About Interview Detectives

I'm Mike Jacobsen, the person behind Interview Detectives.

I'm a recruiter with nearly 30 years of professional experience. I created Interview Detectives to share practical application and interview advice from the perspective of someone who works directly in recruitment and understands how candidates are assessed.

I still work directly in recruitment today, which keeps me close to how employers assess candidates and what makes an application or interview answer stand out.

My Professional Background

My career has given me experience on both sides of recruitment: assessing candidates and being assessed as a candidate myself.

My professional background includes experience within the UK Civil Service, which is particularly relevant to the Civil Service application and interview guidance I produce through Interview Detectives.

I have also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

My professional qualifications include:

• Six Sigma Master Black Belt

• PRINCE2 Agile Foundation & Practitioner

You can see more about my professional background and current recruitment work on LinkedIn.

Civil Service Recruitment

Civil Service recruitment has become one of my main specialist areas.

I have spent years working with the Civil Service recruitment process and examining how candidates are assessed across different grades.

What interests me most is the gap between having good experience and presenting that experience in a way an assessor can actually score.

A candidate may have led a difficult piece of work, made an important decision or delivered an excellent result, yet still receive a poor score because the evidence is unclear or pitched at the wrong level.

That is the problem I focus on when working on Civil Service applications and interviews.

I look at what is actually being assessed, the level expected at the grade and whether the candidate has given the assessor enough evidence to award a strong score.

My Civil Service work covers behaviours, strengths, personal statements and interview preparation, with guidance assessed against the way candidates are being assessed today.

Recruitment From the Other Side of the Table

Working as a recruiter gives me a perspective that is sometimes missing from careers advice.

When you review applications or interview candidates, you quickly see that good recruitment answers are rarely about impressive wording.

They are about evidence.

You need to understand what the employer is looking for, choose experience that proves you can do it and explain your own contribution clearly enough that the person assessing you does not have to guess.

That principle sits behind the advice I give through Interview Detectives.

Published Author

I am also a published author of recruitment and interview preparation books.

My books are designed around the same practical approach I use on Interview Detectives: understanding what the interviewer is trying to establish and helping candidates build answers around their own experience.

You can view one of my published books on Amazon.

About Interview Detectives

I created Interview Detectives to make recruitment advice more useful.

The aim is to explain what candidates are actually being assessed on and show what strong evidence can look like, rather than relying on generic advice such as "use STAR" or "sell yourself."

The examples and guides on the site are there to help people understand the standard expected and then apply that to their own genuine experience.

Contact Me

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or use the contact form below.

Mike Jacobsen
Recruiter and Owner of Interview Detectives
Mike@InterviewDetectives.com