Interview Advice from my former Business Partner….

** MMR Comment: Originally posted on FB: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=375999778110

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Students: My partner in InfoToGo, Howard Hart, is interviewing for a junior programming position this week. He kindly wrote this note as a way to help you avoid deal-breaking interview mistakes. Read and apply, the job you save could be your own!

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Hey, just a thought from the field you might want to share with your students. This week is interview week and I keep seeing people making the same basic mistakes. Forewarned is forearmed, so here are a few things I’d tell students given the chance:

1. SHOW INTEGRITY: If you put a skill on your resume, I’m going to grill you about it. If you can’t speak intelligently about your experiences or your mastery of the skill, you’ve damaged my trust in your integrity and there is probably little you can do to save yourself.

2. BE HONEST: If you don’t know, say so. I deliberately ask questions that you are very unlikely to know the answer to or have the experience for. The winning answer, therefore, is “I don’t know” or “I have no experience with that situation”. The best answer would also include “, but I can assimilate new technologies easily and I’m confident I could work it out” or something of that nature.

3. LISTEN TO MY QUESTION. If I ask you a question and in your anxiety spend 3-5 minutes explaining something totally out of context to my question, that indicates you 1) can’t listen, 2) can’t handle a stressful situation, or 3) don’t know what you’re talking about. All three are killers.

4. SHOW ME YOUR ENERGY. I’m not interviewing for an office slug, I want someone who is truly interested in the terrific opportunity I have for the person who will value it. If you’re honestly not terribly excited about it, then don’t fake it but if you’re really hoping to get that job, exhibit that in your manner and speech.

5. SMILE. Yes, especially on the phone. I can tell.

6. BE REALISTIC: If you worked somewhere for three months and have 99 bullet points of how you rebuilt the company infrastructure, it’s pretty obvious you’re BS’ing me. Chances are the interviewer knows how much work an IT person of your particular genre can realistically do in a given amount of time. Take credit only for what you really did and you’re a lot more believable.

7. If you have a strong accent, slow your speech just enough to be certain you’re being understood. That applies regardless of where you’re from – Boston, Atlanta, China, whatever – we all have accents and not everyone is as familiar with your particular one.

Those are the top ones – you’ll probably have a few to add to that list – feel free. In my book, if you can’t get past these, the chances of my coming back to you are pretty unlikely…