By Bob Van Rossum

There is a lot of bad data out there on how to prepare for an interview, much of which is actually counterproductive to the process.  Please DO NOT go out on Google, search for sample interview questions about behavioral interviews or any other type of interview process and waste your time writing out and memorizing answers to these questions.  The result is likely to be disaster, first you have no idea what type of questions the interviewer will ask. Even if you hear from someone who has interviewed there before that Company X uses behavioral interview techniques, you do not really know if they do or just the person they interviewed with did.  Additionally, no matter what methodology a company uses there are always multiple high ranking employees who can’t be bothered to learn the process and therefore interview the same way they always have.   So now your friend told you to prepare for behavioral based questions and you spend hours doing so and you go in and the very first interviewer asks none of the questions you have painstakingly memorized questions for, first you get a little nervous, second your confidence goes downhill and next you are fumbling for answers to even the most basic questions.  You just lost the opportunity to work for this company.  Worse is you go in and they ask you exactly the questions you are expecting and you answer them all based on the memorization game you played with yourself.  You leave the interview feeling great and you never hear from that company again.  You have been rejected and they never even bothered to call and let you know, let alone let you know why.  In this case the reason you were rejected was your answers sounded rehearsed and therefore fake.  Best case scenario is you lacked credibility, worst case scenario they just flat out did not believe you.   When you interview you are competing and when you compete with others of similar skills and background, it is individual most prepared who will win.  How are you separating yourself from the competition?

Check out:

How to Prepare for an Interview

The Phone Interview

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 By Bob Van Rossum

After you know How to Prepare for an Interview you can learn some specifics about the phone interview. 

The phone interview is inherently challenging as you lose the non-verbal feedback you receive in a face-to-face interview.  Ultimately this leads to some common mistakes.  

Phone interview Do’s and Don’ts:

1. Do NOT under any circumstances have the pages of notes you have created about your career in front of you when you interview.  You do not want to use the notes as a crutch, you do not want to be fumbling through paper looking for an answer and most of all you do not want to sound like you are reading the answer.
2. Be in a quiet place where you can focus on nothing but the interview.  Door closed.
3. Do not be doing anything else, watching the news, sending an instant message, checking e-mail.  The interviewer deserves your undivided attention.  Television off, computer off, cell phone off.
4. Make the call from a land line.  Nothing ruins a phone interview faster than a dropped cell phone call. 
5. Be formal, interviews are naturally a formal process.  You need to be at least as formal on the phone as you would be in person.  Leave the sarcasm and wit for after you already have the job.
6. Do not feel the need to fill up every moment of silence with the sound of your voice.  Answer the question, fully and completely, demonstrating results / achievements and be quiet.  The interviewer is now deciding which question to ask you next, a common mistake at this moment is to get nervous due to the silence and spend the next 30 minutes giving the interviewer a running commentary on your life since age 2.  I have never seen this work very well, I have seen candidates do this after I have warned them not to. 
7. Do have 4 or 5 questions prepared for the end of the interview.  You should have approximately 3 questions prepared related to the company and the job. 
8. Most importantly, close the interview showing you are results oriented, you are interested in the job and ask for the next step.  While you are at it, go ahead and learn what the real job description is:

Phone interview Final Questions: (Separate yourself from the others)

The final two questions I want you to ask after you come up with two or three of your own.  The 2 or 3 of your own will be around the job / company / opportunity.  These are the standard questions about products, job, scope of responsibility, etc. 

The final two questions are important, just like an in person interview, people will remember the beginning and the end.  Your goal at this point in time is to be invited in for an in person interview.  Do not put the cart before the horse and ask for the job, they do not have enough data on you to award it yet. 

The last question you want to ask the interviewer will vary based on who you are interviewing with hiring manager or human resources. 

Time is precious in the interview and asking the right questions is as important if not more important than answering questions well.  Assume you are competing against other talented professionals and everyone will have strong answers for the interviewer, so far you are only equal to the others.  Now is an opportunity to separate you from the pack.  You will not receive the same amount of time to ask questions that the interviewer will so let’s make sure the questions you do ask really count.  

