Interview Skills

Common sense ought to dictate what you wear to your interview, and common courtesy ought to tell you all about punctuality and proper behavior in your interview. Of course, you should arrive on time, take everything you need, and act friendly to all the people you meet. Your conscience can fill-in a lot of the other “skills” - you must tell the truth even as you accentuate the positive, and you never should promise more than you can deliver.

What if we focus on the genuinely difficult skills, the ones the most predictable questions will challenge? The most difficult skills are those that deal with conscientious reflection, self-discovery, and genuine self-disclosure.

You can bet your first paycheck that the interviewers will ask you, “What motivates you?”. Studies show that “the motivation question” comes-up in more than 90% of interviews. Entry level, CEO, or any spot in-between, the interviewers will ask you about your motivation. Constrained to perfect honesty, what will you answer? Will your perfectly honest answer correspond with the company’s values and expectations? If money inspires your passion, and you interview for a job on Wall Street, you should be fine. If, however, “affirmation from people you admire” inspires your very best work, and if you very seldom have met people you admire, you’ll have some difficulty explaining how you will fit into the company’s organization chart.

In order to develop this skill, you must spend some time reflecting - in the privacy of your own journal and under the harsh light of conscience, you should write about it and reconcile it to work’s demands until you feel satisfied you have perfected your answer. You should expect difficulty, because most of the world’s most powerful motivators don’t reconcile well with a job’s demands. Love, for example, motivates a big segment of the population. If you tell your interviewer, however, “Love motivates me more than anything”, she immediately thinks “sexual harassment case” and she begins preparing for the next person. You cannot change your motivation, but you must reconcile it with your profession.

You similarly can stake your first contribution to your 401-K that the interviewers will ask, “What’s your most glaring weakness?”. Just like “the motivation question”, “the weakness question” arises in more than 90% of interviews. And, whether it’s a quirk in human nature - much like people’s morbid curiosity about train-wrecks and other people’s tragedies - or just the effects of long years on the job, interviewers have a tendency to remember confessions of weakness far longer and more vividly than they remember declarations of strength.

What is your greatest weakness? Have you done anything to overcome it; have you taken responsibility for correcting it, or have you sustained an initiative to turn it to a strength? What if your greatest weakness is a compelling virtue? Once upon a time, Saint Kieran was punished for being excessively generous. A high school principal remembers one of his teachers criticizing another for being too smart. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright was admonished for being “too visionary”. Once again, constrained to perfect honesty, what must you confess is your greatest weakness and what will you tell your interviewers about your attempts to overcome it?

Once again, in order to develop this skill, you must invest quiet, fiercely private time in careful reflection and negotiation between conscience and practicality. If you have struggled hopelessly and helplessly with your weakness and it still owns you, you probably should avoid openly discussing it…even if it is your “greatest”. And, as you reflect, think about context: if, a la Carrie Bradshaw, you shop compulsively for shoes and you squander large chunks of paycheck on strappy little numbers you may wear once, the substance of your weakness may not be relevant in the workplace - you will, after all, always comply with the dress code. The compulsion, however, and the fine eye for value may reconcile; the constant need for money may motivate you more than you originally thought.

Invest the time and heart in conscientious reflection. And write it down! E.M. Forster quipped, “I don’t know what I think until I write it”. Psychologists have proven Forster was not and is not the only one, because writing forces clarification and it implies commitment. How many times have you joked, knowing you weren’t joking, “Can I get that in writing?”. Once you have written it, you will see it clearly and you will feel committed to your thoughts and feelings…at least, until you erase and reconsider.

As you prepare, remember - write yourself a post-it or get a tattoo - but remember this as well: the most common questions come with most common answers, so that you constantly stand at-risk of cliché or near-fatal ordinariness. Every wise guy in North America has answered the weakness question, “I struggle constantly against my perfection”. At best, the knock-off answer will win a patronizing “courtesy” smile.

If you answer honestly, you have some assurance that your unique combination of values and attributes will distinguish you. If you perfectly put the words to the emotions and convictions, tracing their shapes and recreating their textures, you should develop a one-of-a-kind answer; and that’s the one you want. In the end, honesty is the best policy, not because it’s ethical, but because it’s expedient: it requires the least effort and it gets the best results.