Interview Confidence

A month ago, I ran a poll here on LinkedIn, asking if job interviews make you nervous.

237 people responded, 73% indicated that interviews made them nervous, and only 27% of respondents were confident at job interviews.

The following newsletter is for the 73%, if you fall into the 27% of people who are confident at interviews, please kindly help forward this newsletter to people in your network who are not as confident. I would appreciate it.

Let’s talk about confidence at interviews, shall we?

Is everyone confident?

I believe most people are confident in themselves… yes, even if they appear to be timid in public situations.

How do I know?

When most people are amongst their friends and people, they feel comfortable with, they are relaxed and more confident to express themselves.

Therefore, we can agree that everyone is confident to a certain degree in certain situations as long as two things are at play, who they are with - the audience, and how they feel in that situation – comfortable or not.

Now let us talk about confidence in interview situations.

Interviewing by nature is not the most comfortable situation. Several things are at play and contribute to this lack of comfort:

You know you are being assessed against a set of criteria.

You know you are being compared with other candidates vying for one role.

Add to this…

Your past negative interview experience.

Your beliefs about your capability to do the job.

How badly pressed you are to get the job.

All of these present a certain level of uncomfortableness.

Does this mean you are doomed to lack of confidence in an interview? No. The key is in the work you do in preparation for the interview and your opener.

The work you do in preparation for the interview.

On the surface, most people will attend job interviews with some form of preparation. However, it is shocking how many people go into interviews without adequate preparation, the kind of preparation that is required to get the job.

In my 15 years in HR, I have been in countless interview sessions, and I have observed that most people don’t come into interviews ready to get the job offer. They just don’t put in the required time and effort enough to prepare and be knowledgeable about critical employer details. Details about the company, its culture, its unique challenges, its market position, its recent wins, and its recent fails. All the facts needed for them to stand out in the sea of applicants.

Your Opener

The job interview is like a performance and you the candidate are the artist.

How do you get the conversation started? How do you own the room? How do you control the interview and pace yourself? How do you ensure you hold the performance enough for you to communicate your highest selling points?

Or are you so unnerved you cannot wait for it to be over? With your heart beating so loudly you barely hear the questions?

You should learn the art of interviewing correctly especially if you are a mid-level HR Professional tired of playing mid-field and you want to position for more senior and visible roles.

In a YouTube video I recorded recently, I shared a tool I use with my interview coaching clients to prepare a great opener for their interviews. Check it out here.

If you would like me to send you a copy of the tool I referred to in the video, send me a message on LinkedIn with the word “Confidence”.

Try it out and let me know how it goes, I have gotten great feedback from my interview coaching clients who use it to prepare their interview openers.

It is always a pleasure writing these newsletters to you, I feel like through these newsletters we can have a pleasant exchange and I can support you by sharing something profound for your career. Isn’t that nice?

Next week, I look forward to sharing my March 1 pager report with you and hearing your thoughts.

Take care and speak next week.

Olutoyin Williams