WACC Students Get Job Interview Experience

Warsaw Area Career Center students were able to sharpen their interviewing skills during a workshop Wednesday.

There were community-led interviews with the 70 students in the Adult Roles and Responsibilities classes and the 12 students in the Job Achievement Graduates classes. This year, there were 25 various community leaders interviewing the juniors and seniors, said Dena Lancaster, Family and Consumer Science teacher.

Several years ago, Lancaster said the event was started because she wanted the students to learn not only to make resumes, but learn how to do interviews.

“Not only are they dressing for success, they’ve completed resumes, they’ve practiced interview skills. So when they’re meeting with the community leaders, the community leader kind of defined what that interview was going to look like – traditional, am I just going to give them pointers, am I going to act like they’re coming in for a position where I work – just to give them real world, hands-on this is how an interview should look like,” she said.

Every 10 minutes, the students met with a different community representative, so the students were meeting with four or five representatives. Some of the students are getting job offers, while “some of them are getting ‘here’s my card,’ some of them are getting ‘it was nice to meet you,’” she said.

A rubric was given to each representative. Lancaster said in the rubric, she’s not worried about the scoring, she looks more at the highlights: what the student did and didn’t do well and if the representative would hire that student. After the interviews are done, she meets with each student and goes over everything.

She said the event is put on twice a year and has probably been put on about 16 times.

She hopes from the event the student gets more confidence in their interviewing skills.

According to a list provided by Warsaw Community Schools, representatives from area businesses included Warsaw Community Schools, Zimmer Biomet, Work One, Community Grace of Warsaw, Male Fashions, Tom Farms, Flexaust, Bowen Center, EMT of Warsaw, Work Box Staffing, SB Communications LLC, Wagon Wheel, Grace College, Winona Lake Fire Department, Cable Bullet, Cardinal Center and the Justice Building.