Hiring Manager:

Second to last question – [FIRST NAME], I really appreciate your time today.  The [INSERT JOB TITLE HERE] role is one I am very excited about, it is a great next step for my career.  I believe I can really come in and add value to the role and the team.  Let’s look out 12 to 18 months and assume I have been able to exceed ALL your expectations.  What have we accomplished and how is the company better off for the effort?

That is a long question but as I said, you do not have much time to communicate your questions.  With this question, you have actually accomplished 4 very important things.

1. You have shown interest in the specific role, the importance of this cannot be overstated.
2. You have shown you are team oriented.
3. You have shown you are results focused.
4. Most importantly if you listen carefully you are about to understand:
   1. The real job description
   2. How to be successful in your first 12 months.

The real job description is something you need to uncover in the interview process.  Chances are the written one was created five years ago by someone other than the hiring manager.  Uncovering the true needs of the position is going to help you prepare for your in-person interview. 

The first year on any job is your most critical time.  Of the people who do not succeed, sometimes it is truly a lack of ability.  Most often it is a misalignment of hiring manager’s expectations with what the new employee sees as important.  New employee is using the job description the hiring manager received from HR and never actually read.

Last question – [FIRST NAME], this sounds like a great time to be joining [COMPANY NAME].  I am impressed with where the company is going and what I have learned about the team.  Do you have any concerns about moving me forward to the next step in the interview process?

With this question you have accomplished three critical items.

1. You have shown interest in the company.  This is equally and important as showing interest in the job and almost always over looked.
2. You have opened a window for them to express any concerns / objections they might have and therefore an opportunity for you to overcome them.  Many times a simple miscommunication derails an interview process.  If they have already decided to take you to the next step or to eliminate you from the process they will not mention anything.  If they are unsure of their decision they will share a concern with you.
3. Psychologically it is harder to say no to someone who asks to go to the next step than it is to say no to someone who does not.

By Bob Van Rossum

The most important thing to remember when preparing for an interview is:  The Company is NOT hiring you, they are hiring what you can DO for them.  The second thing to remember is interview performance is not indicative of job performance, which means the best candidate does not get the job, the candidate who interviews the best does.   An interview is an opportunity and when opportunity meets preparation you get success. 

The key to success in any interview is professional self awareness. 

If you have ever left an interview and thought of a better answer to one of the questions on the way home in your car, you were not appropriately prepared when you walked in.

Ultimately we want to avoid this scenario.  I get a call from the candidate after they leave my clients office after running through 4 or 5 interviews with various members of the team. As I pick up the phone, I am immediately struck by their enthusiasm.   “Bob, thank you for sending me in to this interview, this is a perfect next step for me in my career.  This opportunity has everything I am looking for.  The company is growing, the hiring manager is someone I can learn from.  I will have the opportunity to really create something.”  To which I say, “Great, tell me about how the interviews went.”  Oh everything went fantastic, I really felt strong I answered all the questions really well, there was this one question I did not answer very well, probably not a big deal, but if I just had more time to think about it, I would have had a great answer for them.  As soon as I got to my car I remembered the perfect example to share with them.    Should I mention something about it in my thank you note?  To which, I already know that the thank you note is now completely irrelevant. 

If you spent 2 hours learning about the company, you need to spend 8 hours relearning yourself.  If you have been in the real world for more than 100 days, you have accomplished many things and forgotten most of them.  Trying to remember them on the spot in the middle of an interview is an incredibly bad idea.  It only takes one bad answer to ruin your chances at the job of your dreams. 

I want you to sit down in quiet place and hand write out everything significant or interesting you have done in your career.  You need to hand write it as most of us are more creative when writing by hand versus typing.  You are going to break your background into 3 separate areas, first functional, second is leadership and third is culture.  I want you to take time to go through every role you have ever worked in, this could be multiple roles within the same organization and answer some very important questions. 

