Interview Quick-Start Guide
General Considerations
Go on every interview you can, even if a position appears uninteresting. The interviewing practice will dramatically improve your interviewing skills, 
and it’s not uncommon for a position to sound more attractive when explained in person. There is also the possibility that the employer will have another position available, either now, or in the near future, that is a better fit for you.
An interview is an opportunity for you to gather information about a position and potential employer. If offered the position, you will need this information to decide if you are interested in the job. Come prepared with questions to ask, and a notepad to jot down information
Remember that your resume gets you the interview, but it’s the interview that gets you the job. It is (unfortunately) common for companies to hire the candidate that comes across best in the interview rather than the candidate who is most qualified.
The qualities that interviewers look for in a candidate are:
- strong work ethic
- enthusiasm
- ability to listen and understand
When scheduling an interview, do your best to accommodate the interviewer’s time constraints, not your own. Take a half day off from work if necessary to make sure you don’t have a problem arriving on time or having enough time. Don’t cancel and reschedule. If you decide not to interview, make sure you call and cancel, since not only is it rude not to, there may come a time when you are again interested in a position with this same company.
Planning for the Interview
Research the employer, including financial situation, recent news, and information available from current and former employees.
Anticipate questions you will be asked and think through how you’ll answer them.
Dress for success. Regardless of the dress code of the potential employer, you want to look your best.
Know where you’re going and arrive at least 15 to 20 minutes early, since you may need to fill out an application when you get there.
Take the phone number of the company with you in case you run late or get lost.
At the Interview
Don’t badmouth your past or present employers, or show bitterness.
Marketing yourself to the interviewer is why you are there. Don’t rely on the interviewer to provide opportunities to discuss each of your strengths and accomplishments–they will, of course, cover some, but you have a responsibility to assist by pointing out significant areas of experience and ability that may not arise during the questioning.
Ask for the job, or at least let them know you are interested. Enthusiasm is one of the key characteristics interviewers look for.
If the interviewer is a “talker” and doesn’t let you get a word in edgewise, you’ll need to tactfully look for opportunities to put in a good word for yourself.
You must deal with any “blemishes” on your resume, such as short-tenure positions, missing periods of work, or other concerns. The interviewer may not mention them, but it’s naive to assume they’ve been overlooked; it’s more likely that the problem was noticed and will be considered when evaluating your candidacy. Rather than permitting the employer to form an uninformed judgment, mention the issues and provide an honest explanation.
Answering interview questions
The first step in answering is listening; don’t cut off the question, let the interviewer finish. Make sure you answer the question that was asked; don’t go off on a tangent. While answering, remember to get across favorable information about yourself.
Don’t be long winded with your answers or you may “talk yourself out of a job.” Talking excessively increases the chance you might say something that should have been left unsaid.
Job seekers tend to be overly concerned about correctly answering interview questions, but in most cases the answers are of only incidental interest to the interviewer. The decision maker is more interested in developing an overall opinion of the candidate and his or her character, work ethic, and communication skills. Moreover, experienced interviewers know when you’re telling them what you think they want to hear. The best strategy is to answer questions honestly and be yourself. Doing so builds rapport with the interviewer and leaves them with a positive first impression of you.
Discussing Money
Being clever when answering questions about income can cause you more harm than good. It’s best to answer honestly when asked how much money you would like to earn. Here’s why: at the conclusion of the interviewing process, you will know much more about the company, position, benefit package, and long-term opportunity; obviously this information will influence your compensation requirements.
If you give the interviewer a figure early on and decide later that the number was too low, that’s OK; you aren’t locked in. The employer knows you will use the information they provide during interviews and the information you gather independently to calculate an acceptable level of compensation.
On the other hand, if the company cannot pay you at least the minimum amount you would accept, it is better to find out early in the process and avoid wasting more time.
Stretching the truth about how much money you currently make, or providing an artificially high income requirement can work against you. The employer may offer the job to someone who has asked for less, or who makes less than what they think you earn (but more than you really do). For example, you provide a potential employer with a compensation requirement 20% over what you are making now(hoping they might just give it to you(but in reality, it’s a desirable job and you would be happy with a 10% raise. This strategy might succeed if you are the only qualified candidate for the position. Otherwise, when the company compares your inflated figure to a lower number requested by another candidate, they will most likely decide to offer the position to the other candidate.
Interviewing the Interviewer
The interview is the time to gather the information you’ll need to evaluate the position and company in order to decide if you are interested in working there. If you ask no questions, the interviewer will assume you are either not interested in the position or are not very particular about where you work. Your best bet is to write down your questions ahead of time and bring them with you to the interview.
The best questions relate to the opportunity presented by the company: “Where do you expect the company to be in five years?”, or “If I do an excellent job in this position, where can I go from here?”
