Tag Archives: Interview skills

The Secret Behind an Excellent Interview

The secret is: be brief

What is the secret behind an excellent interview? Be brief. Now that the secret is revealed, I will support my tenet with a few facts. Actually, you can do what I did: I watched some television with a stopwatch to see how long an answer people provide for a question. As samples, I used, among others, Presidents Obama and Clinton because I consider them excellent communicators with media people in a question-and-answer setup. Typically, one of their answers would be 30 to 90 seconds long, with very few deviations. In order to get to such a level of excellence, one needs two ingredients: innate talent and lots of practice. Not all of us are born with this type of talent, but all of us can achieve it through practice and in fact should if we want to excel at interviews.

As an interview coach, I help people become better at answering difficult interview questions. I’ve found it interesting that regardless of people’s professions, backgrounds, or titles most are not good when facing a job interviewer—despite the fact that some think they are, because after all, they’ve gotten jobs in the past, right? Universally, though, people are long-winded, and their answers tend to be paragraphs instead of several bulleted items supported by examples. Some provide protracted answers that go way beyond the listener’s attention span. The danger here is that the job candidate is not made aware of losing the listener’s attention, since regrettably, interviewers don’t have digital readouts on their foreheads showing their listening level at that moment.

The best way to overcome that obstacle is to prepare for interview answers by first writing out the answers longhand in SARB format. (SARB is the acronym for situation, action, result, and benefit.) Next, review each answer with an eye toward shortening them. If an answer can be delivered in about 60 seconds, you’ll achieve your objective. Now, it’s practice time. Best if you work with a career coach who can give you not only honest feedback but also the correct answers. Otherwise, ask a friend, family member, or someone else who also might benefit from such practice.

How Not Feeling Nervous When Interviewing

Are you nervous?

Most if not all people feel nervous before and during a job interview. For the past ten years, I’ve been helping people prepare for job interviews. I’m also a very experienced interviewer, but recently, when asked to be on a radio talk show, I went through the same emotions and nervousness as all my clients do—despite my vast experience. It’s normal. I just now listened to an old interview of famous Italian opera singer Luciano Pavarotti in which he revealed that—despite his years and years of seven-day-a-week vocal practice and endless stage appearances in front of thousands of people in an audience— he felt very nervous every time he appeared on stage.

A job interview is nothing less than an oral exam for which a person typically prepares ahead of time. And there’s nothing wrong with being a bit nervous, provided you know how to turn such nervous energy into a positive outcome. Otherwise, the nervousness can undermine your efforts and manifest itself in sweaty palms, dry mouth, difficulty thinking and focusing, talking very fast with poor enunciation, and eyes darting all over—all of which lead to a poor image and a downward spiral in self-confidence.

Sometimes the interviewer may not be attentive, or may demonstrate lack of deep interest, or may act visibly distracted and unfocused, or may feel hurried and simply not into it. That predicament generates strong negative feelings for the interviewer, especially when the job candidate wants to be liked and convincing and to appear professional and valued with the anticipation of getting a job offer. So let’s see how to deal with this daunting predicament.

First, you need to be very well prepared, with knowledge of the company and lots of facts and details about it. It’s also important to learn as much as possible about the interviewer or even several interviewers and, most of all if possible, about the challenges they’re facing. Having information on those issues via past, similar experiences with successful outcomes arms both parties with confidence. Second, position yourself to face the interviewer so that your shoulders are parallel to the interviewer’s shoulders. Think about the image of the anchor person reading the evening news on TV: make solid eye contact, but don’t stare, because that can make the interviewer almost freak out. Have both your feet squarely on the floor, and place your hands comfortably—whatever feels normal for you. Don’t cross your arms or lock one hand into the other with your fingers interwoven. It is perfectly normal to gesture, but minimally. Gesturing helps make emphasis and—combined with the words you say and the context—can make your responses even better. Think about American presidents making their famous speeches.

The main success factor in overcoming interview jitters and anxiety lies in practicing mock interviews with a competent trainer to the point that you feel confident. And then do a little more just for good measure. So, this has been my advice. What has been your experience? Please feel free to comment.

Being Fired Is Like a Divorce . . .

Fired = divorced?

Being fired is like a divorce and based on today’s statistics, that doesn’t sound good. So many articles cover the fact that 50% of all marriages in America end in divorce. Interestingly enough, other articles say 50% of all hires are bad hires. Might there be a correlation between the two? I think there is. But at this point, I must disclaim by saying that my area of expertise is not in psychology, and I’m merely expressing an opinion.

Of course, once you get closer to the statistics, you can see that lots of variables come into play. For example, statistics indicate that the age at which people get married influences the divorce rate. A man who marries from 20 to 24 years of age has a chance of divorce that is close to 39%. A woman who marries from 35 to 39 has a 5% chance. I wonder whether there are statistics that bracket people by age and show the variances between those who have more of a tendency to lose their jobs. Even without hard evidence, though, I know that people tend to lose their jobs more frequently than they get divorced or separated. And thank goodness for that.

But why such a high turnover in employment? Some articles say that these days, on average, people change jobs every two to three years. Numbers published by the government say 4.6 years. Admittedly, some quit and others get fired. My answer is that it’s partially because many jobs nowadays are project based, and once the project is finished, the job is, too. But I’m also certain that the hiring process itself is lacking. And it’s lacking because the system is broken.

Every public company focuses on increasing shareholder value. And one quick way to achieve that is to cut expenses. Human resources departments have shrunk significantly from the sizes they used to be, and relatively few competent people are left who really understand the interviewing process. Plus, among hiring managers themselves who make final decisions to hire, only a minuscule fraction of them took any educational courses to learn how to interview and, further, how to make good final decisions. Isn’t it grotesque to think that so many hiring decision makers have absolutely no training in this important aspect of hiring? And by the way, some studies indicate that the cost of replacement of an employee is 10 to 30% of the employee’s annual salary. On the executive level, that could add up to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. So what’s wrong with this picture?

My suggestion is that companies rethink their hiring strategies and begin to insist that all of those in a position to make hiring decisions get some formal education to improve their knowledge about the hiring process. Recently, I presented to a group of very senior financial executives. I asked the audience how many of them had taken at least one course about interviewing techniques. Only one of the 31 attendees raised his hand! It is astonishing and appalling that such high-level executives make such important decisions based purely on gut feelings. Again, getting at least some formal education and training on interviewing skills should be mandatory. I’m certain that if it were, retention rates would improve dramatically and so would bottom lines. Is this too much to ask? I invite your comments and opinions.