Tag Archives: Career advice

How to Detect the Interviewer’s Personality

I wonder about his personality

How to detect the interviewer’s personality is not an easy task. During all of my corporate working years, my subordinates and associates heard me say, “Nobody impresses me the first 60 days on the job.” I must have said that dozens of times because I truly believe the thought. Basically, via that sentence I was expressing the concept that the impression one makes in the job interview doesn’t always pan out in real life on the job after, say, 60 days, once reality begins to set in. At times, the real person appears to be very different from the one that made certain impressions during the interview process.

I am a career coach focusing on the specialty of the interviewing process. I teach clients by practicing mock interviews with them so they can become appealing to cadres of interviewers. Those interviewers of course have various personalities and wide-ranging needs, and a candidate that is one size fits all will not fare well without being able to assess and then adapt to the interviewer’s style and interests. For example, the interests of the hiring manager are different from (1) those of the human resources interviewer and (2) those of potential future peers and (3) those of the hiring manager’s own supervisor.

How can you find out the style of the interviewer?

Many of us have developed through the years an intuition for assessing people we talk with. Some of us are better at such assessment than others, and some of us are not so good at it. For those who feel challenged in this area, I prepared a short video, which is available via my LinkedIn profile under the Summary section. In this video, I describe four types of people who conduct interviews. Of course, no one type is pure, with only one type of personality; we each have in us a combination of personalities, but most of us have a dominant personality. Once you read the person interviewing you, the learned adaptation should come automatically. For example, if the interviewer is an executive interested only in brevity and the bottom line, then a candidate’s long-windedness is a prescription for failure. If the interviewer is the friendly type, feels talkative, and likes working in teams with others and a job candidate is too brief or focuses exclusively on self, which would not work out either.

Can you emulate a chameleon?

Please don’t misunderstand my intention. I am certainly not one who admires an insincere or fake personality. For me that would be an instant turnoff. But my suggestion for you is to learn how to change your communication style so as to adapt to or accommodate a variety of people and situations. In other words, a story can be told by emphasizing extensive and minute details in order to be thorough, or it can be summarized briefly and get quickly to the punch line. So, open your eyes and ears early into the interview, make an assessment of the person sitting on the other side of the desk, and respond in that interviewer’s style. Such a skill will bring you much closer to being liked—and hopefully, to receiving the job offer.

Do You Want a Job or the Right Job?

You want a great job and not any job.

Do you want a job or the right job? This a great question. As a career coach, I talk mostly with two kinds of people: employed or in transition to another job. Sadly, people in both groups have one thing in common: most of them are unhappy. For those in transition, the unhappiness is self-explanatory, but why such a high level of unhappiness for those who are lucky to have an employer?

Several recent articles cover this subject. People who still work spend longer hours at it, and they face higher levels of stress. There’s no question that employee satisfaction is at an all-time low and that it has an impact on people’s health as well as relationships with family and friends.

A study found that in the United States, 55% of employees were not satisfied with their jobs! This is the highest level of dissatisfaction ever recorded, and the trend toward such dissatisfaction has strengthened steadily in the past 25 years. That means that unhappiness in the workplace is not directly related to the current economic downturn.

Unhappiness at work is not isolated. Unfortunately, it affects not only the unhappy people themselves but also those surrounding them. A recent Swedish study found a direct link between one’s relationship with one’s manager and the impact that that relationship has on one’s health: men who had toxic supervisors increased their risk of heart attack by 50%. A different study revealed that people of average height who felt unhappy at work added as much as five pounds to their weight.

A different, long-term study dealing with the impact of unhappiness at work confirmed that there is a strong correlation between one’s job satisfaction and one’s life satisfaction. Clearly, our thoughts, our emotions, and our performance on the job affect our behaviors away from the job and thus are affecting our loved ones.

What a job seeker can learn from all this is that it is of utmost importance to find out about a company’s culture, about the work conditions there, and as much as possible about the person one will report to before accepting the job. The sad—but practical—part is that even if one gets a great job at a great company with a great boss, in today’s economy things change so fast, and many of those changes are totally out of the control of the employee. So, what does one need so that work life harmonizes relationships and doesn’t destroy them? Luck—lots of it.

How to Sell Yourself in a Job Interview

So, finally the phone rings and the caller ID displays the name of a company you sent your résumé to. The caller is from the company’s human resources department and wants to schedule you for an in-person interview. Fantastic, this is music to your ears, but what now? Are you prepared? Do you have time to get ready? More important, do you understand the interview process and in what context the company wants to explore your candidacy? Plus, also remember that such interviews are competitive. In other words, your résumé provided some clues about you that may fit the company’s need, the company’s culture, the skills sought, and so on, but in addition to exploring hiring possibilities with you, the company does so with several additional candidates as well. So now the question is, What can you do to maximize your chances?

Know your relationship with the interviewer

From the moment you hung up the phone with the person arranging the interview, this upcoming face-to-face meeting becomes the focal point of your next few days. Such is not the case, however, with the person who’s going to conduct the interview. For that person, the excitement about meeting with you is minimal—sometimes even to the point that the interviewer might not be prepared to conduct the interview. Sometimes the interviewer does not have with him a copy of your résumé—or even the job description!—and will just wing it, as they say. On top of that, you think that well-rehearsed answers to common interview questions are very convincing. Well, think again. The interviewer knows you came in to sell yourself and knows to expect from you many self-proclaimed adjectives about how great you are. But do you really think the interviewer believes everything you say? Well, maybe some of it—and probably more of it if you have factual examples and you describe them as viewed by others.

What’s actually important to the interviewer?

This is where the candidate is at a disadvantage. Don’t forget that the hiring manager initiated the quest for the “ideal candidate” because there’s a problem to solve. It’s most likely the hiring manager (or interviewer) did not agree to meet with you because of your beautiful hands—well, unless you’re a professional model and the company is selling, say, wristwatches.

Seriously, your focus should be on identifying what the hiring manager needs done. And most likely, that information does not get revealed even via a candid dialogue. The thing is that job descriptions are typically rather general by not highlighting the specifics that are in fact the driving forces behind the hiring process for the positions advertised. Additionally, a large survey conducted among human resources personnel and hiring managers exposed the fact that 100 percent of them were looking for candidate fit into their companies’ cultures. And 82 percent of interviewers said they look for passion and excitement in candidates. So, based on this information, you may think your past speaks very well and you’d therefore be a shoo-in for the position. Not so, says the survey, unless you fit into the culture and you exhibit passion and excitement while interviewing.

As a reader, you may have your own opinion. I’d welcome your comment.