Have you ever had a bad job interview before? Did
you really suck in your interview! Well, this video is
about how not to suck in the job interview.
Hello I am Dr. Anthony
Llewellyn the Career Doctor, I'm right here on YouTube to
help you manage your career.
Today we're going to talk about how not to suck
in the job interview.
Have you ever sucked in a job interview I'd be
interested to know, leave me a comment below about the
worst thing that you ever did in a job interview. S
o let's get into it
right away.
First off the rank, let's talk about how to enter
the job interview room and not suck in the first
few minutes.
One of the best ways to suck in the first
few minutes is to do some sort of awkward thing
when you enter the room like shake hands awkwardly.
No one wants to shake hands with a limp wristed
interview candidate or worse see someone stumbling over a desk
or a chair to try and extend their hand out
and knocking over a jug of water or something like
that.
That's a really great way to get off to a
bad start.
You're going to be nervous from the get go and
the panel members are going to think that you lack
confidence.
So how would we not suck in that moment? Well,
my first tip here is do you really need a
shake a hand in the interview?
Often it's best to take the lead of the chair
of the interview panel and the interview panel members themselves.
If they don't offer a hand.
Maybe don't offer yours, particularly if they are set behind a big
desk or you're going to have to shake more than
five or six hands with a big panel interview.
But if you are planning to go in with a
power shake or really good handshake, why not practice that
beforehand? If you're one of those people who's not used
to shaking hands in social situations, then you're planning on
shaking hands in the interview,
then give that a bit of a practice beforehand.
The second great way you suck in an interview is
to not have a good example when you're asked for
it.
You see in most interviews for jobs these days, there's
going to be at least one question where they say,
can you tell me about a time when you did
And then it's going to be over to you.
So what they're looking for the areas and example of
your past work or possibly even something in your education
or even outside of education and work where you can
show that you've risen to that sort of challenge in
the past before.
Now it's extremely awkward if you haven't got an example
of prepared and there's this big long pause silence while
you're trying to think of something and then you sort
of come up with an example and you're not kind
of sure and ah, it doesn't really fit what they
need and it just comes across badly.
Now you're probably wondering, well, how do I know What
sort of examples do I need to prepare for the
interview Well if you actually go and read through the
job description, you'll find some selection criteria which give you
a lot of information about the sort of examples of
past work that they may want to hear from you.
These would generally be about things like meeting success targets
or in a team resolving conflict, using communication skills.
It depends on what the selection criteria for the job,
but if you read through those selection criteria, you can
then think about your own career, your own work, your
life, your academia, and think about the sort of examples
that might be
needed in the interview and be prepared on the day.
The next sure fire way to suck at an interview is to
fall forward.
Gender stereotypes.
What do I mean about gender stereotypes where you see
these days, most interview panels are normally comprised of both
male and female members of the existing team.
And they may throw a question to you, which is
say like a hypothetical about working in a team and
you start referring to a certain team member as a
she or he and they actually haven't given you that
information.
So a classic example is inside the world of medicine
where they might ask you about resolving conflict between yourself
as a doctor and a member of the nursing staff,
and you start referring to that member of the nursing
staff as a she or her or a lady or
something like that.
That's a sure fire away of annoying any member of the
panel who's got any appreciation for gender diversity in the
workplace.
So try and avoid referring to people as she and
he based on stereotypes that you've already set up
in your own mind.
The next great way to suck at a job interview is
actually talking too much.
What do I mean by talking too much where you
can talk too long in terms of your answers to
particular questions you can ramble on rather than being succinct
and giving them an organized response, which is what they're
generally looking for.
Or you can talk too much about yourself and when
you talk too long and you talk about yourself, that
means you're not talking about the actual job you're applying
for the organization that you want to join.
The interviewers and the team that you are intending to
join the teams that you've worked with in the past
and so the connections you might have to other people
that might be helpful in the role.
This is all important stuff and it sells you to
the panel.
Far too often I hear people talking about themselves in
I terms rather than WE terms. I
n terms of the successes they've had in their career
and how they're attributable to good, hard, solid teamwork.
You see the panel may be looking for someone brilliant,
but they also don't want someone who's going to dominate
them.
They want someone who can come in and brilliantly contribute
to the hardworking and high performance of the existing team.
The next way to suck at the job interview is to
ask a silly question.
You see you at the end of each interview there's
usually a time where they say, those are all the
official questions we have for you, but do you have
any questions for the panel? And how often have we
managed to completely unravel a really good interview process by
asking just a stitch stupid dumb question at the end.
For example things, what are the rosters for the job
or what, where will I exactly be working or who
will I be reporting to Those things you should have
actually found out about in your research beforehand and it
just shows that you're unprepared.
So there's a couple of ways of correcting this problem
with sucking in the interview.
One is to think about whether you really need to
ask a question at all.
You can often just answer that question by saying something
like, no thanks.
I've had enough opportunities to ask questions already.
Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Or if you are really intending on asking a question
and do your research and prepare a question that's going to dazzle
them or wow them and I'll leave a link to
a video I did about that in the descriptions below.
If you have had a bad interview performance before, you've
probably thought of a few reasons why it went wrong.
It might've been that it was a high pressure environment
and you just got stressed.
It might just be that you felt you didn't click
with the interview panel.
It might be that they asked you all the wrong
questions or you just had a bad day.
What do all these reasons, or excuses have in common?
They all reflect the fact that you probably didn't prepare
and practice for the interview.
Performing in a job interview is a skill, but the
problem with the job interview as a skill is that
it is only a skill that you very rarely occasionally
use and the rest of the time it's meaningless.
And the problem with skills that we don't use very
often is that they degrade quite quickly.
We're not regularly practicing at interview performance.
So without regular practice and preparation, your interview performance is
likely to suck.
So the number one tip for not sucking in the
job interview is to spend the time to practice and
prepare for your next job interview.
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