Whether you number among the ranks of the unemployed, or you are about to separate from your employer due to a downsizing, or even if you are “putting out feelers” in the name of career advancement, our continuing series concerning interview tips will be of benefit to you.  Today’s tip is often overlooked, yet can be critical to the success of your interview.

Watch the Small Talk.  Provided he or she has the luxury of time, the savvy interviewer may wish to engage you in small talk.  Our well-considered advice, based upon nearly thirty years of professional experience, is to be prepared for this eventually, and well prepared. The rationale behind this latest of our interview tips is this: on an interview, small talk can have huge ramifications.  If you have established a rapport with the hiring manager and the interview appears to be going well, you may have begun to drop your guard.  Take care in how far you drop it.  While Equal Employment Opportunity legislation was enacted to protect potential employees from discrimination on virtually every level, prospective employers will still try to extract information from you beyond questions that blatantly telegraph infringement of these laws.  They do so in order to minimize risk to their corporations as well as to reduce risk to themselves, associated with their decision to hire you.

Particular targets of this type of “small talk” are moms, women of childbearing age, and older applicants.  Moms and women of childbearing age are often viewed as a greater risk than the general candidate population because of the potential for maternity leave or care of school-age children home because of illness or days off.  Older applicant face the prospect of age discrimination, as younger applicants are viewed as more cost-effective in terms of salary, as well as more flexible in their thinking than their more mature counterparts. When engaging in “small talk” on interviews, then, know in which direction and for how long to take what may appear at first glance to be light-hearted banter. 

Congratulations: you have secured an interview!  In order to ensure that you maintain the most professional demeanor and ace the interview, you will wish to heed the following interview tips:

Give yourself a little pep talk.  Among the myriad applicants from which to choose, your prospective employer has selected you as one of the most qualified candidates for the open position.   If you have been unemployed for a while due solely to the lackluster economy, you may have allowed yourself to become disheartened and perhaps even cynical.  One of our most effective interview tips is to force those feelings aside as you prepare for this interview, and literally look yourself in the mirror.  Tell yourself that you are exactly what the company is looking for, and why.  After you have completed your self-motivating speech, make a list of all the traits and competencies that you possess that are valuable to the potential employer.  Display that list in a place of prominence, so that you will see it easily and repeatedly.  Thus prepared, you will sail into your meeting with genuine confidence.  Never underestimate the draw of confidence on an interview!  Conversely, studiously avoid verbal and non-verbal communication that may paint you as anything other than self-possessed, knowledgeable, and skilled.

Organize your thought processes.   Before meeting with the hiring manager, our next most vital of interview tips is to review your resume once again.  If you have described accomplishments, as we have strongly urged you to do in previous articles, prepare to be asked about some of those achievements in greater detail.  Understand that the interviewer may phrase things a bit differently than you are expecting, such as “Who opposed this project (or recommendation or new system) and why?  How did you get around that?”  You may also be thrown a curve ball with, “You got angry at least once at your job.  Why, and what did you do about it?”  While the old adage states that honesty is the best policy, prudence is always the better policy.  Denigrating (”slamming”) your former employer and/or colleagues, even by inference, will be received as a negative on your part.  If you are expecting such questions in advance, you will know best how to frame your answer to portray yourself as a professional.

We’ve all had them, those hellish days when we’ve wished we had never tumbled out of bed.  Interviewers have those days as well.  Constrained by business ethics to conduct themselves with the utmost professionalism, the fact remains that those who must interview prospective employees often deal, simultaneously, with larger issues.  When these personal matters spill over into a job screening session, however, the manager’s attitude can color the entire tone of an interview and even blacken it against you!  For instance, you might, be speaking figuratively when you ask rather innocently, “Would my job functions include writing reports after I have met with the client?”  The interviewer may snap back with, “You don’t have the job yet!  That’s for me to decide!”

Or, perhaps, during an interview, the rather pleasant manager with whom you feel you’ve established a rapport receives a call from home; a so-called emergency involving his eight-year-old that is, in fact, nothing urgent in the eyes of most people.  The interviewer may become frazzled and even embarrassed that you were a witness to that conversation.  He may hang up with his spouse or child and then resume the interview in a brusque or hurried manner.

In these situations, it can be easy for you to become rattled or even belligerent.  However warranted, such a response will only work against you.  As the interviewer is already in a less than optimal state of mind, an approach that is patently offensive or defensive will only aggravate the situation further.  If you can maintain your composure, you will have scored points for your demeanor.  You can accomplish this by:

Counting silently to 10 before responding.  Yes, this does work.  It gives you a few precious seconds to collect yourself and think about how you will frame your response.

