18
Sep
Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I gave an interview. Having previously only been on the receiving end of the relentless barrage of questions, I discovered a number of things about the experience that I had never noticed before.
- You become a lot more aware of body language. When you’re the interviewee, you might be so anxious that you don’t pay much attention to your nonverbal signals. But when you’re the interviewer, you’re more relaxed and notice the changes in others.
- If you take notes, it freaks people out. Note-taking during an interview seems like an innocuous task, but when you’re writing on a pad that the responder can’t see, they get a bit nervous.
- People are better at answering specific questions than general ones. We were interviewing for interns with a high degree of technical knowledge, and although they answered those questions accurately, they seemed to have trouble with more generic questions, like those from this list.
- It can be just as stressful for the employers as the potential employees. Since all you have to go on is a resume and some emails or calls arranging a meeting, you really don’t know about the character, motivations, qualifications or honesty of the person you’re meeting with. It’s difficult to determine these things about a person, especially during an interview.
- You might not be sure of what kind of dispersion of the four factors you really want. Although you should have a model employee type in mind, meeting someone who you think might be as good or better than you predicted can make other assessments more difficult, as well as rationalizing your choices to your superiors.
- While the interviewee can talk in declarative and affirmative statements, you have to keep things more vague and noncommittal. As the hiring decision is not usually a split second decision, it can be tricky to figure out how to phrase sentences or ask questions, without raising false hopes.
So the next time you’re going in for an interview, it might help to remember that your interviewer may have some of the same stresses as you do.