In regard to your specific job / function:

1. What was it like to work at the company during this time?
2. What were our challenges?
3. What were my individual goals?
4. Most importantly what were the quantifiable results achieved.  What would I define as my biggest accomplishments?
5. Why those results were important to the company.

In regard to your leadership ability: (if you have not had management responsibilities, you can skip this)

1. What is my leadership style?  Why?
2. Number of direct reports in each of your previous roles and total # on your team.
3. Top hiring success?
4. Example of a time I turned a mediocre performer into a top performer?
5. How do you motivate your team?
6. Most difficult management decision?

With regard to culture:

1. What was the culture of the organization?
2. Did the culture help or hinder success?
3. What would I have changed about the culture if I was empowered to do so?

After you go through all this one time this will become a working document.  You will add notes in the margin as you think of them.  You want to review your notes in detail 3 or 4 times prior to your interview.  Leave the notes at home, you do not want anyone you are interviewing with to see it.  If this is a phone interview DO NOT have the notes in front of you while you are on the phone.  It is not appropriate to be fumbling through your notes looking for answers, nor do you want to sound like you are reading your answers. 

The ultimate purpose of doing this is threefold:

1. To bring all your significant accomplishments to the top of your mind where you can easily access them.  You are now prepared to answer any question they ask because you know yourself.   You can easily access your best answer every time.
2. To increase your confidence in the interview.
3. You will have such ready access to the best answer you will actually be able to determine in the interview if this is really a place you want to work. 

Preparing this way will make every answer you give incrementally better, when you add all those increments up it makes a huge big difference in setting you apart from your competition.

Also check out The Phone Interview.

By Bob Van Rossum 

1. You should be concerned any time it takes the threat of losing an employee for a company to offer a raise, promotion, etc.

2. Once your intention to resign has been announced, your loyalty will always be questioned; counteroffers do not change this fact.

3. Often counteroffers just buy time for an employer to find someone to take your place.

4. Remember your reasons for wanting to leave in the first place. Counteroffers are an immediate and temporary fix that make a situation seem improved. Has anything really changed?

5. Remember, counteroffers are made because of the threat to resign. They are not proactive business decisions by an employer to satisfy and retain valued employees.

6. Counteroffers are not a universal business practice. Most high quality companies refuse to play the game because they understand the temporary and coercive nature of such decisions.

7. 83% of all employees who accept counteroffers are no longer with that employer in one year.

How do I handle a counteroffer?

More Info:

http://www.collegegrad.com/jobsearch/21-16.shtml

http://www.careerknowhow.com/guidance/counter.htm

http://www.joelhwilensky.com/countero.html

By ALYSE KNORR 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

If you can’t Tweet, you might get beat — in the job hunt, that is.

http://www.ajc.com/business/social-media-skills-become-crucial-for-job-hunters-102247.html

MarketPro recommends www.CompetitiveInterviewing.com

Do you or someone you know need help finding a job? We have a unique program that teaches people how to interview like a pro – giving them a huge competitive advantage during the job search and interview process.

Review our Competitive Interviewing Program Here

This program was developed by Pax Gabriel, a leading executive search firm based in Atlanta, GA. We have placed over 1,500 individuals and managed over 6,000 interview processes over the past decade. Our valuable experience has led to knowing what is most successful in the interviewing process and what needs to be avoided at all costs.

Let us put our experience and know-how to work for you in your next job search. In the current environment, don’t get out-interviewed by someone who understands the hiring process better than you do. Competitive Interviewing can get you there and land you the job ahead of your competition.

Please forward this to anyone you know who might be in need of a new opportunity.

Showing interest and being committed are integral to interview success.  This young man impressed after he made it to the interview with a stab wound in his leg.  While I would not recommend trying to repeat his feat on the way to your next interview, ask yourself how committed you are to getting this job and what have you done to make sure you are prepared to win.

Teen stabbed in leg, but makes it to job interview, then hospital – Welland Tribune – Ontario, CA

http://www.wellandtribune.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1422078

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