Part 10: Prepare For the Interview

Patricia Kitchen | Change@work

November 30, 2003

Part 10 of a weekly series helping people with job searches.

Going to networking events and chatting up strangers may be high on the anxiety scale for job hunters -- but that's nothing compared to going on the job interview. The discomfort, though, can be greatly reduced if you do some smart preparation.

That means when you get the phone call -- or e-mail -- inviting you for the interview, get some key details: the names and titles of those you'll be meeting, the exact office location, directions if you need them, the name of the people you're speaking with plus their titles and contact info.

Why so? You'll want to do some research on the interviewers to get a sense of their interests, positions in the organization and styles of dealing with people. "Scoping things out calms you down," says Judy Rosemarin, president of Sense-Able Strategies, a Manhattan-based coaching firm. That's why she also says some job hunters visit the interview site a day or so before -- first to make sure they can find it easily and second, so they can say, "I already have that piece of information under my belt. I've walked these stairs before."

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There are two types of preparation, she says. First there's external, such as learning more about the company and its needs. And then internal, which has to do with "how you feel about yourself, knowing your three key strengths, and what your value to the company will be."

Students at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City get prepped before they go out on interviews, learning what Judy Bieber calls the "rhythm" of the interview: the beginning, middle and end. She's chair of the department of co-operative education.

The warm-up starts when you arrive -- and that should be about 15 minutes early -- as you greet and make pleasantries with receptionists/assistants and find out if they were the people who called to set up the interviews. These gatekeepers are incredibly important and will often key the boss in to an applicant's waiting-room manners.

When you meet the interviewer, shake hands and make eye contact. "Keep your face up even if you are nervous," Bieber said. For good or for ill, such first impressions can seal your fate. Be prepared for some warm-up chit chat, such as about the weather or last night's Knicks game. It pays to read the morning's headlines, so you'll know potential office buzz.

Next, you'll get down to the real core of the meeting in which the interviewer will be sizing you up to see if: you have the right skills, you'll be a good fit, you have the desired work ethic. This means a series of questions that don't just stop with your initial answers.

LaGuardia students taking a class called Gateway to the Workplace learn that interviewers will probe, saying things like, "Tell me more about that? Could you describe that in detail? What was the outcome?"

This is why you want to practice answering the most common interview questions -- to be found on most career Web sites -- and to know your resume inside and out. Anything on that resume is fair game, says John McCrudden, director of the career center at Southampton College of Long Island University. You also want to prepare your own questions, though issues of salary and benefits are taboo on a first interview.

For the past several weeks Kimberly Elfast, who is about to get her accounting degree in December from Southampton, has been prepping for interviews, as well as going on them. She first did a mock videotaped interview at the career center and then hit some Web sites to learn more about what accounting interviewers ask.

She says she bombed out on her first campus interview as she wasn't prepared to discuss specific past experiences, but as for her second interview -- "I aced that one," and was called back a second time. All this preparation sure has helped, she says, but "it's consuming me."

You can tell when you get to the wind-up stage of the interview, Bieber says, when you get "dead air space" or the interviewer starts to clear his or her desk or stand up. That's a signal to ask any final questions and to say you are really interested in the job, if indeed you are.

It's also the time to ask what comes next. When do they expect they'll be making a hiring decision? Can you call in a week to see how they are progressing? This is the set-up for your own follow up to the interview, which we'll discuss further in next week's column.