What should you not do in an ‘Interview’

Recently I had an experience of taking an interview. Trust me, I could maybe give an interview with less preparation but to take one, I need a lot of preparation! Additionally, my manager has an emphasis for having someone with great attitude more than the knowledge part.

Forwarding to the part that I want to tell – I found someone who was excited about the role. Every time I had given an interview, I had felt a sense of enthusiasm or excitement from within. Call it my intuition but this was what helped me feel better and confident at my job. Meeting someone who was also excited, I knew that this was the person I wanted to give a chance to.

The person is simple and hardworking. He is self-motivated and hopefully will remain to be the same way. He is still a little new to technical details and nitty-grities but he was definitely quite confident about learning as much as required. There were a few things that I mentioned that could be worked upon too. When you hire someone in an organization, you look for them to understand the organization – this definitely makes your task easier and interesting. This was my first feedback – to get to know the problem before solving it. The second feedback was leadership – it does not matter if you are a fresher, you have been working for an year, five years or twenty years – leadership is something you need to have. Leadership helps pave out an amiable path for you and your team when there seem to be uncertainties ahead.

Forward to getting the person to meet my manager. My manager asked the candidate about the feedback they received. Quickly they mentioned the positive feedback about their confidence and enthusiasm and completely omitted out the points to work upon. Additionally when my manager asked the candidate about his weaknesses or points in his life that he considered were failures – there he mentioned things that he had been working upon and a few points that were not relevant.

From all my above experience, there were a few pointers that I do not want to miss out.

• We are all human beings and we all have flaws. Accept if you have a flaw since you will only then consciously start working towards overcoming the same.
• If you are given a feedback, share it in completeness. There are high chances that the feedback has been shared ahead.
• While talking about your weaknesses – while we all need to accept all our weaknesses, but we need to mention relevant weaknesses. If you are not able to find anything that you want to mention then try something like – too detail oriented that sometimes it causes delay, to honest to sometimes get stuck in diplomatic situations, etc.

And while I do know that we are all going through a tough time and in any case job searching is complex in itself, we need to always prepare ourselves.

This has helped me personally and I hope I am able to add some value to you too.