How to prepare for an interview

Why prepare?

There are three main reasons.

One: Although you can’t guess every question you might be asked, if you are prepared you can tailor your answers to fit.

Two: If you’re well prepared, you will have more confidence and this will affect the way you come across.

Three: Attitude matters. Prospective employers will choose a not-quite-perfect but willing candidate over a brilliant one who obviously isn’t bothered.

What to prepare?

Find out about the organisation

• Visit the website and read any materials that you have been sent. If nothing has been sent. phone the company to ask for any reading matter they may have.

• Talk to anyone you know who works there already.

Find out about the job

• Ask for a job description or specification. This will tell you the duties that go with the job.

• Talk to anyone you know who is familiar with the work you may be doing.

Find out what the employer is looking for

• Make a list of the skills specified in the job advertisement.

• Think of examples to back up claims that you have these skills.

You can then answer most of the questions that will come up, such as ‘Tell me more about how you work in a team’.

Add in a few ‘lessons learned’ — what you did and how you might have done it better. You can also outline any voluntary work you have done for a charity, or any experience of paid work in an unrelated sector.

Preparing for other kinds of questions

Interviewers are also looking for someone who is likely to stay with the organisation and progress within it. Prepare to answer questions about your ambitions for the future.

You may also be asked to account for gaps in your career history, if you have any. Be positive and accentuate the learning or experience you gained during these periods.

Preparing your own questions

• Do ask technical questions about software, systems and structures and how things are done.

• Do ask about possibilities for training.

• Don’t ask about salary unless you have been offered the job.

When you’ve prepared as much as this, you’ve got a good chance of success.

Good luck!

Setting up your own business

Here are some ideas about how you should start:

Know your market

So you know what you want to sell — the most important thing is that it should be something that people want to buy. Start by thinking about who your target customers are. Arc they people who live locally? Are they a particular group of people?

Now look at your competitors. What is different about what you will be doing and how will you persuade people to come to you instead of going to someone who is already established?

How will you reach the customers?

Will you promote your product by phoning people, or visiting local traders, or advertising in magazines or online? Will your delivery system be direct or through shops?

How will your business work?

Now think about what your business needs to succeed. Do you need to look for premises or can you work from home? Do you need to invest in manufacturing equipment to start with?

Is the business something that you can do on your own, or if you get more work will you be looking to recruit staff? If so, what skills would they need?

Whether you’re a sole operator or are looking to recruit a team, effective management is essential.

The law regulates how companies are run and you need to set aside the time to ace that this is done properly, in relation to issues like accounting, insurance and tax.

The money!

As you are working out the prices for your products, you need to make sure you build in all your costs. Remember you will probably need help from an accountant at least once a year, so build that in too, and do a forecast of how much money you think will flow in and out of the business. Look at what you expect to happen over the next three years — and work out what you need to do to break even, as well as the turnover that you hope to achieve to give you a profit. If you think you will need to find some funding to help get the business off the ground, how much will you need and who will you approach to get it?

Your business plan

Now write it all up and call it a business plan

Understanding hares

With its wild stare, swift speed and secretive nature, the UK’s brown hare is the rabbit’s mysterious cousin. Even in these days of agricultural intensification, the hare is still to be seen in open countryside, but its numbers are falling.

A Like many herbivores, brown hares spend a relatively large amount of their time feeding. They prefer to do this in the dark, but when nights are short, their activities do spill into daylight hours. Wherever they live, hares appear to have a fondness for fields with a variety of vegetation, for example short as well as longer clumps of grasses. Studies have demonstrated that they benefit from uncultivated land and other unploughed areas on farms, such as field margins. Therefore, if farmers provided patches of woodland in areas of pasture as well as assorted crops in arable areas, there would be year-round shelter and food, and this could be the key to turning round the current decline in hare populations.

B Brown hares have a number of physical adaptations that enable them to survive in open countryside. They have exceptionally large ears that move independently, so that a range of sounds can be pinpointed accurately. Positioned high up on their heads, the hares’ large golden eyes give them 360° vision, making it hard to take a hare by surprise. Compared to mammals of a similar size, hares have a greatly enlarged heart and a higher volume of blood in their bodies, and this allows for superior speed and stamina. In addition, their legs are longer than those of a rabbit, enabling hares to run more like a dog and reach speeds of up to 70 kph.

C Brown hares have unusual lifestyles for their large size, breeding from a young age and producing many leverets (babies). There are about three litters of up to four leverets every year. Both males and females are able to breed at about seven months old, but they have to be quick because they seldom live for more than two years. The breeding season runs from January to October, and by late February most females are pregnant or giving birth to their first litter of the year. So it seems strange, therefore, that it is in March, when the breeding season is already underway, that hares seemingly go mad: boxing, dancing, running and fighting. This has given rise to the age-old reference to ‘mad March hares’. In fact, boxing occurs throughout the breeding season, but people tend to see this behaviour more often in March. This is because in the succeeding months, dusk – the time when hares are most active – is later, when fewer people are about. Crops and vegetation are also taller, hiding the hares from view. Though it is often thought that they are males fighting over females, boxing hares are usually females fighting off males. Hares are mostly solitary, but a female fights off a series of males until she is ready to mate. This occurs several times through the breeding season because, as soon as the female has given birth, she will be ready to mate again.

D But how can females manage to do this while simultaneously feeding themselves and rearing their young? The reason is that hares have evolved such self-sufficient young. Unlike baby rabbits, leverets are born furry and mobile. They weigh about 100 g at birth and are immediately left to their own devices by their mothers. A few days later, the members of the litter creep away to create their own individual resting places, known as ‘forms’. Incredibly, their mother visits them only once every 24 hours and, even then, she only suckles them for a maximum of five minutes each. This lack of family contact may seem harsh to us, but it is a strategy that draws less attention from predators. At the tender age of two weeks, leverets start to feed themselves, while still drinking their mother’s milk. They grow swiftly and are fully weaned at four weeks, reaching adult weight at about six months.

E Research has shown that hares’ milk is extremely rich and fatty, so a little goes a long way. In order to produce such nutritious milk, females need a high-quality, high-calorie diet. Hares are selective feeders at the best of times: unlike many herbivores, they can’t sit around waiting to digest low-quality food — they need high-energy herbs and other leaves in order to sprint. This causes them problems when faced with the smallest alterations in food availability and abundance. So, as well as reductions in the diversity of farmland habitat, the decline in the range of food plants is injurious to hares.

F The rapid turnaround in the breeding cycle suggests that hares should, in principle, be able to increase their populations quickly to exploit new habitats. They certainly used to: studies show that hares evolved on the open plains and spread rapidly westward from the Black Sea after the last ice age (though they were probably introduced to Britain as a species to be hunted for the pot by the Romans). But today’s hares are thwarted by the lack of rich farmland habitat. When the delicate herbs and other plants they rely on are ploughed up or poisoned by herbicides, these wonderful, agile runners disappear too, taking with them some of the wildness from our lives.