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How To Deal With Weird Situations During A Job Interview
Weird situations cropping during an interview might be termed unintentional stress interviews. Following are some examples and suggested responses:
Interviewer Talks Incessantly about Himself
Say you’d like to have the opportunity to learn from a person who has achieved so much. Then ask, “Where does the hiring process go from here?” Normally, this will either get the interview back on track or result in the interviewer setting up another interview for you. Another approach is to ask the person questions that feed his or her need to brag. That may result in you being described as a wonderful listener.
Dressing Right for Job Interviews
Neatness and cleanliness are the key considerations when dressing for job interviews. If you need a haircut, get one. If your shoes are scuffed, shine them. Your clothes should be neat, clean, and wrinkle-free. Try to dress as you expect the interviewer to dress; when in doubt, err on the more formal side. Any jewelry you wear should be limited and conservative. (Men should wear none, except for a watch and a wedding ring, if applicable.) How can you tell what people in the company will be wearing? You can talk with people who work there or who worked there recently.
Why Flexible Schedules Could Persuade a Candidate To Take The Job
If your salary offer isn’t quite up to par, you might still persuade a candidate to take the job by offering more time off or flexible work hours. A recent survey by an online benefits company found that flexible work arrangements were the most coveted employee benefit, even more desirable than healthcare. Telecommuting or working from home has surged in recent years, especially in high-tech companies. Research indicates that allowing employees to telecommute reduces absenteeism and turnover, improves productivity, and increases levels of satisfaction. Some employers even report that telecommuting can benefit the bottom line. One example is Development Counselors International, a New York City–based economic-analysis firm, which saw its western business triple when two 15-year veterans began telecommuting from the West Coast.
Assessing Attitude
Many employers believe that people can be taught skills—but that their character is fixed. Thus, they specifically look for people with the attitude or personality that will mesh with their organization’s culture. To weed out candidates who might have the experience for the job but not the right stuff, a technique called behaviour-based interviewing was developed. In this approach, candidates are asked to give examples of how they performed or behaved in the past in specific situations. For example, to assess leadership ability, you might ask, “Can you tell me about a time when you had to persuade someone to do something that he or she did not want to do? What did you say to them and what was the result?” In behaviour based interviews, all questions attempt to elicit examples of how the candidate has handled situations in the past that demonstrate particular desirable qualities.
Everyone Networks
Networking comes naturally to almost all of us. We network when we ask a friend’s opinion of a movie. We network when we seek recommendations for good doctors. We network when we try to line up cheap or free lodgings for a trip to Europe. And if the friends we ask can’t tell us what we want to know, they often know someone who can. So why not network to learn about career fields, companies, and job opportunities? Networking can accomplish four important things:
1. It can give you information that will help you direct your efforts more productively and present yourself better.
2. It can garner introductions to people who may control job opportunities.
3. It can let you in on these opportunities earlier in the cycle, giving you a competitive advantage.
4. Finally, the networking process itself adds to your credibility, since the person who refers you is adding his or her favorable judgment to your qualifications.
While you certainly want to take advantage of on-campus interviews and Internet job services, you should also use networking to broaden and improve your opportunities.
Get to Know Yourself
While it’s important to know yourself, it’s more important to know how you are similar and different from others, and to use this knowledge to help you become more influential with them.
Interpersonally competent people understand themselves. They use this self understanding to better understand others and to build and maintain, long term, mutually beneficial relationships with the important people in their lives. You have to understand yourself if you want to understand others and build strong relationships. Take a few minutes and answer these questions.
• When I need to recharge my batteries, do I like to prefer to be around other people, or do I prefer to be by myself?
• Do I like to take in information in a structured step by step manner, or do I prefer getting a lot of information all at once and figuring out the connections for myself?
• Do I make decisions with my heart or head?
• Do I like to resolve things quickly, or do I like to wait until the last minute to commit to a course of action?
You probably lean to one or the other of the choices in the four questions above. Once you know your answers to these questions, think about the people around you. How are they similar to you? How are they different?
Let’s take a Friday night for example. You and your partner or spouse are invited to a party. You’ve both had a long, tough week and you’re both tired. If you are the type of person who recharges your batteries by engaging in solitary activities, make sure you find time for yourself. If your partner is the opposite, let him or her go to the party on his or her own. Your partner won’t even miss you — there will be enough people at the party to recharge his or her batteries, and you’ll get the precious solitary time that you need.
How to Create a Positive Personal Impact!
To create positive personal impact – you have to be seen by others as a person who is responsive to their needs and requests.
All successful people create positive personal impact. Positive personal impact is like charisma, only more so. People gravitate towards people with positive personal impact. When you create positive personal impact other people want to be around you. They want to work with you. They want to be your friend and colleague.
