Breaking Into Repro: Preparing for a job interview
Interviewing for a new job is an exhilarating, exhausting, and vulnerable experience. You’re going in front of strangers—or sometimes colleagues you’ve known for years—and putting yourself out there in hopes of proving that they should take a chance on you. You’re trying to lay out your credentials without sounding too eager, and trying to be honest about your growing edges without making your potential employer nervous. It’s a tough place to be in. We understand that because we’ve been there.
Here are a few tips to help you get ready for a job interview in the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but we hope it helps you feel prepared.
Be ready to talk about the why. If this is your first or your tenth job in the reproductive health, rights, and justice field, it’s still important to be able to explain why you’re committed to doing this work. Take some time to brainstorm this before you get to the interview. Make a bulleted list, get down to the real why, not just the line you share with your parents or strangers on the subway. If you feel comfortable, be authentic. Is it because you helped a friend get an abortion in high school? Or because you saw your single mom struggle to make ends meet growing up? Remember, the folks on the hiring side have heard the standard cliches before -- think about why you, specifically, are drawn to reproductive health, rights, and justice, and connect your passion back to the job. Why is someone with your experience, skills, and smarts the best fit? What is it about your past that has lead you to the here and now? You don’t need to bear your soul, of course. Share whatever you’re comfortable with, that will both help you stand out as a candidate and drive home how much you care.
Do your research. Spend some time reading up on the website and social media of the organization before you go into the interview. If you can, find the department you’re interviewing with and read about their most recent projects. What interests you? What excites you? What might you do differently, if you were there now? See if they list their staff and board members, and skim over their backgrounds and areas of expertise. Are these people you’d want to go to lunch with? Learn from? Mentor, and receive mentorship? Take a look and see who they list as their organizational partners, and explore their websites, too. Being able to articulate the organization’s mission and vision, why you’re inspired by it, and how you think your future fits in will give you a big advantage in the interview.
Learn the basic context. Is the organization engaged in abortion-related state policy work? Look up the latest statistics for your state from Guttmacher. Are they involved in abortion provision? Make sure you know what happens during an abortion, who the other clinics are in the area, and what it takes to get an abortion where you live. Does the organization use a reproductive health, rights, or justice framework? Learn the difference. You don’t need to know everything about an organization or movement, of course, but showing that you care enough about the work to have done your due diligence shows commitment. If the organization is in a new field for you, don’t be afraid to ask ahead of time if there are resources you can look at beforehand.
Review the job description before the interview. Make sure you’re familiar with the tasks and can speak to your relevant experience for each one, as much as you can. If it helps, go through the job description line by line and think of relevant examples you can discuss for each task. Remember, even if you haven’t done this exact job before, think about the roles you’ve had in the past that might be relevant in skillset. Customer service or waitressing skills, for example, can easily translate to canvassing skills or clinic intake.
Reflect on your values. What is most important to you at a job? What might you be willing to let go of in order to get this job? What are your must-haves at work, and what are your deal breakers? Some advice to consider: “All nonprofits are dysfunctional in some way or another and figuring out where to hang your hat requires one to assess whether the level and type of dysfunction is personally tolerable.”
Practice! See here for our suggestions on questions to practice before the interview, including questions to ask your interviewers. The more comfortable you get answering questions on your own, the easier it’ll be in the interview itself.
After the interview:
Send a follow up thank you email. It’s a nice touch to send your interviewers a note of gratitude for the time they took to interview you. Keep it relatively short and mention why you continue to be excited to be in the running for the position. The more specific the better. It’s okay to share any thoughts you may have forgotten to mention that they asked you about, but again, keep it short and sweet.
Reflect back on your values and your interview experience. Did they keep you waiting in the lobby for 30 minutes? Did they offer you water? Were you the only person of color you saw in the entire office? Were people talking to each other or silent and siloed? What does your gut say about the experience? Remember, this is an opportunity for you to shine and also a chance for you to get a peek into the workplace culture.
Did we miss something? Let us know what your tips are for job interviews.