How to Perform Well in a Job Interview
Interviewing for a job is obviously a very important topic in a book about insight and career advancement. An interview, by its nature, represents a high-risk hurdle, because it is a single, short exposure with a binary outcome. One either does well enough to pass on to the next stage, or one fails.
Many how-to books and articles have been written about interviews, presumably by those who know a lot about the subject. My intention is not to cover the same ground, but rather to cover aspects that provide you with additional insights—insights that I maintain are not passed on as common wisdom from experts and that I believe will help you get the job you want.
Preparing well for an interview involves understanding subtleties and nuances, and to do justice to the topic is to take you step-by-step through the logic, explanations, and examples. This in-depth process will not only serve you well in interviews, but will also serve you well throughout your entire career.
Clearly, an important element of a job search and the interviewing process is the resume. The topic of how to write a good resume was covered in chapter three and chapter eight. Chapter three also covered other things that relate to the interviewing process, and will not be repeated here. Please consider this section, “Interviewing Well for a Job,” a complement to chapter three in that it focuses not on the interviewing process, but rather on specific interactions with the interviewers.
For the purposes of this section, I divide interviews into four categories:
1.Interviewing for a job upon graduating from school.
2.Interviewing for a job that seeks candidates with specific subject matter knowledge like finance, economics, human resources, strategy, marketing, and so on, as well as decent prior work experience in a specific area.
3.Interviewing for a job that seeks candidates with expertise in a specific subject matter and extensive work experience.
4.Interviewing for a higher-level management position.
This section pertains primarily to insights for the first two categories. Most observations and recommendations apply to both categories. I will point out whenever there are some notable differences that are important to understand. As I said, my goal in this section is to focus on topics I believe will allow you to gain an insightful perspective on interviews and enable you to perform well. I hope that you will indeed agree that this section discusses many insights, some of which may be illuminating even to experienced and knowledgeable professionals.
What Do Interviewers Look for in an Interview?
Although it seems like an obvious question to ask, this question seems to perplex people, including those who may consider themselves knowledgeable with the process and conduct of interviews. They may be nearly correct with their answers, but miss very important nuances. (I hope I’ve convinced you by now that what appears to be a small nuance could be quite important.) How can a candidate be most effective in an interview without knowing exactly what the interviewer is looking for? I believe that having a clear answer to this question is imperative.
Whenever asked for my advice, I start by asking people to enumerate and prioritize the top things that an interviewer seeks to learn about candidates. I then ask them to give examples of the kind of questions that the interviewers may ask to help them reach their conclusions. I generally get consistent answers, although expressed in different ways, and have collated the responses in the following Priority List:
1.Subject expertise: How competent is the candidate in the subject matter expertise the job requires? The interviewer will ask specific technical questions related to the subject matter to ascertain and reach a conclusion on this criterion.
2.Smarts and brainpower: How smart is the candidate? Interviewers ascertain this by presenting and discussing case studies with the interviewees.
3.Enthusiasm for the job: How passionate is a candidate for the potential job at hand? Interviewers have their different methods to discover a candidate’s enthusiasm, and as such it is hard to predict specific questions they might ask.
4.Communication skills: How well can a candidate articulate their thoughts? Interviewers, for the most part, will be able to ascertain how well a candidate is able to articulate their thoughts from responses and dialogue during the interview itself.
5.Interpersonal skills: Can a candidate interact effectively from a social standpoint? Interviewers, for the most part, will be able to determine it from the interview itself. No special questions are warranted.
While these may be generally accepted notions of what interviewers attempt to discover in an interview, in my opinion the list does not accurately reflect what I believe are the most important aspects of the interviewing process. There are two critical observations to be pointed out in that regard.
First, the list is completely silent on an observation I made earlier in the book, which is that one always competes against others for job opportunities (or promotions). The above Priority List suggests that the candidate is at the center of the interviewing process, which is false! At the center of the interviewing process are all other candidates and their positioning relative to one another. You may ask, “What is the difference from my perspective, since there is little I can do about other candidates?” You may also add the obvious, “I’ll either measure well, or not, but it is not within my control. So, I can only do my best in an interview and hope to have done well.” As I said, it may be a nuance, but an important nuance. Your observations, although logical, ignore another very important element I emphasize in this book—your ability to influence.
It is possible that you may be able to influence how the interviewer will rank you relative to everybody else, so that you are not completely passive about it. You may say, “Yes, sounds nice conceptually, but how can it be done in reality? It is completely out of my control.” Maybe, but maybe not! Here, I will point to the central theme of this book: being insightful—having a different perspective that may lead to a different approach, and thus better potential results.