Remember the interviewers have committed their valuable time and are just as keen to find the right person.

Preparation

• Know your prospective employer: Research their company website and source relevant journals and news articles;
• Seek feedback from your consultant;
• Practice: Find a trusted peer to ask you interview questions;
• Document major achievements and obstacles you have encountered in work over the last 12 months;
• Know the position: If you don’t have a job description request one from your recruitment consultant;
• Dress to impress: Ensure excellent personal presentation: dress appropriately for the role and company culture;
• Know where you are going, be on time, avoid interviews that clash with peak hour traffic, take the interviewers phone number in case of the unknown;
• Bring a recent copy of your CV. Recent graduates should bring an academic transcript.

Throughout The Interview

• Shake hands firmly;
• Demonstrate enthusiasm for the role;
• Maintain positive body language and good eye contact;
• Clarify any question you don’t understand;

Avoid

• Negative comments about your current or previous employer are not suitable;
• Don’t ask about salary at the first interview, but be prepared to state your expectations if needed;
• For experienced candidates, avoid over- answering or giving longwinded responses to the interviewers’ questions. If they need more information they will probe
• Avoid "Yes" and "No" answers - always elaborate

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You Blew the Interview. Now What?
Source: John Kador, HR.com 2002
Grant me the confidence to accept the rejection I cannot change, the determination to change the rejection I can, and the wisdom to learn from each.

No one likes to be rejected, but if you are serious about your career in the long-term, you must learn to embrace rejection. In the course of your career you will get rejected for a lot of reasons - some valid, some not so valid, and some for no reason at all. The challenge of embracing rejection is to accept your limitations, transform hopelessness into action, and learn from each rejection.

When they are rejected, most candidates fold up their tents and slink away. That is understandable, but precisely the wrong strategy. To a salesperson, a no is just the beginning of another conversation. Many candidates have parlayed a rejection into a relationship that led to another job offer, if not for the original job then for another job. Even if you can’t do this, a rejection can be beneficial if you can get authentic feedback.

Your first challenge is to find out why you were rejected. If you didn’t get a job you believed you were qualified for, ask yourself why? Oftentimes you will know why. You were under-qualified, you were over-qualified, your previous salary was too high or too low, or you are a job-hopper. These objections were surely brought out in the interview, so your rejection should have been no major surprise. You can take some comfort from the fact that there was nothing much you could have done to overcome these objections.

Every once in a while, you will blow an interview, quickly realise what you did wrong, and kick yourself immediately afterward. You might recover from some of these mistakes, but others are fatal, at least as far as that interview is concerned. Perhaps you dressed inappropriately. Or perhaps you inadvertently insulted the interviewer. Perhaps you permitted yourself a moment of anger to vent at your current supervisor. Maybe you were late to the interview or were unprepared because you didn’t have any questions to ask. By the time you left the interview, you knew it was hopeless. Consider these learning experiences and resolve to conduct yourself more professionally next time.

But occasionally a rejection will come out of left field and you will feel blindsided because you just didn’t see this one coming. You felt you were well qualified for the job. The interviewer seemed to like you and gave you some positive indications that everything was going to work out. You left the interview feeling positive. Then you get a letter or phone call telling you thanks, but no thanks.

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Understanding Rejection

This is the time when embracing rejection pays off. You have to understand exactly why you were rejected. There is really only one way to do this. You have to ask the person who rejected you why. Send a short note that says: Thank you again for interviewing me. I understand you decided to go with another candidate and I accept your decision. I’d appreciate any feedback you can give me.

Key here is acknowledging that you accept the interviewer’s decision. The issue of your application for this position has been decided. You lost. Get over it. No recruiter will help you if they think you want to give them an argument.

Unfortunately, many interviewers are not going to tell you what you want to know under any circumstances. The fear of lawsuits by former employees has so traumatised employers that they will almost never give candidates the authentic feedback they need. Some companies are so fearful that an HR person may inadvertently say something that might come back and bite them that they sharply restrict what HR people can say. Companies checking references on former employees run into this problem all the time. Many companies now reveal only the title of former employees and the dates of their hire and termination. Reluctantly, they may reveal salary information. In fact, a new trend at some companies is to have reference checks conducted entirely by a computerised telephone system that gives prospective employers the minimal information. The idea is to remove actual HR from the process.

In this atmosphere it is all but impossible to get a hiring manager or HR person to be honest. It’s a shame because many HR people are educators by nature and desperately want to tell candidates what they could better next time or how their resume could be improved. But they have absolutely no incentive to do so and lots of incentive to keep mum. For you, that makes getting authentic feedback very difficult.

An HR manager at a Fortune 1000 company who prefers not be identified reported the following exchange with a candidate who had just received a letter of rejection:

Candidate: Thanks for taking my call. I got your letter telling me that you won’t be making me an offer. I was a little surprised because I left the interview thinking that I was very qualified for the job. Of course, I accept your decision, but I am calling to try to understand why I did not get an offer. I want to learn from any mistakes I may have made. Candidly, can you tell me why I did not get the offer and what I might have done differently to present myself as a stronger candidate?

What interviewer wanted to say: I admire you for making a call like this. It takes a thick skin to ask for such details. In fact, you sabotaged yourself in a number of ways that can be easily remedied. You had a couple of misspelled words on your resume and your choice to wear sandals instead of shoes caused some of us to question your professionalism.

What interviewer actually said: I appreciate your call and we were impressed by your credentials, but the truth is that another candidate simply had a little more experience in the areas most important to us. Good luck in your job search.

Unless you have a personal relationship with the hiring manager, it’s almost impossible to get honest feedback about the selection process. And the irony is, the more you need brutally honest feedback—the more there’s something you can actually do something about—the less chance you will get it. That’s because few HR professionals want to come clean on the subjective reasons one candidate is chosen over another.

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Cutting Through the Pretence

There may be one strategy for cutting through the pretence, but it’s pretty strong medicine and it doesn’t always work. Of course, you have little to lose. And some candidates have actually had success with it. After you are rejected from a position and you genuinely don’t know why, call the interview. The pitch goes something like this:

Thanks for taking my call. I got your letter telling me that you won’t be making me an offer and I accept the decision. I need to improve my interviewing skills and I’m asking for your help. I am asking you to be brutally honest about my performance and what I could have done better. I can make you three promises. I promise I will not interrupt you. I promise I will not defend myself. And I promise I will not contact you or anyone in your company for a year. Will you help me?

That last appeal is important. It speaks to the desire of most HR people to be helpful.

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Enlarge the Recruiter’s Territory

Whether you get a job offer or not, follow up with a thank you letter. You’d be surprised how few candidates actually take this simple step. Most recruiters tell rejected applicants they will keep their resumes on file, and a few actually mean it. But if you send a great letter accepting the recruiters’ decision and suggesting that if another position more suitable opened up you would very much like for the company to consider you, chances are much greater that the recruiter would follow through.

REPRODUCED FROM HR.COM (WWW.HR.COM)

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