Are you one of those people that hates awkward silences? If you are, you’re not alone.
Tip 1: Silence can be your friend.
A bit of silence is ok. If I ask you a question you need to think about, then think about it first. We often feel the need to jump right into an answer and it often is not necessarily the best representation of our true thoughts. If you need a few seconds of thinking time, say “Wow, that’s a great question”………pause and answer.
Also when your thought is complete and you finish your answer, you’re done. Stop talking. If I want more information, I will ask a follow up question. Don’t give into the urge after 3 seconds to add more information. Silence is something that recruiters will use to make a candidate talk “too much.” When a candidate talks “too much”, there is a better chance something gets said that might be later regretted.
Tip 2: Resist the urge to read me your resume.
Remember most recruiters have completed some prep work prior to conducting the interview. You have been selected for the interview because things in your resume stood out. With that, assume I have read it fully… When I ask you “tell me about yourself”, or “tell me more about working at XYZ Company”, tell me something I won’t find on your resume. This is your opportunity to expose your personality and uniqueness that is not possible on a piece of paper.
The recruiter is not looking for a 5 minute history starting from birth nor looking for a 15 second mini snapshot of your career. Depending on the length of your career, the appropriate length for this answer is about 1-2 minutes. I want you to tell me about yourself personally and also professionally. Your answer should be chronological in nature and should also mirror your resume, but it should not be a walkthrough of your bullets, unless there are some amazing things that you are really proud of. If that is the case, mention that bullet and move on, but don’t linger at any one specific point for too long.
A few articles ago, I wrote about not repeating bullets in a resume, that should also be followed in the interview process. Everything you talk about should be another reason for the company to give you an offer. In other words, when you use the time in your interview to say things that you already wrote in your resume, you are not getting me more excited to hire you. You may be showing me that you are a one trick pony, or you have not accomplished more than what is in your resume. An interviewer always assumes there is more to the story than what is in the resume.
When interviewing someone, I always anticipate that we are going to discuss specifics from the candidate’s resume, but as a general rule, resist the urge to dive into several specific ones and spend a large amount of time there, unless you’re asked about them directly. If they are that impressive, you probably will be asked about them directly and get your moment to shine.
Tip 3: How to answer questions on Behavioral Emotional Intelligence?
First let me define Behavioral Emotional Intelligence (EQ or EI). Behavioral EQ is a model that emphasizes behavior—the outward actions that others notice and respond to and that create objective, measurable benefits. In other words, someone’s ability to reflect on oneself and determine one’s own emotions and those around them. Then taking it one step further and being able to assess how those emotions will manifest into actions. It is often said, that IQ will get you the job, but EQ will allow you to keep the job.
A Behavioral EQ question sounds something like, “Give me an example of a time when you had two different deadlines to meet for two different people and you couldn’t do both. What did you do?”
The correct way to answer this question and questions like this are as follows. Use the acronym C.A.R.:
Circumstance – Paint a word picture of where you were, when you were there and who was with you.
Action – What happened, what did you do, how did it make others feel?
Result – After you did your action, what was the result?
With these types of questions, your answers are not meant to be 30 seconds in length. You are allowed some latitude in the length of your answer. Your answer should tell me the story that allows me to understand your feelings and actions.
There is really only one way to answer this type of question wrong and that is to not have a story. When you start your answer with, “what I would do in this situation…” or “usually I…” then you are not following the above model and you are answering it incorrectly. I want to know what you did, not what you would do. Here is why.
Imagine you are driving down the road and you come to an intersection. As you approach, the traffic light turns from red to yellow. What do you do?
If you are in an interview, you would say, well I would slow down. Great job, this is the right answer!
Then I ask you this, “On your way here to the interview, what did you do when you passed through the last yellow light on the street before getting to our building? If the truth is, you sped up to beat the light before it turned red, now you may understand why recruiters are looking for you to give us a specific time when you completed the action to the question.
We all know what we are supposed to do when faced with a dilemma, but not all of us do the right thing. My job is figure out what you actually do, not hear you tell me what you should or would do. Too often, people’s actual actions don’t match up with the “right answer”. It’s often said, the best predictor
Tip 4: If offered something to drink before the interview starts, what do you do and why?
Most of the time when I offer someone something to drink prior to an interview starting, they politely decline to not be an inconvenience to the hostess/office manager, which is perfectly fine and certainly not something that anyone like me would use as a negative. That being said, when you turn down the drink, you may actually be giving yourself a disadvantage during the interview process.
Yes, the obvious answer is you might be nervous to interview and get dry mouth, so it’s nice to have water standing by if needed. And yes it is always appropriate to accept a cup or bottle of water if it is offered, but why else does it help?
I have often found that people who have a glass of water in front of them during the interview use it at strategic times when they can’t think of something to say.
If the candidate doesn’t have a glass of water, this is often what happens; I ask my tough question, the candidate pauses for 5 seconds, which feels like 45 seconds (I am not sure why time gets multiplied like this, but it just does) and then they start to make things up about what they would do, or could do. I then cut them off, and say something like, “remember I am looking for a specific time when you did do this.” Which only adds to the level of stress the candidate is feeling, because now they feel like they messed up and don’t know what to say. I will often, at this point, ask a different question to cover the same topic, because it is true not all questions asked you’re going to have an example for, so feel free to deflect a little bit, but if I ask you 3 questions where I am trying to reveal your ability to deal with stress and you can’t come up with any situations where you handled stress, then you probably are not going to get the offer. You could at least come up with a joke for this question about how my question is stressing you out, so can you use what you are doing right now as an example of coping? I would actually think that is a pretty funny answer and can see you use humor to deal with stress. I think you understand my point though.
Here is what often happens when someone does have a glass of water; I ask my tough question, the candidate pauses for 2 seconds, which feels like 2 seconds because the candidate then reaches for their glass of water. They then take a sip swallow, and proceed to answer the question. I can’t tell you why it works, perhaps it removes the stress of the situation by allowing the person to focus on something else for a split second, but people who have water typically do better than those that don’t.
The bottom line is when you are going through an interview process, remember to give yourself every possible advantage. Don’t talk too much and assume you know what I think is important for this role. Think about ways to give you an edge over your competition, because sometimes when the decision comes down to a final tally, it could be what makes the difference between you and the person you were up against.
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