If you think CV’s, letters and Internet job searching lead to jobs, think again. These job search activities are actually prerequisites to getting a job interview. Indeed, the job interview is the single most important step in the job search process.
No interview, no job offer. Do well during the job interview, and you may be offered the job. Do poorly during the job interview, and the door may permanently close behind you.
So how can you best prepare for interviews that lead to job offers? What types of interviews will you encounter? What questions are you most likely to be asked? Do you know how to respond to different types of questions? What questions are you prepared to ask? How well do you communicate non-verbally? How can you best influence the hiring decision after the interview? Can you negotiate a higher salary? Interviews play a critical role at various stages of your job search. They help determine whether or not you are “qualified” for the position in question. But being “qualified” means different things to different people, including interviewees and interviewers.
One of the great job search myths is that the purpose of the job interview is to determine your qualifications through a process of asking and answering questions. If this were true, employers would not bother with costly job interviews, but would rely on screening activities, such as tests, demonstrations and questionnaires.
Job interviews have little to do with determining qualifications, experience and talent. These qualifiers have already been determined, through pre-screening activities, prior to receiving an invitation for a job interview.
Since you already pre-qualify for the job interview - you have the requisite experience and talent to do the job based on your CV and other credentials - the job interview is more about chemistry, about your likeability and that you would fit into the organization. In other words, do you and the interviewer like each other enough to want to work together in the long term?
Are you likely to fit into the organizational culture given your personality and style? Non-verbal elements such as how you dress, speak, smile, maintain eye contact and use vocal inflections are equally as important, if not more so in determining the outcome of the interview than the content of answers and quality of your questions. Ultimately you will be offered the job because the employer likes you more than other candidates.
Therefore how you communicate your likeability, as well as your qualifications, during the interview will largely determine whether or not you will be offered the position. So pay particular attention to the non-verbal messages you are likely to send during the job interview.
The very first messages occur during the first five seconds when the interviewer sees how you dress and groom for the interview and how you greet the interviewer. Do you look, feel and sound great for both the position and the organization?
Preparing for job interviews is some of the hardest work you will ever do.
But the payoff - not just a job offer - but the right job for you, is your reward. And what happens if you don’t prepare adequately for your job interviews? You don’t get any job offers!
The negative ramifications are far more numerous and pervasive than simply not being offered the job. You waste your time going to the interview, you waste the interviewer’s time, you jeopardize the likelihood of being considered for any other position at a later time by this interviewer or this company and there is a chance that comments about your bad performance are networked to other employers who may be of interest to you in the future.
You cannot afford to take shortcuts on any of the steps necessary to prepare for each interview. If the next interview is not worth putting in the necessary time to prepare for adequately, then the job is not worth getting. If the job is not worth getting, why waste your time and the interviewer’s?
(Based in Dubai, David Thatcher, [email protected], is managing director of career management firm Bernard Haldane Associates in the Middle East.)