Are You Suffering from Interview Advice Overload?

As if there isn’t enough pressure with job interviews, the process comes with a seemingly endless barrage of advice about how to do everything from dress and smile to shake hands and focus the conversation on your talents and skills. This article elaborates, “Visit Google sometime and type in ‘interview tips.’ In less than quarter of a second, you’ll have 187,000,000 articles, posts, and pages filled with advice on how to ace your next interview, tips for job search and career success, and other helpful hints.”

Don’t allow paralysis by analysis to undermine your interviewing style. And, yes, you have an interviewing style just as you have a personal style determined by the clothes you wear, the music you listen to and the way you walk. So have enough confidence in your style—in you—at job interviews. People, especially interviewers, are constantly acknowledging and interpreting the messages you send via body language, work choice and those beads of sweat rolling down your forehead and collecting in your armpits.

It’s difficult to relax in stressful situations, especially when every piece of advice is telling you to relax. Keeping your cool is best accomplished by being prepared for an interview. Remember there is little you can do at the interview in the days leading up to it. Your years of life, the jobs you have worked, the schools you attended and the grades you received, and the life you have lead have all led up to this interview. Your only responsibility during the job interview is to talk about these things, and be yourself.

Being yourself is often easier said than done, but as you gain more experience with job interviews, you’ll learn soon enough that there is no reason to be nervous. You’re either a good fit for the job or not, and if you don’t get the job it rarely is because the person interviewing didn’t like you as a person—it’s because it was someone else’s turn to land their dream job, perhaps someone who has worked harder than you for many more years than you. It’s business. And the more you feel comfortable with the business of business, the easier you’ll find it to be yourself, and your career will follow suit.

Photo courtesy of bpsusf.