Post by Deborah Udy Okusaga Akanne (@deborah_udy_okusaga)
Because It's A Great Trust! That Answer Just Told The Panel You Didn't Research Them.
"Why do you want to work for us?"
It feels like the easiest question in the interview. It is, statistically, one of the most badly answered.
Most candidates answer with something generic enough to apply to literally any NHS Trust in the country: strong reputation, good training opportunities, committed to patient care. Every Trust would say all three of those things about itself. Saying them back changes nothing — it tells the panel you didn't actually look past the job advert.
Here's what the panel is genuinely trying to find out with this question: have you done the work to understand this specific department, and can you connect your own genuine motivation to something real about this specific place, rather than reciting values language you found on their website five minutes before the interview.
The answer that scores high does three things. It names something specific and verifiable about the Trust or department — a named service development, a specific clinical specialism, a named consultant's subspecialty interest, a real statistic about their patient population or outcomes.
It connects that specific detail to something genuinely true about the candidate's own career direction, not a forced link. And it closes with a concrete sense of what the candidate believes they can contribute, not just what they hope to receive.
Compare: "I want to work here because of your excellent reputation in cardiac care" against "I want to work here because your department runs a structured CRT optimisation clinic alongside complex device follow-up, and I'm specifically building toward subspecialty cardiac physiology experience as the next deliberate step in my training — this is one of very few departments locally where I could genuinely develop that."
The second answer could only be given by someone who actually researched this specific department. That is precisely the point.
DM me "WHYUS" and I'll send you a structured method for researching any Trust properly before an interview, in under thirty minutes.
Post 4 at 2pm: I'm walking through exactly what your CESR portfolio assessors are looking for in each Capability in Practice — and the one mistake that quietly weakens almost every overseas consultant's submission.
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