Avoid asking questions about details that can be ironed out at a later time (like after the job has been offered, but before you accept): “How many weeks of vacation do I get?”, or “Where will my office be?”
Do you, as a recruiter, “coach” candidates prior to an interview?
During my first conversation with a job candidate, I brief them on the position and gather the information necessary to determine if he or she is a fit for the position to be filled. At the conclusion of this conversation, if I view the candidate as qualified, I tell them so, and ask that they inform me the following day if they wish to proceed to the next step. To aid their deliberations, I email them a detailed position description and a link to the employer’s website.
Unless the candidate contacts me again to ask for assistance prior to the interview, I don’t prepare or coach them. My feeling is that, if I have searched for and found good candidates, and each candidate has reviewed the position description and the employer’s situation, nothing more need be done and everything will work out fine.
I realize that recruiters often coach candidates in the hope of increasing the candidate’s chances of receiving a job offer. However, it is not clear that this preparation has any effect–positive or negative–on the outcome. But even assuming the recruiter can pass along specific, inside information which improves the candidate’s interview performance, none of this coaching will improve the candidate’s work performance.
My concern is for the long-term. My reputation as a recruiter rests on how well the employees hired through me perform on job. Rather than coach a marginal candidate in an effort to improve their interviewing performance, I would rather continue searching and find a well-qualified candidate capable of earning the job offer with no assistance from me, and more likely to perform well on the job.
In any event, I prefer to downplay interviewing as a means of evaluating candidate qualifications and rely more heavily on candidate reference checking and in-depth, background research.
What is the most common mistake job seekers make?
The most common mistake, surprisingly, is job seekers don’t anticipate that hiring managers will perform an internet search to find out more about them. This oversight can result in two different problems: 1. negative information is discovered; and, 2. positive information, though available, is not found by the searcher.
It is always prudent to consider the potential career consequences of our actions, but with an increasing amount of real-time and historical information available on the Web, 
the likelihood is now much greater that missteps will be discovered by potential employers, even many years after the fact.
Some sources of information are obvious: photo posting sites, forums, blogs, and social networking sites. But less obvious sources are just as important. Google, for example, keeps Web pages cached and available to searchers. So even if a page has been taken down, it will come up in a Google search and can be accessed by clicking on the “Cached” link in Google’s results. ZoomInfo.com permanently stores Web pages that mention individuals by name and can be retrieved from their cache at any time.
In addition to your name, employers will Google your phone number, email address, former employers, and anything else on your resume that might produce a “hit” when combined with your first or last name, city or state. Before you send out a resume, perform each of these searches so you know what potential problems await you.
There are sources other than Google that employers may check; the most intimidating, perhaps, is Lexis-Nexis, which can search and retrieve nearly every newspaper, magazine, radio or TV story from the last twenty years, or more. Though not as extensive as Lexis-Nexis, public and university libraries offer full text access for written and transmitted stories.
There are many ways in which records can be retrieved at little or no cost from online databases. If you have a corporation registered in your name, marriage, divorce, bankruptcy, tax delinquency, civil or criminal court proceeding, or any type of state professional license, the records are generally available. Even traffic and parking tickets can sometimes be retrieved.
Information that enhances your reputation will aid your job quest. Attention must be paid, though, to assuring the information will be found. A Google search may miss something if it is associated with a less common variation of your name. I consistently use “Michael G Smith” as my name online, since anything associated with “Mike Smith” or “Michael Smith” will be listed so far down in Google’s results they won’t be seen. It’s important to decide what your name is and then stick with that exact form. “Kate Smith” is not the same, in Google’s eyes, as “Kathleen Smith,” “Bill Board” is not the same as “William Board,” and “James R Towne” is not the same as “James Towne.”
Sites where individuals create and edit their own records are of critical importance. You have no control over much of what comes up in a Google search, but the employer knows that you alone control the information on sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and so on. Content you post can be a liability if it is inconsistent or potentially embarrassing–your resume and your LinkedIn work history, for example, had better agree. On the plus side, if you anticipate that potential employers will view your profile, then you can emphasize your accomplishments and achievements in order to make a good impression.
You must decide what goal you wish to serve by having an online presence. Your profile on LinkedIn–currently, the most important business networking site–should not feature activities that detract from your “day job,” as that will give the impression your focus is not on work. If you are a fundraising professional and have a political blog that is compatible with the outlook of the organization you work for, that’s fine. But if your profile emphasizes a personal business you operate on the side, a reasonable person will conclude you are stretched too thin and your attention is divided.
Michael G Smith
Why don’t recruiters state the name of the employer in job postings?
