8 tips to help you ace the job interview

You have made it to the interview. Where you know all about yourself. You expect that the interviewers know all about their company’s business, people and role. Which you do not know. You never hear back from them after the interview. The person who was hired had researched these for a week before the interview. Your homework and due diligence on the company are just as crucial a part of the interaction as your own stories. Be well-versed and thorough.

Your previous employer’s business model was flawed and you had told them so. Your boss was a terrible manager. Your team mates would never support you and steal your credit. It was not your fault. You tell your interviewers about it. Your interviewers choose to interpret it as disloyalty and lack of ownership while bidding you goodbye. Even if you had bitter experiences, an interview with your potential future company or bosses is not the place to make a pity party or bad mouth anyone. Remain ethical and moral at all times.

Why would you waste time in an interview if the salary was not up to expectations? So you discuss money and position right at the beginning. The interview seems to go downhill thereafter. The interviewer thinks of himself as a buyer and wants to be sold and convinced about the product before discussing price. Money matters are important but if you show that it's the only thing that's important to you, don't expect the company to put its faith in you.

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The interviewer asks strange questions from your resume. Like examples of how you outperformed or handled negative clients or team conflicts. Or about industry numbers. Or specific learnings from the certifications and education you have claimed. You fumble or spin a story. The stories don't check out. And you don't either. Know you stories by heart, prepare for behavioral workplace questions, they are the most common part of any job interview because past performance is often taken as a metric to determine future behavior.

You heard your interviewer ask you about yourself. And later ask you to leave. You do not remember the questions that were asked in between. And why the interviewer would repeat each question even after you had answered. Meanwhile, the interviewer’s notes look somewhat like this— poor listener, irrelevant answers. You must be attentive, present and alert at all times. An interview is not the place to have your focus detracted. Be mindful.

Also read: How to negotiate salary during job interview

Keeping your resume completely confidential, letting no eyes other than your own get a peak at it before it goes to a recruiter are rookie mistakes. Matters are made worse if you do not believe in criticism of what you have written. Meanwhile, the recruiter does not see your resume like you do and trashes it in five seconds finding it ordinary and even irrelevant. So what went wrong? Other job-seekers who got short listed had polished their resumes with inputs from multiple friends, and that's where you can err.

If you choose to explain your entire career over six pages of size six font, you are headed the wrong path. The average recruiter spends about six seconds on a CV decision. Your CV lands in the out tray while the in tray is filled with one page resumes or two pages for 20+ years of experience. These CVs avoid writing much about older jobs, irrelevant hobbies or information like a residence address.

Also read: Dos and don'ts to create the ideal one-page resume

If you shoot your shot at every distinct target job with a single weapon, I.e. the same CV every time, you are likely to miss many targets. Your old CV simply takes a single click to send and you target multiple job applications in an hour. What did the successful candidate, on the other hand, do? He took hours to line up his target by reading the job description, learning about the company and role and then customising his resume to prune, reword and highlight what was important to the employer.

Also read: To fail that job interview, any of these 5 mistakes is all it takes

Surely the resume is about you and tells your professional highlights. But using personal pronouns such as “I”, “me”, “we” is perhaps the biggest no-no. Otherwise, your CV will stand out in the recruiter’s hands but only for the wrong reasons. Regular resume writers know that using a personal pronoun as the subject or object of a sentence is not expected. Instead they start bullet points with an active verb like ‘Managed a team of five engineers’.

If you exaggerate, use partial facts or someone else’s achievements, you are putting yourself in grave danger not just for one time but probably for life. In most places, the recruiter’s existing knowledge and access to the internet will uncover the truth. Where you get a shortlist or a job, the situation is worse. A termination, black-listing and a permanent blot on reputation follows after a post hiring background verification including a document and reference check.

You believe a picture is worth a thousand words. And that what you see is what you get. So you include your own passport photograph at the top of your CV and then maybe add a few graphs or colourful designs for good measure. Which is all very well if you are auditioning for Bollywood. Or showing off your creative abilities for a designer or artist’s role. For all other purposes, the ATS—applicant tracking software—rejects your resume finding it unreadable. Thereafter the recruiter overlooks it in favour of standard professional resumes minus pictures and designs.

Your manager agrees that you are hardworking and smart. The job description calls for diligence and professionalism. You put these words in your resume. And yet your resume does not make it to the recruiter’s laptop. A recruiter searches for hard skills like “python” and “Tally” and not for subjective attributes like “hardworking” or “diligent”.

You are proud of the responsibilities you handle in your role and pour them all out in your resume. The recruiter will then be left wondering why you wrote down a job description instead of a resume and whether you even contributed to the company's growth or success story. Meanwhile, the smart resume writer will pen his personal achievements and not his duties, core tasks or responsibilities, thus making the CV relatable, comparable and of course, catchy.

You have never heard of a spell check nor asked someone for a grammar check and submit your resume. Your resume contains an extra digit or wrong dates or even incorrect contact info. Basically, you do not check what you have once drafted. Big time mistake! Your resume is not a rough draft, it is the real deal. Why let your telephone be unreachable for the recruiter? Observing such errors and typos, she assumes that the job is not important for you and you haven't even taken the first step seriously.

Also read: For career success, complement writing skills with editing