How To Ruin A Job Interview In Under Five Minutes By Liz Ryan.

 
                                             Setting: A sunny office, mid-afternoon. COCO the cat is sleeping on a pillow. LIZ is drawing at the conference table. The phone rings.
RRRRRRRRING!
LIZ (pressing the button to operate the speaker): Liz Ryan! Is this Denise?
DENISE (on the phone): Yes! Hi, Liz - it's nice to meet you!
LIZ: Nice to meet you, too!
DENISE: Thanks for making time to speak with me about my story.
LIZ: No problem!
DENISE: My editor assigned me this story. It's a piece about interviewing mistakes -- how to ruin a job interview through lack of preparation, and that kind of thing.
LIZ: Great. Do you have questions for me?
DENISE: Well, what is the number one thing that causes job interviews to fall apart?
LIZ: It's what you said -- lack of preparation. Not taking the process seriously enough, and not giving it enough thought. Dialing it in, you might say.
DENISE: And with all the articles that have been written on this topic, why do you think that people still make the same interviewing mistakes?
LIZ: It's hard to blame them. Where would they go to be trained in good interviewing technique? It's not like they learn it in school.
DENISE: That's a good point. So how can people get better at interviewing?
LIZ: One way is to really think through the job opening. Think about what's important in the job -- not just the standard interview questions and standard answers.
DENISE: Does Human Workplace teach people how to think through the job opening and prepare for a job interview?
LIZ: For sure!
DENISE: So, how would you advise a client to begin their preparation?
LIZ: Well, you've got job ad, right? You've got a job opening and a hiring manager who went to great trouble to get that job opening approved.
Chief Financial Officers and other financial people are not in a rush to approve new job openings. There has to be big pain or they would wait and fill the job later, or never fill it.
DENISE: So you have to think about what that pain might be?
LIZ: Unless you work for the company, and then you can just ask the department manager.
DENISE: Wait a second -- you said "Unless you work for the company." If someone's looking for a job, they're not already working there -- how could they ask the manager?
LIZ: What audience are you writing the story for? I thought we were talking about the interviewer.
DENISE: The interviewer? No -- this story is for job-seekers!
LIZ: Really? Oh, that's my mistake. I figured you were writing a story for interviewers, because most of the not-prepping-for-interviews problems and the dialing-it-in problems I see are not on the job-seeker side of the desk. They're on the interviewer's side.
DENISE: Okay, wait! Now I'm confused. An interviewer has to prepare for a job interview?
LIZ: Definitely! Sadly, way too many job interviewers just go through the motions -- like you mentioned, following the standard script. That's a huge disservice to their colleagues, their customers and their shareholders. It's a massive insult to the job applicant who spent a lot of time learning about the company and preparing questions. It's shocking how bad the standard interviewing process is.
DENISE: How so?
LIZ: In the traditional interviewing set-up we focus all of our energy on vetting the candidate and very little if any of it on selling him or her on the opportunity. We assume they're sold, because they showed up. We focus on our needs and not theirs, and we don't even do a good job of evaluating whether a person can do the job or not.
DENISE: Can you give me an example?
LIZ: People have their biases and prejudices, right? We all have them. We can surmount them if we are aware of them, but most interviewers don't even stop to do that. They walk around with ideas in their heads that they believe are real and don't consciously think about, much less talk about.
They might believe that people who know their weaknesses and are willing to tell strangers about their weaknesses are better hires. Is there any evidence for that? Heck, no! Those interviewers don't care.
We can't even say for sure what a 'weakness' is, or why everyone must have one, but a lot of interviewers insist that not only do people have them, but it's appropriate for a job-seeker to tell the interview -- a perfect stranger -- what those weaknesses are! They say "It shows self-awareness." Self-awareness cuts both ways!
The question "What is your greatest weakness" shouldn't even be legal -- it has nothing to do with a person's qualifications for the job. But we have all grown up with the idea that the interviewer sits on a higher perch than the job-seeker does, and therefore calls the shots. We see this belief acted out in job interviews every day.
DENISE: I never thought about it before, but you're right. It's almost as though the job-seeker is expected to put on a show for the interviewer's pleasure.
LIZ: That's the whole story, except in those organizations and for those managers who are aware of that bias and work to neutralize it. A lot of people don't.
They firmly believe that one of the benefits of being a manager or a recruiter or HR person is that you get to run applicants through their paces. There's no business logic behind it -- it's just a process that we cast in stone a hundred years ago and haven't thought about since.
If you needed a plumber to come to your house and get your kid's sock out of the tub drain, would you dream of subjecting the plumber to your list of goofy questions? Of course not! The plumber would never stand for it.
DENISE: So you believe that it's job interviewers, and not job applicants, who have the most to learn about interviewing?
LIZ: Even before anybody learns anything, it's the job interviewers who have the most to UN-learn. Step one: burn the interview script! It's a hundred years out of date. Reading those idiotic questions from an interview script marks you as a half-wit, let's be honest. Get off the script and have a human conversation.
DENISE: You teach people how to do that?
LIZ: Yes, and it's easy to learn once you shift your mindset. It's much more fun to interview people in a human way than to grill them like suspects in a police interrogation room!
DENISE: Wow, this is not what I expected. I thought you were going to talk about how job-seekers ruin their chances at a job by blowing job interviews.
LIZ: Of course, that happens, but the traditional and widely-used interview script and process is so dysfunctional that most of the job-seekers who do well with that process are excellent actors. That's their advantage. If they took off the mask and brought more of themselves to the interview they wouldn't get the job.
DENISE: Things are that bad?
LIZ: They aren't that great, but they are getting better.
DENISE: So what can a job-seeker do, when faced with someone like that?
LIZ: You have to listen to your gut. You can sit there and answer the questions with a plastic smile on your face if you want, or you can get up and leave if you can't stomach it.
Honestly, I think that's the only way some interviewers are going to change their approach - when enough candidates literally get up and go home.
The old "Grovel, knave" interviewing mindset is dying off. It won't last. Millennials won't tolerate it, and a lot of people of all ages won't either. They insist on being real at work, and who can blame them?
DENISE: So you are hopeful -- you see a change coming?
LIZ: It's underway right now! The Human Workplace movement has over a million people in it. CEOs are coming around. Managers are getting the message and thinking about their leadership style and the Team Mojo in their departments.
HR people are the greatest evangelists for the shift in mindset that needs to happen and that is already happening. They teach their teams how to interview differently and also how to lead differently.
DENISE: Not a moment too soon, right?
LIZ: Not a second too soon!
KINGSMITH.