People with positive personal impact develop and nurture their personal brand. They are impeccable in their presentation of self. They know and follow the basic rules of etiquette. If you master these three keys, you’ll be able to create positive personal impact.
I have a model of customer service that I use with my consulting clients. It begins from the premise that after any interaction your customers R.A.T.E. you. The people in your life R.A.T.E. you too. You can use your R.A.T.E.ing to build positive personal impact. It works like this…
• R stands for Responsiveness;
• A stands for Assurance;
• T stands for Tangibles; and
• E stands for Empathy.
If you notice, only one of the four points in the model—tangibles—is what you actually do for, or deliver to, the people in your life. The other three are the emotional measures by which people judge you. These emotional measures are at least as important as the tangibles you deliver, especially when it comes to creating positive personal impact.
You have to deliver the tangibles. You must produce results. That’s the cost of a ticket to the professional success sweepstakes.
However, you have to pay attention to the other three factors—responsiveness, assurance, and empathy—if you’re going to make a positive personal impact while you’re performing. Let’s look at each of these three in detail.
Responsiveness. You have to ensure that the people in your life see you as someone who is willing to help, someone who understands what needs to be done and is willing to do it. Other people need to think that you will give them what they want, when they want it, and in a manner that they can use it.
Assurance. You have to be able to convey trust and confidence. People need to feel that you are going to deliver. To do this, you must be very knowledgeable about the people in your life and their needs and wants. You need to be clear on what you can offer them to help them meet their goals. You need to ensure that they are confident that you will do what you say you will do.
Empathy. The people in your life must perceive you as an individual who understands, cares about, and pays attention to their needs. To do this, you need to be willing to walk a mile in other people’s shoes. You have to demonstrate to them that you are aware of and sensitive to their unique and individual needs.
The commonsense point here is simple. To create positive personal impact, you must do more than deliver results, look good, and act graciously. You have to be seen by others as a person who is responsive to their needs and requests. You have to build trust with these individuals, and you need to demonstrate that you understand their needs and issues.
The Optimist Creed
Embrace your mistakes and failures. Learn from them. Treating your mistakes and failures as learning opportunities is a great way to jumpstart your professional success. There’s an old saying, “Optimists are right, pessimists are too. You get to choose which one you’ll be.” I choose optimism. Optimism is a great way to jumpstart your professional success. Here’s some of the best commonsense advice you’ll ever come across. We have a copy of it posted in our office. You must too.
Promise Yourself:
• To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
• To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
• To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
• To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
• To think only of the best, to work only for the best, and to expect only the best.
Job-Hunting? – The Best Story Always Wins
There’s an old joke about two men hunting in the jungle. Suddenly, they come upon a man-eating tiger that hasn’t eaten for days. The hunters both start running with the tiger in hot pursuit. As they are running, one hunter says to the other. “You know, we’ll never be able to outrun this tiger.” To which the other hunter replies, “I don’t have to outrun the tiger; I only have to outrun you.”
The point of the story is that, yes, there will be many other candidates in the stack of 500 cover letters and resumes that the hiring manager will receive for just one ad and many will have more experience and better qualifications than you. You just need to be sure that your cover letter and resume shows off your strengths and experience better than the other guy. And if you follow the ideas in this section, they will!
Job-hunting is like the sales profession. It always comes down to…he who has the best “story” wins. Unless your boss was either friends with the hiring manager, or the nephew of the owner, or had compromising photos of the President, he/she probably got into the position because they had a great “story” to tell.
Here’s a question we hear all the time – I have better credentials yet they got the job. How did they do it? The answer is simple: They did their “homework” ahead of time. They put the time required into the job-hunting process.
In addition all the pieces of their job-hunting process had the same CONSISTENT look, feel and style. Not only did their cover letter, resume, Interview, thank you letters, and negotiating have the same style, it was the Style the company was looking for. As a matter of fact, the hiring company felt damn lucky to land such a find!
What does it mean to have the “best story”?
Let us define “story”. A great story essentially means that to the employer, you have “The Right Stuff”. A great story evolves from a well thought out job-hunting system where all pieces of the “campaign” are closely aligned. It requires thought, logic, study and of course practice. It’s a theme that continually shows up in anything and everything you write or say.
Developing a great story takes time and it takes thought. As agonizing as it can sometimes be, the process of gathering information for your cover letter and resume will prove to be one of the most rewarding experiences in the job-changing process. It forces you to compile and summarize the most important facts and significant achievements of your career. It also helps you narrow down the focus of your current job search objective and develop your story.
In the Street Smart Job Changing System, there is a self-analysis section designed to help you answer some important questions that will be the basis for developing your story.
Some of these questions include:
• What am I good at?
• What do I like to do?
• Where do I want to be in 5 years and what would I like to be doing?
• What do I want to get out of my next job?
• Where do I want to end up?
• What do I really want to do?
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