Stay above pettiness
One of the many, sometimes silly little snares of a job interview may rear it head very early in the screening exercise in which you are a party.
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Some of these little, annoying situations may be deliberately engineered by the interviewer in her efforts to test a certain weakness she seems to be discovering in you in the course of the screening.
Other traps may also come up on their own and quickly exploited by an intelligent interviewer to test an important indicator such as stress resistance, patience, cooperation, integrity, team work, et cetera.
As much as possible, do well to steer yourself clear of these hurdles because without such a winning capacity to rise above such pettiness, you could transform a glaringly winning interview into one that leaves you with only regrets.
But to be able to steer your way out of these almost unavoidable snares, you need to know the nature of the traps, when they usually occur, where they are set and how to either avoid them or change them into an advantage.
Some of the gravest errors with real potential to steal away golden opportunities from jobseekers attending an interview have often been rooted in simple tests whose principal objectives jobseekers have failed to decipher.
Unnecessary arguments
Arguments that slowly heat up and sometimes explode around the interview table usually start like a simple, technical question whose answer is often common knowledge in the industry.
When the interviewee is told that her right answer is wrong, she may fail to understand the essence of the job-giver's objection.
Such objections may represent clear provocations from the interviewers as they try to test the jobseeker's tolerance level and her ability to overcome clear provocation.
A test this simple, which can be resolved by a little more effort invested in the explanation and eventual friendly disagreeing with the interviewers may degenerate into scenes that may bring out the ugly side of the jobseeker.
Personal questions sometimes become sources of disagreements around the interview table. While the interviewers may not be mean in asking certain personal questions, jobseekers may view such questions as hitting below the belt.
Instead of reacting with caution and reason, some jobseekers go overboard and in the process offend some members of the panel.
Experienced interviewers have unconventional ways of de-stressing the candidate when the former have reason to believe that their subject is under undue pressure.
To offset this negative effect, intelligent interviewers are known to veer off the main subject and introduce themes often unrelated to the encounter.
While their objective may be genuine and intended to assist the jobseeker to reach maximum capacity, the interviewee may also genuinely misunderstand this deviation.
In such circumstances, some jobseeker choose the uneasy road of proving to the job-givers what ugly stuff they are made of.
Personal questions
Sometimes too, the personal questions are not a de-stressing factor: they may be deliberately intended to check the kind of person the jobseeker is on the emotional scale.
Questions about your past love relationships may come up in passing but if you allow such a journey down the line of bad memories to fling you back into that hateful mood as was typical on the occasion of the breakup or loss, you might more likely fail this test.
While your job-givers may be testing how you let go of the tragedies of the past and focus, harness and unleash all energies towards the achievement of present goals and future strategies, you could be letting yourself go with the flood if your reactions paint the picture of a man or woman incapable of reconciling with life.
Unfortunately however, a lot of the strenuous daily tasks of modern corporate world almost perfectly fit into the person with the skills to overcome life's multiple hurdles, to forgive both oneself and the offender and to come out of adversity stronger.
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Without these, the butters of life may soon transform a sweet employee into a constantly nagging, bitter person incapable of handling the stresses generated by the corporation's interaction with its environment. .
I have had the opportunity of listening to a lady trainee at one of my job interview coaching lessons who related to the class about how she threw an opportunity under the bus at a job screening. She was asked about her past or current relationship challenges and failures.
Her opinion was that matters of emotional relationship were personal and so she would not share them. Then a followup question from one of the interviewers suggested that she was the probably the problem.
The lady trainee related how she got into a tussle with the interviewers over the second comment. By the time the little showdown was over, she did not need a prophet to tell her she had crushed the opportunity to be on the team of one of Britain's banks operating in the country.
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The world of business is full of distractions. Interviewers, especially if they are mature, experienced and intelligent, tend to creatively invent their own ways of f testing key performance indicators that may not have found their way into any contemporary business textbooks. If by their experience and wisdom , persons exposed to certain conditions react in a certain way which way compromises productivity, such HR practioners may be tempted to create situations akin to the ones they have in mind. And when they subject you to this test and you fall into the trap, no one is to be blamed but yourself.
When getting set for a job interview, it may be necessary to consider your job-giver as a little ingenious devil capable of surprises .
While one may not be able to master all the likely little , troubling quizzes, it should be possible to foresee and almost adequately prepare premeditated answers for some of the little quarrel-laden, annoying questions.
Unless you rise above such pettiness and desist from making a generally embarrassing question your own, you may never make it pass the first screening.
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In subsequent editions, I will be dealing with the real interview questions. And the theme that will open this new series will be the first question that we often get greeted with at a job interview: