Interviewing Part 3

I was in Europe last month, and Shanghai last week. Yeah, I know – pity me, poor world traveler. I will say this – Paris had the worst heat wave in 40 years while I was there, and Shanghai had the hottest week of the year while I was visiting, so you can probably feel a little bad for me – I am a cold-weather type o’ person. Yet, any place I go seems to get the heat! Anyway, I am back, and I’ll share interesting stories about the interesting locales in some future posts. Right now – it’s time to wrap up the final in my 3 part series on interviewing.

Probably some interviews going on in there, right now.

Confused message: Related to the rambling, some candidates give confused impressions about themselves. Either they try to be self-deprecating, or just have semi-contradictory points. A candidate might say that one of their strongest skills is communication. Later when asked about weaknesses, they might say that they are shy and must become more outgoing in order to work as part of a team.

Technically, those two qualities don’t contradict. Someone can be shy and want to become more outgoing, while still being good at communication. But that’s a lot of nuance for a job interview- the message gets muddled. And if the candidate is saying “I used to be shy, but I overcame it and now am great at communication,” that’s a heart-warming message, but it means they didn’t really tell me about a weakness, only a past weakness.

As a potential manager, I’m just trying to understand – are you going to be great at communicating at the team, or am I going to have to work on that with you? If you’re strong enough in other areas, it’s fine if the answer is “we’re going to have to work on that one.” But what’s not fine is if I come out of the interview thinking “Is this candidate strong in communication? I’m not sure.”

Craft a message:The flip side of not giving a confused message is to craft a message. This is what you want people to leave the interview thinking about you. Many resumes have a section near the top where the candidate has listed what they feel are their strongest qualities. Something like:

• Creative
• Dynamic
• Team Player

That’s great! If you’ve figured out that list, you already know what message you want to craft. You want us to leave the interview having imprinted those qualities on you in our minds. Once you know what qualities you want to exemplify, try to look at each answer as a way to demonstrate those. Don’t force it to the point where you’re not answering the question (or rambling!) but there is usually a way to evoke some quality in every answer. Even the dreaded “greatest weakness” question. If you’re trying to push the idea that you’re dynamic and a team player, for greatest weakness, you could say:

“In the past, I’ve sometimes been too willing to go along with the will of the team, even when I thought they were wrong. I would speak up, but I would also immediately start figuring out ways to make the new idea work. And once I would see how it could work, that would give the idea new life. That’s often a good quality, but sometimes it’s better to defend a good idea from being replaced by a bad idea, and I need to work on learning when to fight and when to get on board.”

That’s a real weakness, and wouldn’t set off my BS alert like the old “I work too hard” answer – but it also reinforces that you are dynamic (figuring out how to make a new idea work,) and a team player (going along with the team’s wishes.)

Too Sensitive: it’s hard, when you go into a room, ready to sell yourself as an awesome person, someone this development team absolutely needs, and they criticize you. Say you did a writing test that got you to the interview, and then I come in and tell you all the things I didn’t like about it? Maybe under normal circumstances, you’d be cool about it, but right now the pressure is on, and you want to convince me that I’m wrong – every criticism I had of your test is a mistake, and your test is just awesome! That’s just a terrible thing to communicate, isn’t it? Because really, if you get hired, part of my job is going to be telling you things you could have done better.

Side Note: There are people who play mind games in interviews – say provocative things, or attack you, to see how you react. There are people like this in every organization. I think it’s BS, and I don’t do it. So when I say that I’ll come in and criticize your test, it’s not some elaborate mind game. I just want to discuss weak points with you, and see how you’d fix them. True, I also want to see how you react to feedback, but in an honest and straightforward way.

Practical: Yep, the opposite of “too sensitive” in this context is not “Tough” – because if you’re a creative, you’re probably not that tough inside. Or if you are, it’s probably to the detriment of your creativity. To me, the best attitude is practical. You’re creative, you’re passionate, and you want your stuff to be good. So when someone gives you feedback, you want to hear it – it may hurt, but in the end, you really want your stuff to be good, and you want to learn, and you’re willing to listen to anyone – CEO, janitor, drunken-lead writer (ahem,) who may have some insight.  Be practical!

In closing: The biggest thing I see is that people get nervous, over-analyze what’s going on and freak out. Take a deep breath. Remember what you want to communicate. Hopefully it’s “I’m creative and chill. I take and give criticism really well, and I know who I am – and who I’m not.”

So that’s about it for interview thoughts. As I said in the first post of this series – I don’t want this blog to become a “How to find a job” thing – I’m not even particularly knowledgeable about that, and there’s lots of great resources out there. I just wanted to cover some fairly basic interview mistakes I’ve seen over the years. So now that’s out of my system and I can rant about other strange things in the future!

 

-BTK