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Acing Your Trial Presentation

Sabrina
Last updated: November 19, 2020
 •  4 min read

At Xendit we have a unique recruitment stage called work trial. If you have read this post about our recruitment guidelines, this should come as no surprise to you.

Why a work trial is necessary

Xendit is the home of SEA’s best talent (otherwise known as honey badgers) and we’d like to keep it that way. In order to make sure that we select the best and the brightest future honey badgers out there, we will have shortlisted candidates perform a series of tasks for the span of 1-2 days. Think test drive, but for your career growth. It’s also helpful for candidates to get a taste of what Xendit’s life is all about before deciding on an offer.

Typically. a work trial begins with a kickoff meeting in the morning of your trial day. The hiring manager or trial PIC will brief you about the tasks that you must complete within your determined trial day(s). Afterwards, you’ll have more meetings with other Xenpeeps who will become your future stakeholders if you get hired later. At the end of the day, you’ll have your presentation session, at which you’ll present about the trial deliverables or the tasks that you have completed. Everybody whom you’ve had meetings before will more likely attend your presentation. If you’re applying for a sales role, our VP of Sales or CEO might come to your presentation. Or, if you’re trialling for an engineering position, you might see our CTO as one of your presentation session’s attendees. The people attending your presentation session may not be your direct supervisors/peers, but they are your future stakeholders and thus involved in the hiring decision making process. The presentation session is considered as the make-or-break moment that will determine the success of your work trial performance.

Sliding your thoughts into… Google Slides

trial presentation at xendit

We use all things Google in our day-to-day work life. Meeting materials are usually presented in the format of a 6-pager or Google Slides. If your presentation is going to be laden with words, bullet points, and tables, a 6-pager might be good for you. But if you want to feature images, graphs, pie charts, and not wanting to be too wordy, then use Google Slides. It is the most common tool to visualize your ideas in a work trial setting. Feel free to consult with your hiring manager/trial PIC about the outcomes expected.

A work trial presentation session usually lasts for 60 minutes so you might want to consider putting together some materials that could easily be delivered by you and digested by the attendees in that time window. You also need to allocate a few minutes for a Q&A session. Typically Q&As are done in the session’s last 10 minutes. So be mindful of how timely you should deliver your presentation. I have personally seen a candidate who spent 10 minutes explaining one single introduction alone, out of 18 other slides that she hadn’t yet gone through.

Speaking of the number of slides, we don’t really determine how many of them you should make for your presentation. We really want to see how well you interpret the tasks and advice given. However before you create 48 slides of your brilliant ideas, you might want to think, is it really necessary to present this many? Can some key points in slides 8 and 9 be merged into slide 7 because they’re basically the same thing? Does this slide look too cramped with words, that you might need to take down some from the slides and instead verbally explain it?

Design-wise, we have our own Xendit template deck that you can use for the layout of your presentation. it has the Xendit-style color palette, flow structure to help you guide your thinking, the fonts that we typically use, as well as the graphics. You can ask your trial PIC as to where you can access the file.

trial presentation template at xendit

Besides how well you put your ideas into slides, how you deliver them will also be evaluated by the attendees. So you might want to pay attention to  things like how fast you speak and how elaborate you are in describing the key points in your slides. 

For some sales roles, there’s a possibility that the hiring managers would want to do a role play with you. For instance, they’ll play the role of a challenging client to convince. They might want to evaluate how well you are in understanding their situation and pain points, being composed amid crisis or “fire”, and what solutions you can bring to the table.

We hope by reading this you’re able to produce top quality presentation material, deliver it seamlessly at the end of your work trial, and create a lasting good impression. See you at your work trial!

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