You’ve submitted your Core Surgical Training application via the Oriel Recruitment Portal some time last November? You’ve uploaded your answers to the self-assessment questions on the evidence portal in December? And now you are one of the 1,100 highest-scoring candidates and have been invited for an online interview?
Congratulations! You have put yourself in a great position to land your dream job.
There are still a few steps ahead and it’s worth marking your calendar with the key dates in the 2022 core surgical training application timeline if you haven’t done so already. Your next step will be the online interview in the first and second week of February. To succeed at your interview, it’s going to be important that you know what to expect. Your online interview will last 20 minutes and will be conducted on Microsoft Teams. In two back-to-back sections you will spend 10 minutes showcasing your clinical knowledge and judgement and then 10 minutes showcasing your management and leadership skills.
For the clinical station you will need to be able to demonstrate:
- Your ability to apply sound clinical knowledge and judgement to problems
- Your ability to prioritise clinical need
- Your ability to maximise safety and minimise risk
- Your recognition of, and ability to undertake the initial management of, an acutely ill patient
For the management station you will need to be able to demonstrate:
- A capacity to communicate well and adapt language to the situation, as appropriate
- An ability to build rapport, listen, persuade and negotiate
- Capacity to use logical, analytical thinking to make decisions
- Capacity to take in others’ perspectives and treat others with understanding; demonstrating respect for all
- Capacity to work effectively with others
- Capacity to manage/prioritise time and information effectively
- Vigilance and situational awareness
You can read about tried-and-tested frameworks to demonstrate these skills in our Core Surgical Training online interview course. For each of the interview stations, you want to think about the approach to the station, the knowledge needed to perform well, and then to actually practice that station.
At stinterview.com we provide realistic scenarios for peer-to-peer interview practice either using our on-demand scenarios in our question bank or at our live mock interview workshops. At our workshops you will be paired with a fellow CST Interview subscriber and split into a virtual breakout room. Each of you will get to act as interview candidate and examiner under timed conditions and using new interview scenarios newly released for this workshop. All our mock interview workshops are hosted by top scoring CT trainees and they will be happy to share their experience and top tips on the day.
The interview workshops are free for question bank subscribers.
Join us for our pre-interview practice sessions on 4th and 6th February 2022!
Friday, 4 February 2022 6.00PM – 7.30PM GMT
Sunday, 6 February 2022 10.00AM – 11.30AM GMT
How do I secure a place? Fill out our registration form at https://lu.ma/cst1 – first come first serve basis.
The interview workshop will be hosted on Zoom.
We hope to see you there!
stinterview.com team