February 25, 2008

A revelation

During the time I was jobhunting I got my hands on a lot of tips and suggestions on how to do good interviews. Good bodylanguage, ask questions, be confident, etc etc.

Not until this week did I realize how much of a difference it really makes. Over the past 1,5 weeks I've been doing interviews for a vacancy at our department with my manager. Very fun, but very weird to suddenly be on the other side.

And although I've always taken in the advice I've gotten and tried to keep it in mind and act on it as much as possible during interviews, it wasn't until I could see these tips and tricks from the other side that I could really understand the difference.

# Sitting crossarmed in a corner not moving is not the way to show you really are motivated for the job.
# No one asked questions at the end - I thought that was compulsory? I couldn't believe it.
# Only one person really came across as very confident, well prepared, knowing what he wants and so on. He's definitely through to the next round.

Interesting (and fun!) to do though... and I have lots more inspiration for the workshop I'm hosting in April.

1 comment:

Jules said...

When you do the workshop thing, can you emphasise to people that they should do a bit of reading up on the company they are interviewing with???

You have no idea how many interviews I have been on the interview panel for, and have asked the question "did you look at the website?" or "how much do you know about [insert organisation name]?" and the answers are "I didn't look at the website" and "I don't really know anything about [organisation]".