Preparing to Ace your Interview, regardless of their interviewing style

posted by Mark Moyer on June 9, 2009 on ERE Community

As
your recruiter representing you throughout this interviewing process,
we're both in this together, and we both have similar goals...  I would like to see you accept a position that satisfies all of your wants and needs, and you want that same position! And as a reminder, I am a for-profit enterprise.  If I am sending you into an interview against five other candidates, I want YOU to get the offer, not any of the other five!  So I will do everything I can to prepare you for that set of interviews, because I want you to beat the competition.  Beat them soundly - make it a no-brainer!

            But let's break this down to its simplest components.  This is very much like professional dating
- the candidate that gets hired will likely be the one that the
employer feels the most comfortable with..."the best fit" - as if you
were a shoe!  That doesn't necessarily mean the smartest, or
best-educated, or tallest...it means the most comfortable.

            So...you have to anticipate what makes them comfortable. 
Much of this is like making a gallon of paint at the paint store.  You
may have an idea of what color the employer is hoping to end up with,
but what individual hues will combine to make that final color....for
example, how important product knowledge vs. personality vs. experience
vs. street-smarts is.  How can you anticipate what colors to focus on?

            The most important thing to do in an interview is to put yourself in the mind of the interviewer. 
What specifically are they looking for?  What qualities will be
important to them?  What elements of your background will they care
about?  Why are they looking to fill the empty desk?  Most likely
because the bulk of the work that needs to be done by that desk is
being done by the manager.  The moment you convince that manager that
you are able to take the workload off their hands, you are halfway into
that desk.

            What questions would you ask candidates for this job if
you were the employer?  If you were the manager, what would be
important for you to find out about the candidate?  What fundamental
skills are critical?  Are personality traits important in this role? 
Technical skills?  What would you consider to be important skills if
you were interviewing candidates to work for your own company?  How do
you find out who is really right for the job?  Everyone has different
opinions on what is right - but it all ends with one word, as cliche as it is....CHEMISTRY!

          Clearly the aforementioned questions have many answers,
each of which may be interchangeable and certainly flexible dependent
on how the interview is progressing.  But a very effective preparation
technique is to actually handwrite each of the questions down on a legal pad, and then more importantly, handwrite the answers! 
You will find that if you write them down, you won't go rambling on and
on about how your grandmother was instrumental in your interest in
fingerpainting, or how your Cub Scout leader taught you management
skills.  And you will also focus on making a brief, sensible, and
articulate answer. 

        Remember, the interviewer often cares little about the actual answer, but more so how you go about answering the question,
how articulate and to the point your answer is. Typically the
interviewer will tune you out after the first couple of senetences,
especially if you are not specifically answering the question you were
asked.  (Picture Charlie Brown's teacher Mrs. Donovan saying "Wah-wah,
wah-wah, wah wah wah)

        This goes for almost every human interaction you will have
in life...anticipate what it is that your partner in the conversation
is looking for, do your best to satisfy that within your parameters,
and this will likely lead to a positive response, getting you closer to
your goals of the meeting/conversation.  And in the case of this
posting, that goal is to get the offer for the job you've been waiting
for all along!