Mentally transferring your anger to an inanimate object.  If you are seated, envision your anger flowing down your arms, out of your fingertips, and into the chair.  This mental exercise will prevent you from venting back or verbally attacking the interviewer.

Distracting the prospective employer with a question totally unrelated to his or her question.  Although this can be tricky, it has been known to work in potentially explosive situations.  Instead of retorting something disastrous such as, “Who qualified you to interview people?”, you might redirect the situation by asking brightly, “Is that your dog in the photograph on the wall, the chocolate Lab?  I love dogs.  I have a German shepherd myself; she’s four years old and loves to fetch.”

Asking if the interviewer is “all right” may have the opposite effect, as your question implies that something is indeed amiss.  However, use your instincts. If you sense that something is seriously wrong, that perhaps, for example, the interviewer just received bad news a moment or two before you walked into his office, you may wish to exercise sensitivity as well as logic.  You might suggest that, if another time may be more convenient to discuss the job opening, you would be willing to reschedule the appointment.

Given the need to run leaner and meaner in an increasingly competitive environment, career professionals have streamlined the interviewing process.   Essentially a process of elimination for both interviewer and job candidate, it is no longer “business as usual” to conduct a first or sometimes even a second interview in person.  Instead, the telephone has become the medium through which a job candidate makes an initial, direct impression upon the recruiter or employer.

A calm, confident, and professional telephone demeanor infers that you conduct yourself in a similar manner in business settings.  In order to convey this image, be prepared.  Once you have submitted your resume, cover letter, and any other required documents to the headhunter or prospective employer, presume that you will receive responses via telephone.

To prepare for these, you can practice by recording yourself during a mock interview in which a friend or family member can assume the role of the hiring manager.  Playbacks will reveal the deficiencies in your delivery that you will want to correct.  I warn you that listening to how you actually sound on the telephone may be rather disconcerting.  However, the more simulated interviews in which you participate, the better you will sound and the more comfortable you will be during the actual screening process.

Make sure that the message on your answering machine reflects your professional character.  Change any inappropriate greetings (and I believe that you know those of which I speak).

Have your resume handy as well as any information concerning the company and the position you desire.  An applicant who does not have these essentials immediately at hand runs the risk of sounding ill-equipped and even appearing disinterested in the job.  If you need to hang a small corkboard by your telephone to manage your information, do so.  This corkboard should not be used by other members of your family as a forum for posting reminders, bills, or children’s artwork; its sole purpose is to facilitate the interview for you.

Similarly, the interruptions of family members and background sounds such as TV’s, stereos, or pets are not conducive to productive telephone interviews.  A telephone extension placed in a quiet area of your home will provide you with the privacy that you require.  Please note that a landline is preferable to a cell phone for purposes of interviewing.  If you do not have a landline in your residence, perhaps you can arrange to call the employer at a pre-arranged time rather than awaiting the employer’s call.  In that way, you might make arrangements to use a landline of a friend or family member for the conversation.

If the interview has been scheduled for a specific time, be sure to take care of other matters beforehand so that you will not be distracted during your dialogue with the recruiter or employer.  Even if the call is unscheduled, adherence to the suggestions above will facilitate your projection of poise and professionalism that may lead to a personal interview and an offer of employment.

Not all forms of prejudice are as blatant as Karl’s situation.  Although Equal Employment Opportunity legislation was enacted to prevent job-related discrimination, the law, as written, can differ vastly from its practice.  In a society that prizes and glorifies its concepts of good looks, bias based upon an applicant’s appearance is often so subtly ingrained that an employer can be unaware of the fact that he or she is prejudicial.  Married to tall, well-conditioned frames, handsome or pretty countenances can open doors faster and wider than their plainer counterparts.  However, there are exceptions.

Is it possible to be so beautiful that looks can eclipse one’s abilities, clouding the hiring manager’s vision so that all he or she sees are the applicant’s external attributes?  The popular television program, “Beauty and the Geek,” revolves around the accepted premise that attractive individuals are considerably less intellectual, and less capable of reasoning problems through to successful resolution, than their ordinary-looking, more scholarly partners.  Over the months that the program airs and the contestants evolve, this supposition is debunked to a certain degree.  However, a job applicant does not have that luxury of time. Numerous psychological studies have indicated that human beings form impressions of others within the first thirty seconds of meeting them.  How will you be perceived when you face your prospective employer?