HOW TO GET IT RIGHT MOST OF THE TIME

Considering the many hundreds of people I meet every year who believe that they don’t perform well at interviews, there is clearly a widespread need to achieve some kind of improvement.

You don’t need to become the perfect interviewee (and I’m not sure such a person exists – at least I haven’t met them yet), but you do need to be completely honest about the areas you could improve. That’s an important starting point, because even small changes in your approach will make a difference. So, simply start out by being prepared to make a change.

If you have little experience and you feel very nervous in a job interview, good news – you can make enormous improvements in a short space of time because you don’t have interview habits to shake off. If, however, you are a seasoned veteran, you might find it harder to kick the bad habits that have been holding you back. All too often I meet people who have skills in abundance, but they continuously fail at interview. Why? Because they are stuck in one interview ‘mode’, which they remain in – even when they can see it fails to get the right results.

They nod politely when tips are offered, but their actual strategy is ‘I know what I am doing, so leave me alone’. They go into automatic mode in the interview room, putting in the same dull performance, making the same mistakes. Even the most accomplished public speakers refine and tweak what they do and keep themselves open to the possibility that there is at least one thing they could do completely differently. Similarly we all need to keep sharp by keeping an open mind.

The changes you are likely to make are around awareness, mindset and technique: awareness of how the interview is experienced by the people in the room making the decisions; rethinking your mindset (particularly if you’re starting out with ‘I don’t interview well’ running through your head – see Chapter 6 for more about adopting the right thinking before interviews); and, finally, technique – the good news is that this can be learned – you don’t have to be a natural.

LEVERAGE

If your interviews are not translating into job offers it’s easy to believe that you have to change everything – not just what you say, but who you are. That’s almost always impossible. You don’t have to re-invent yourself. What you do need to do is change the small things that really matter. Just altering one or two things (rethinking the way you start an interview, talking about your best skills, or learning good stories) can make the difference between a lacklustre attempt and a star performance, moving you very suddenly from ‘no’ to a ‘definite maybe’.

One of the small things you can do is read this chapter twice – you will find at least one thing here that makes a difference immediately.

WHAT A GREAT PERFORMANCE LOOKS LIKE TO A DECISION MAKER

What do top interviewees do differently? You might think that they pitch themselves aggressively, or they have pre-rehearsed, perfect answers. You might think that they can deliver a three-minute career summary at the drop of a hat. You might think that they are only great at interview because they have great things to talk about. You might feel they are better educated, more articulate, more glamorous than you. Wrong.

This is what managers and HR specialists say about the candidates who brighten up their day:

• Relaxed enough so that they seem themselves and build some kind of relationship in the room.
• Nervous and modest enough to show that the interview is important.
• Careful listeners, focusing on the questions asked.
• Well prepared – they have thought in detail about the organisation and the job. They have prepared material for questions they believe will come up.
• Clearly and genuinely interested in the job as a worthwhile activity, not just as a means of getting a pay cheque.
• Capable of describing their own behaviours, working style and strengths, showing that they have learned from experience.
• Well equipped with a fund of short, memorable examples which showcase their skills and motivation.
• Armed with a small number of very relevant questions.
• On time, on message, and looking and sounding the part from the moment they walk into the building.

Is there anything in this list that you really can’t do?

‘IT’S AN INTERVIEW, NOT A PERFORMANCE’

I hear this line from people who think an interview is just about content. They couldn’t be more wrong. Too many people approach interviews passively – ‘I’ll just turn up and respond’. This is the perfect strategy for failure. Would you use the same approach for a wedding speech? For an interview to approve your citizenship? For a driving test? For a funding application? There are many occasions when active commitment matters – the way you say what you say, and the evidence you choose to deliver – and a job interview should be close to the top of this list.

An interview is always a performance – you have to command your audience’s attention, you are on show, everything about you is being observed. An average candidate leaves much of that to chance, or trusts that ‘being yourself’ wins the day. More effective candidates know that it’s the details that tip the balance in their favour.

Let’s take another kind of planned performance – a speech. As soon as you stand up the small details are noticed – how you walk up to the lectern, your clothes, hair, glasses, physical confidence – these are all assessed in micro-seconds. The audience then listens intently to your first sentence. If you say ‘Is this microphone working?’ or ‘Sorry, my notes are in the wrong order’, your listeners form an immediate conclusion, because that’s what we’re conditioned to do every time we put our attention onto encountering someone new.

In contrast, if the speaker stands very still, makes eye contact and says ‘Thank you for being here today. My name is Bill, and I want to talk to you about rebuilding this community’, the chances are that you decide to buy into the person and the message – immediately. The same thing happens in the opening moments of the interview, which is why Chapter 10 tackles the issue head on.

SEEING THE INTERVIEW THROUGH THE EYES OF THE DECISION MAKER

It may sound painfully obvious, yet consistently, and for years, the most common complaints I hear from HR staff, line managers and external recruiters are that candidates:

1. haven’t thought enough about the content of the job;
2. haven’t matched the job to their own experience;
3. don’t package their experience in terms which motivate the recruiter to make a positive decision.

This is the paradox: employers say candidates don’t match themselves to the requirements of the job; candidates say this advice is obvious. Both realities co-exist. Perhaps it’s because an interview looks deceptively simple, but there is a huge gulf between what interviewers want and what candidates do.

If this is so evident, what does it tell us? That many people choose to be under-prepared. They choose not to make obvious, organised connections between what the organisation is looking for and what they have to offer. Why on earth would they do that?

When you’re hyping yourself up for a job interview it’s easy to forget the perspective of the decision maker. Candidates often fail to appreciate that recruitment is not an inspiring business. Reading CVs, for example, is not something many people look forward to. Although recruiters often talk about enjoying meeting people, interviewing can feel like a chore. So, simply being an interesting candidate will help.

You also need to be more memorable than other candidates. Over 25 years or so I have asked recruiters what impresses them about candidates, and much of their feedback informs this book.

Most of their feedback is about people being people, not about recruitment issues. Interviewers, for example, are more likely to remember you if they like you, or if you share common interests. They are more likely to remember you if you get two or three key messages across. They are more likely to recall you, sadly, if you are the first or the last candidate of the day.

They will also remember you for all the wrong reasons if you immediately make a poor impression, never relax, or say something negative. Beyond that, the dull, average and nondescript is all very quickly forgotten.

Robin Rose, Careers Consultant to Manchester Business School, suggests ‘it also helps if you present as someone who is not unlucky. So even if you have been through difficult times, if you say “I was lucky because ...” and show how you learned and bounced back, you make a strong impression. Some candidates talk about a long history of business and personal setbacks and just come across as downbeat and unlucky.’

JOB INTERVIEWS – MYTHS AND REALITY