One of the chief reasons recruiters are hired to fill job openings is that the employer lacks the time or manpower to deal with job seekers responding to ads. It makes more sense, for a number of reasons, to outsource that responsibility by hiring a recruiter.
One might assume that providing the employer’s name in a job posting would be fine, so long as interested candidates are instructed to apply through the recruiter rather than the employer. But an astounding number of people think that it is perfectly OK to ignore those instructions and contact the employer anyway. They figure that, by applying to both the recruiter and employer, they increase their odds of getting an interview. Or, if they don’t hear from the recruiter (which only happens if they are unqualified for the job), they then contact the employer directly, figuring they have nothing to lose at that point.
The large number of utterly unqualified individuals who respond to a job posting is a sight to behold. Then there are those who feel the need to apply two, three or even four times. In fact, these two categories constitute the majority of responses to most postings.
Unlike most employers–especially those lacking a human resource department–I deal with this every day; I know what to expect and have put in place automated systems to handle the avalanche of responses. From the employer’s perspective, I reduce the workload arising from job postings in two ways: pre-screening qualified candidates, and insulating the employer from unnecessary outside contacts.
Negotiating salary: overstating your current income or desired salary can cost you
Job candidates sometimes outsmart themselves when discussing compensation with a prospective employer. Forget what you may have learned about negotiating tactics or you may sabotage the job offer.
Here’s what can happen: if you stretch the truth about how much you currently earn, or provide an inflated “minimum” amount of compensation you are willing to accept, the employer may offer the job to another candidate who has asked for less.
Say, for example, you tell a prospective employer that you wish to earn $100,000, figuring you can then “negotiate” down to $90,000, an amount with which you would be pleased. The other candidate, however, may ask for $90,000, 
which is the number he or she really wants. Naturally, the employer takes both candidates at their word and proceeds to offer the job to the employee who will cost less (assuming, of course, both candidates have roughly equal skills).
Suppose you give the employer an honest, minimum compensation number and they then make an offer that is lower? This is not a problem; it doesn’t make a bit of difference what amount you ask for, or what amount they offer, since you alone control whether you accept the offer or not. If the offer is too low, turn it down and reiterate that the number you provided earlier–your minimum compensation amount–is truly the minimum offer you will accept.
If the employer is unwilling to come back with an offer at, or above your minimum, then either the employer has another candidate that is not quite as desirable as you, but somewhat less expensive, or the amount the employer offered is simply the most they are able to spend.
In my experience, employers do not typically reduce the amount of compensation they plan to offer when they learn the candidate is willing to accept less. Surprised? Think about it; if the employer decides that, for a variety of reasons, salary “X” is the right amount to pay for a certain quality of employee doing a particular job, then why pay a different amount? If money had been the most important consideration, then the employer could easily have sought out a less expensive employee.
I have also found that it is much better for the employer to find out before the offer is made that the compensation amount is not acceptable to the candidate. It is usually easier for the hiring manager to secure approval for higher compensation during the process of preparing the offer, especially if the request is based on specific information provided by the candidate. Once the offer is made and rejected, though, the manager’s harried effort to secure more money will likely be seen as an attempt to salvage a bungled hire.
Working from home; finding a work-from-home job
Considered from the employer’s point of view, e-commuting is not a viable option for many jobs and some employers are hesitant to open the door to that option. Nearly all management positions require the manager to be on site in order to mentor staff and direct activities. By the same token, less experienced employees who wish to develop management skills and eventually become managers themselves cannot expect to do so if they work off site.
From a quality of life perspective, working from home appears to offer advantages: flexibility with regard to work hours, less micro-management, and lower commuting costs. However, individuals who have worked from home or in a one-person office are aware of the disadvantages of this arrangement: loneliness (no social interaction with office peers), difficulty getting motivated, and lack of real-time information flows that may affect the direction of ongoing projects.
Taking these considerations into account, there are certain types of work where the trade-offs are worthwhile. By foregoing the requirement that an employee work on site, an organization can gain access to a larger pool of qualified candidates and possibly lower their costs as well. In fact, that’s exactly what outsourcing is, since there isn’t really much difference between having an off site employee and an off site vendor–the considerations underlying the decision-making process are much the same.
Selling the idea of working from home to your current employer may be tough, since your boss already has the preferred situation and is not likely to settle for less. From the employer’s perspective, converting an employee from onsite to off site has few advantages (your office or cubicle becomes available to another employee, yet only if you never work in the office), but many disadvantages (less accountability, and more difficult and slower communication). Unless the employer is faced with losing the employee and having to find a replacement, there is no advantage to the employer in agreeing to your proposal, so the only leverage you may have is offering to work from home instead of quitting.
On occasion, an employer will state in a job posting that the position may be performed from home. If not, you should raise the issue during the first conversation with an interested employer and see how they respond.
