And Help for Those Being Hired, Too
I have interviewed a lot of applicants for a lot of jobs and since my previous post was aimed at giving interviewers a few tips on how to be a little less awkward and evil when interviewing, it's time to level the playing field by helping those being interviewed keep their nerves from overshadowing their skills. This list is for the applicants out there who try to portray themselves as competent professionals but actually come across as crazy stalkers, stuck-up jerks, entitled millennials, or just entirely disconnected from Planet Earth.
1) Knowing a bit about the person who will be interviewing you is smart; creeping them out by knowing too much is a one-way ticket out of that company. I once had an applicant sit in a way that I could see his notes and clearly see that he had not only figured out who would be interviewing him, he had done his research on all of us. He noted that I was "nice", which compensated for the creepiness a tiny bit. He also noted that my co-interviewer was divorced and had three children, which walked all that compensation back. REALLY far back.
2) If you have repeatedly been the most competent, qualified, innovative, or insightful person on the team or in the office, the problem is not your previous colleagues; the problem is you. Someone with the humility and self-awareness to not only be a good co-worker but also just a good human knows that anybody can wind up in a dysfunctional situation once or twice, but the odds just don't line up for it to happen immediately. The people interviewing you are going to be rightfully suspicious if every example you cite from your past casts you as the hero. You know what? This is a good one for people just trying to exist in the world. You don't need to be job-seeking to benefit from learning you're actually a pompous pain in the neck.
3) Your potential employer doesn't care how great your team was; they care about what role you played on it. It's possible for an applicant to complete a 45 minute interview only having used the word "I" when explaining why he is interested in the job. When every other answer is about a "we", your interviewers are going to get tired of looking for the "I". Your job interview is one of the few environments explicitly set up for you to be vocally honest about your amazing accomplishments; temper any impulse to shamelessly brag with a healthy dose of self-awareness and you'll be close to the right balance. And you'll have saved your interviewers the challenge of imagining the role you played when your last 8-person team won that amazing contract.
4) If you can't practice an interview with a trusted, knowledgeable friend, at least ask a friend who fits the bill to tell you about the thing you say that makes her so frustrated she just blocks it out. We all have vocal tics. We all use filler words or specific expressions that we have no idea about. The people we talk to notice, however, and this is something you want to nip in the bud, sooner rather than later. Otherwise you'll lose out on a job and never have any idea that if you hadn't said "That reminds me of a time when..." or "You know?" 27 times in a half hour, it would be you sitting in that swanky new office.
