Essential Skills To Top Interviews And How To Deal With Rejection

Facing a hiring manager across the interview table you want to make the right impression that gets you selected. Equally important is to know what to do if you get rejected every time.

When every other person called for an interview is equally qualified, only those candidates get selected who are able to create the impression of being the right fit for the job.

The general strategy should be to use the ‘right’ words in answering the questions and avoid certain other words that may create a negative impression, says Lily Zhang, Career Development Specialist at MIT.

Writing for The Muse career advice site, she says judgemental words like intelligent to describe oneself should be avoided. Instead, terms like logical, quantitative, fast learner that sound more like facts could be used.

Same logic works for “likeable”. Instead, words like ‘team player’, ‘outgoing,’ ‘enthusiastic,’ or ‘caring’ could be used along with examples of the candidate helping out in certain critical situations, speaking up in meetings, thus providing concrete evidence of personality and capabilities.

Then again, describing oneself as ‘successful‘ does not cut much ice with interviewers who would rather hear you pointing out relevant skills and experience that you possess to qualify for the job.

The word ‘obsessive‘ to describe your passion for work also sends out negative connotations. Among words that are more specific would be ‘focused,’ ‘detail-oriented’, ‘hard working’, or ‘dedicated‘.

Another contradiction would be to project your humbleness without being a braggart. Here again, a simple statement of facts, about what you did, the results and reaction of others leaving the judgement to the interviewer would work well.

There could, of course, be exceptions to the rule or other ways to get your point across.

Apart from displaying your soft skills to impress the interviewer without going overboard, it would be worthwhile prior to the interview to find out if you could fit in with the company’s profile and culture.

It could be that one company’s culture is more collaborative and extroverted than another’s. But with more and more companies spending time, effort and money to project a certain kind of profile, it would be difficult to get a true assessment from outside.

During the interview itself, couple of leading questions like the employees’ average tenure or the average generation of the company’s workforce would allow you to get a better idea about the situation. It also conveys to the interviewer about your serious intentions to join the firm, says Kim Shepherd, CEO of the recruitment firm Decision Toolbox, talking to Fast Company.

In case of rejection, you could ask for a feedback from the interviewer to find what went wrong. However, since it places employers in positions of liability because they are not giving inputs to every single candidate, the hiring manager may offer a vague feedback or simply refuse.

In such a situation, a depersonalised approach would be better, Shepherd says. You could express your desire to work for the company at a later date, say three to five years and ask what would make a viable candidate.

This would be more of a forward-looking hypothetical approach than a post-mortem. In such a case, they are being asked to help groom you.

Another approach would be to display empathy towards the hiring manager’s situation by saying that you had been in a hiring role previously and if he could share the thing where you fell short and the quality that he really liked.

This could get you an appraisal of your strengths and weaknesses while avoiding seeming to be defensive.