearly show progression forwards, and each piece of information needs to lead on from the preceding paragraph. This creates a piece of writing that hiring managers actually want to read. Your story matters, it’s what makes you unique. Make sure your CV captures it well.

2. The Basics

Once you have an idea of your story and how you want to tell it, make sure you read over your CV carefully. A misplaced word or a typo will make you look sloppy and unprofessional. Neither of these are good impressions to give a potential employer. Fortunately there are some great free online tools you can use to ensure you write flawlessly. Grammarly is an excellent option for spelling, and you guessed it, grammar. The Hemmingway App is useful for analysing your writing for clarity.

3. Your Purpose

In most cases, it’s worth tailoring, or even completely rewriting your CV, with whatever job you’re applying for in mind. Your CV should always be written with a purpose and that purpose should match up with the job you’re applying for. Your CV must be designed with the job description in mind and you need to clearly show how your skills and accomplishments will benefit a potential employer. Don’t leave them guessing! This also shows a potential employer that you’ve done your research, too.

4. Contact Information

This seems self explanatory, but including as much contact information as possible can make a big difference. This includes your LinkedIn page, any social sites that you use professionally, your mobile number, your personal/company website… the list goes on. But the more information you provide here, the higher the chance of a prospective employer looking you up. Just make sure everything is ship shape before you send them off to look over your online presence!

5. Your Work History

Obviously your CV will detail your work history, but it’s important to dig a little deeper than simply an overview of the company you worked for. What did you do there? What skills did you learn? What projects did you implement or work on? Make sure that the examples you pick are relevant to the job you’re applying for, and use each job to show why you’d be an excellent choice for the role in question.

The role of the CV is to get you as far as the interview — after that you are selling yourself in person. If your CV isn’t getting you invited to interview, perhaps it needs a rethink. B2E Consulting offers a free invitation to a webinar based workshop where CVs are peer reviewed for content, style and impact — contact Hugh Abbott on 07917 322 808 or [email protected] for more information.

About the author

Known to put words on paper, Andy Mckendry is a freelance writer and editor with a MA in Professional Writing -writing in conjunction with B2E Consulting (www.b2econsulting.com) — THE Place for Interim Consulting.

What should you wear to your next interview? Dressing for interview success is a tricky one for candidates. Getting it right can make all the difference to making the best first impression. So, to help you do just that, we’ve consulted friend of B2E Consulting, Caroline Tweddle, a professional image consultant. Here are 5 tips to help you look the part for your next job interview!

1. Culture Club

This is more of a guiding thought, and one to use to contextualise the points that come next. Do your research on the company you’re interviewing for. Are they casual or smart? If you show up wearing a suit to a trendy tech startup where everyday is dress down Fridays, then it’s immediately clear that you don’t ‘get’ the company and its culture. Likewise, jeans and a t-shirt for a managerial interview at an established fin-tech company won’t do you any favours. So, match your attire to the workplace you’re interviewing for.

2. Colour Coding

The colours you pick will shape how the hiring manager sees you. Dark colours come across as more authoritative, whereas lighter colours are considered to be more approachable. Wearing a light blue shirt or blouse with a black jacket is a good combination.

Your initial impression is professional thanks to the black jacket, but after handshakes and formalities are done, and you sit down for the interview itself, take off your jacket. The lighter coloured top will help to break the ice and foster a friendlier impression, creating a better atmosphere for conversation.

When picking your colour combination, consider the 75% — 25% rule. This means opt for 75% neutral or darker colours and 25% lighter colours.

3.Plain Works Best

That distinctive patterned top you want to wear? Leave it at home. Anything floral, patterned, or eye catching is best to avoid, as it will only distract the interviewer. You want them to focus on you, not the clothes you’re wearing. So, avoid anything too bright or definitive. Instead, opt for conservative clothing choices.

This means, unless you’re applying for a job in the fashion industry, don’t wear anything too trendy either. Often, interviewers are looking for signs you’ll fit into their workplace, so any clothing that stands out too much means you’re less likely to slot into their culture.

This is true of the shoes you choose to wear. Trainers are not the best choice. Instead, select a pair of plain shoes that aren’t especially noticeable. Make sure they’re in a good state of repair, polished, and if you’re wearing a belt, match the shoes to the colour of the belt.

4. Describe Yourself in Three Words

When picking out your outfit for your next job interview, take a moment to define the impression you want to give. Use three words to describe how you want to come across and use them to review your clothing choices. This works especially well if you match these three words to the values of the company you’re interviewing for.

By doing so, you’ll find it much easier to pick out a relevant outfit that enables you to make the very best first impression. Keep in mind, though, that you should always feel comfortable in the clothes you select. So, if you end up with a collection of clothes that don’t sit quite right with who you are, go back to the drawing board. Confidence sells. If you’re constantly readjusting your clothing during the interview, then hiring managers will quickly note you’re uncomfortable and this will have a negative impact on their opinion of your suitability for the role.

5. Some Housekeeping Rules

To round it all up then, once you’ve selected an outfit you’re comfortable in, that matches the culture of the place you’re interviewing for, and that conveys the best impression, take a step back. Try on the outfit and assess yourself in a full-length mirror. Does the outfit work? Do you feel confident and comfortable in it? Be honest here and evaluate your clothing choices as critically as possible. Does everything fit correctly, and are the colours matched well? Once you’re happy with your appearance, make sure there’s enough time for all the admin stuff: ironing, dry cleaning, and polishing up shoes.

Now you’re happy with the outfit, the last piece of advice: return to those three words you picked. Have you met the ‘brief’? If so, you’re good to go. So, dress up, suit up, and look the part. You can now focus on the actual interview, the questions, and the answers!

Of course, what you wear to an interview shouldn’t matter as much as what’s on your CV. But it does. First impressions count and the best impression is one you control. So, shape how you want to be defined and use the above advice, with big thanks to Caroline Tweddle, to help you land that job!

About the contributor, Caroline Tweddle

Caroline is both an image consultant and a freelance event manager with many years experience of working within a corporate environment. She is committed to creating the right impression whether it be working with an individual or delivering a client event. She works with women and men, helping them to identify their own personal branding and guiding them in creating the right impression, leading to increased confidence as well as saving them time and money. As a freelance event manager, Caroline has over 12 years’ experience of working with a professional services organisation, helping them in creating the right impression for their clients through their strategic client event programme.