Last time, I shared two fundamental things you should pay attention to in order to be successful at interviews – researching the organization and sorting out first impressions. This week, let’s take it a little further and talk about another two, each loaded with tips. It’s quite a lot this week, so brace up.

1. KNOW YOUR RESUME WELL and be ready to defend it.

You’ve put your resume in already and it is too late to make changes. By now, your interviewer has read it probably more than once. If he/she is skilled, certain areas are penciled down for enquiry already. It’s virtually guaranteed that your interviewer will use your resume as a launch pad for his/her questions. While an HR interviewer will be interested in verifying the authenticity of your experience and education perhaps certain competencies, a line manager will take greater interest in the technical details of the experiences you catalogued. Either way, your resume is the starting point. This is the reason why you should not write resumes with grandiloquent and verbose achievements that appear to read nicely and sound important to you but may fall completely apart when you are being interviewed. You should be able to defend every single word, date and location in your resume. Your story MUST check out. If you start to fall apart right from your resume, you give the impression you are not a person of integrity, or you are one who window dresses the facts to suit you. 

This is why I always advise candidates to write a simple, straightforward resume. Don’t leave holes and obscure statements that you will not have answers to when questioned. For example, you assisted on a technical team that deployed new software for a blue-chip client, but in your CV, you stated that “I deployed xyz software for ABC client”. To you it seems like an innocent attempt to shore up your CV and appear fit for the job, but in truth you are not telling the whole story. If you’re faced with an interviewer worth his/her onions, be sure you will be questioned on that software, what it entails and how you deployed it. If it turns out you were the one doing the paperwork and filing the client’s logs, you’ve literarily done yourself in! 

So what should you do to prepare yourself? Two very important things I would advise:

a. Get the same CV you sent when applying and study it carefully. Make sure you know the chronology of the events in it as well as all its other contents like you know the back of your hand. This should be easy if you have not sugarcoated your CV to show you are who you really are not.

b. Rehearse your interview. Get a friend (or better yet, someone skilled in interviewing) to role play the interviewer and drill you on aspects of your CV. Listen for feedback and adjust accordingly.

2. CONFIDENCE RULES!

Interviews in themselves are very stressful on the interviewee. Sitting in front of someone or several people you do not know, receiving wave after wave of questions can be unnerving for the best of us. I’ve seen people tense up so much that they forget things that they know. I’ve seen people burst into tears as the sheer weight of the anxiety of the process can no longer be contained. The desperate need for the job consumes many so much so that it manifests in worried creases on the face and hard balls of flowing sweat in well air-conditioned rooms. I know…but still CONFIDENCE rules the interview room! 

The fact of the matter is that your anxiety will not impress anyone; neither will your desperation get you very far. If anything, it jeopardizes your chances of getting the job and distracts you from the task at hand. So what should you do?

a. Stay positive. This is a personal marketing drive. You’re the product and you know you are sellable, so stay positive and raise yourself up. No one can do this for you but you!

b. Don’t come across as desperate. Let’s face it, if you really need the job, you will be desperate. Sometimes, this is the break you’ve been waiting for all your life and you just don’t want to see it slip. So yes, I get it, you can be desperate but you MUST contain it. Try not to let this slip through the cracks because its outcomes are painful to watch. Desperation robs you of confidence because it breeds fear. Shaky hands, trembling voices, stammering, sweaty palms, avoiding eye contact, all byproducts of anxiety and fear from a desperate standpoint, are not good signs for an interviewer. That’s not what you want to portray. Give a firm handshake, introduce yourself well, sit up straight and enjoy the ride. It could be rough, but ride it to the end. Think of it this way…the worst that will happen is that you won’t get the job and that will not stop the world from spinning!

In my experience, the most confident people, the one who always caught our attention, the ones who we were desperate to have, were the ones who were not (or at least appeared not to be) desperate for us. Some had no reason to be desperate for us, since they already had secure jobs and were job hunting only to satisfy an interest to know how valued they were beyond their current organization. Others simply had a sincerely positive disposition to whatever the outcome of the process would be.

c. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. A lot of people simply do not want to say they don’t know the answer to a question, even when they truly DON’T KNOW! Rather than answer technical questions wrongly, if you cannot recall the correct answer, simply and confidently apologize and say you don’t know. If you have an idea of what’s being asked, say what you know, but don’t push yourself over the edge trying to be correct on something you are unsure of. It could unsettle you if your interviewer tells you that you are wrong. However, when you confidently and calmly deflect by saying “I’m sorry, but I don’t quite remember that…”, you appear much surer of yourself and are less likely to be ruffled.

To conclude, keep at the back of your mind that every organization these days is looking for confident self assured people who can add value to the organization. Always think in terms of “what value (skills, knowledge and abilities) can I bring to this organization” and not “what value (salaries and benefits) can I get from it”. At the interview table, take your opportunity to show how much they will be missing if they do not pick you and how much they stand to gain if they do.

Till next time…

A+

Deji 

(twitter @dejiogunnubi; dejiogunnubi.com)