IMPRESSING AT A JOB INTERVIEW

As an interviewer, the most frustrating thing is to see a great candidate blow an interview by making simple mistakes. The tips in this blog post will help you avoid the most common pitfalls.

After all your diligent preparation for your interview, you should be in a great position to impress the panel with your expertise, experience, communication skills and knowledge. Below are my top tips for how to perform during an interview.

Think Before You Speak

If there is only one piece of advice you take away from reading this page it is to learn to pause and think before you start answering an interview question.

Here is the scenario which is witnessed in interview rooms across the world every day. The interviewer asks a question. The candidate smiles, nods politely and then launches into their response. After a few seconds a pained look starts to spread across the candidate’s face as their brain realises that it’s not really sure where it is planning to go with this answer. The candidate’s brain realises that it just needs a few seconds to get its thoughts in order, but the mouth is in mid-sentence and doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of stopping. It is very difficult to talk about one thing while thinking of another, and so by this point the chance of the candidate being able to construct a good answer to the question is very low.

Compare this with the scenario of someone absorbing the question they’ve just been asked, taking a few seconds to construct their answer, and only when they are ready, starting to talk in a coherent way. If you’re worried that pausing before your answer will seem awkward, then ask the panel for a few seconds to think about your answer. This will be seen as a sign of maturity and confidence, not a weakness. 

Read Your Audience

By far the best way to see how you’re doing in an interview is to take a look at the interviewers’ body language. You may be thinking “well yeah, that’s pretty obvious”, and it should be. Yet time after time, I sit in interviews listening to candidates drone on, looking at my colleagues on the interview panel who are showing very unsubtle signs of boredom, irritation, anguish and even despair, and yet the candidate continues as if we’re all hanging off their every word. 

Being able to read both verbal and non-verbal cues is a massive advantage when being interviewed. Some common cues to look for in the interview panel that should indicate that you’re not doing well and need to change tactics include classic signs of boredom (e.g. yawning), reading the papers in front of them rather than listening to you, a negative body position (turning or leaning away from you), not asking follow-up questions, interrupting you while you’re in mid answer, or highlighting negative aspects of the job (this is something panel members tend to do unconsciously as a way of trying to put a candidate you don’t like off).

Positive cues that show you are on the right track include leaning in towards you, nodding, asking specific follow-up questions (this shows that they have listened to your answer), or laughing.

Interruptions

If a panel member feels the need to interrupt a candidate, this is a bad sign. Most interviewers will start with subtle non-verbal interruptions if a candidate is talking too much or giving incoherent answers. If this fails, they will move to polite interruptions and finally firm interruptions. If you find yourself being interrupted, you need to make a mental note of it and adapt the way you answer questions accordingly. Having to interrupt a candidate more than a couple of times during an interview is a sure sign that the candidate will not be hired. 

Keep to Time

Keeping to time during an interview is really important. Both you and the interview panel should share the same goal of getting through the pre-amble, presentation or exercise (if there is one), interview questions, your questions, and the closing comments within a given time window. 

Candidates who understand that the panel don’t have all day and keep their responses to a sensible length will automatically score some points with the interviewers. 

However, candidates who give very long-winded answers to even the simplest questions early on, put themselves at a massive disadvantage. If I’ve got 25 minutes to interview you, and despite my best efforts to curtail you, you have spent 10 minutes answering a basic warm up question, then I will be forced to try and make up time later on. I may have to do this by skipping over some of the questions I was planning to ask. When this happens, you lose the opportunity to sell yourself. Unfortunately, it will probably be that the one question you were desperately hoping for, and had the perfect answer for, is the one that gets missed in order to finish the interview on time.