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Two types of people make interviewers’ alarm bells ring – people who have no self-confidence and people who have total self-confidence.
In an interview, it’s your job to make the interviewer feel confident that whatever is thrown at you, you will find a way to conquer it. It’s a pretty safe bet that he or she wants to hear neither what you think you can’t do nor that you think you can do it all.
Because both make you look incompetent. Somewhere between Bridget Jones and Kanye West is the person he or she wants to hire.
Here are a few confidence tricks:
1. Be prepared. That’s the only antidote to worrying about what you’re going to be asked. Work out when and where to be proud and when and where to be humble. Yes, you do need to be both.
2. When you get near the building where your interview is being held, find a bin and dump all your negative thoughts. You don’t hate your old job, your old boss, clients who reject your work…You don’t even hate Justin Bieber or the fact that you’re losing your hair.
3. Now that you’re negativity-free, throw out all your buzzwords too. You’re not a “thought leader”. You don’t live by, “No regrets, no excuses, just do it!” You’re not going to “disrupt” things. And nothing your interviewer tells you is “dope”.
4. 70% of his/her decision (more or less, depending on which source you’re citing) is made during the “prologue”. The chat at the beginning of your interview is not an interrogation, it’s social interaction (or as your interviewer calls it, the foundation of business). So interact – you’ve known how to do that since you were two.
5. How you handle an interview says a lot about how you’re going to handle a client meeting, a presentation and a new business pitch. Aim for cool, calm and collected. In other words, sit comfortably, don’t fidget and smile.
6. Speak slowly, keep looking at your interviewer…and edit. Say as much as you need to answer questions fully, but keep the unexpurgated editions to yourself. Bridget Jones babbles and Kanye rants.
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