Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Home / Interviews Tips / What Can Happen in a Difficult Interview
It is important to avoid developing fixed ideas about what to expect from either your interview surroundings or your interviewer. Expectations can well suffer a nasty shock when reality strikes, and this will only add to your anxieties at a time when you want to keep them to a minimum. It is much better to approach your interview with an open mind. Expect anything and be mentally prepared to readjust your approach to adapt to any situation which might arise.
Timekeeping. Warning bells should start ringing if you arrive a quarter-of-an-hour before your appointment to find more than one other candidate in the waiting area. Something has gone badly wrong with the schedule, either because of an emergency, or more likely, because each interview is taking longer than the time originally allocated to it. This is sheer bad planning and can throw a carefully planned return journey home into total disarray.
Other areas of poor time-planning are:
interviews restricted to too short a period—say quarter of an hour; or
interviews extended beyond their ‘natural’ length—say beyond three-quarters of an hour.
A well-structured interview should last between half-an-hour and forty minutes, with five minutes allocated for the interviewer to complete any relevant notes before seeing the next candidate.
An Unsuitable Interview Location. If you find yourself being ushered into a corner at the far end of a large office or workshop with hectic activity going on all around you unabated, you have problems. There could be several reasons for this unsuitable interview location, not all of them due to thoughtlessness:
1. There is no suitable spare room available to set aside for interviews.
2. Your interviewer is the supervisor in charge of a section, and can’t, or won’t, leave his or her work station for long periods.
3. Your interviewer is oblivious to the surroundings and does not think them unsatisfactory for interview purposes.
4. Your interviewer knows the surroundings are unsuitable but believes candidates should be able to cope with them.
Having your interview in a room shared with other members of staff can be just as harrowing. The effect is just the same as being interviewed in the larger environment—constant interruptions from both employees and phone calls to other people in the room.
Even where an interview room has been set aside from the hurlyburly of the rest of the organisation’s everyday life, your troubles are not over. It may be any old spare room currently not being used. It may be the stationery cupboard or even a store room. Conditions may be cramped, vast, untidy, dirty, cold, hot, damp, stuffy, draughty or a combination of several of these. In other words, totally unsuitable.
Even in ideal surroundings, you can be faced with the ‘interrogation’ layout—a huge desk with three interviewers sitting behind it like judges, and the candidates’ chair—rigid and straightbacked—placed several feet away from the table in terrible isolation.
All these signals warn of the low priority given to recruitment standards by the organisation, and may well reflect the management’s attitude towards staffing matters in general.
