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TEN COMMON INTERVIEWING MISTAKES
AND HOW TO AVOID THEM
By Taunee Besson
Published in The Wall Street Journal: National Business Employment Weekly

Up to this point, you've conducted a flawless job search. You've developed lots of networking contacts, tailored every cover letter and resume to individual employer needs, and sent your two best suits to the cleaners regularly. Now you are ready to begin scheduling your initial group of employment interviews.
To maintain your admirable track record, you'll need to consider the following questions before you launch into your first interview. Have you spent some time contemplating how to prepare for each of your interviews, or do you plan to "wing it?" Do you have a clear understanding of what the relationship between you and the interviewer should be, or are you assuming your role will evolve in situ? Do you know what to do if you receive an offer less than what you are worth, or have you decided you will deal with that problem when and if it occurs? Have you put together a list of questions for your interviewer, or do you think it's his job to do the asking?

If you have decided to take a spontaneous approach to interviewing, stop for a moment, and think about the uncanny parallel between making the right choice in your career versus finding a great marriage partner. If you make a good match, you will live with your spouse and your colleagues for years. You will spend many hours with both your personal and professional partners motivating and mentoring each other, pursuing common goals, celebrating successes, and sharing failures. You will be bound financially, in sickness, and in health.

Even though our career and marital relationships are both very important, we spend much longer selecting a mate than we do choosing our next job. While I don't advocate taking months or years to make a sound career move, it seems this critical decision deserves more thought and preparation than "hoping for the best." Below are some common mistakes that job seekers make on a regular basis, because they don't recognize the need to collaborate with their potential employer in selecting the best match for both parties.

1. Winging It
Any time you are heading into unknown territory, it's a good idea to do a little research in advance. Interviewing with someone you have never met isn't exactly exploring the Zambezi, but there will undoubtedly be some psychological rapids and verbal quicksand to navigate during the course of your conversation.
To prepare yourself for any eventuality, find out as much as you can about the company and job opening ahead of time. Some very useful information may include: sales volume, profit for the last several years, debt load, major products and/or services, opportunities for growth, number of employees and branches, the mission statement, corporate giving to charitable institutions, reputation and background of the management, and job responsibilities. Some of this data is easily available at your local library in reference books, trade journals, and annual reports. Other pieces of information, such as the management's approach to growing its employees along with the company and the job's description and compensation package, may require a little more digging. Contacts are generally the best way to capture these less tangible, but very important elements.

2. Telling the Interviewer What You Think He Wants to Hear
When you are looking for a potential marriage partner or good friend, do you represent yourself as the individual you think this person wants you to be? Or do you realize that a long-term relationship depends upon honesty and straightforward communication?

If you assume an employer-employee partnership will be a long-term association, it makes sense for both parties to be candid and open with each other from the start. Rather than approaching an interview with the goal of getting the job, look upon your initial contact as a vehicle for finding out if the organization, management and position are congruent with your skills and values. Too many job seekers pride themselves on winning the offer whether they want the job or not. Unfortunately, this misguided approach often leads to a scenario where pride goes before the fall, and the victor's spoils are not worth the battle.

3. Assuming the Interviewer Holds All the Aces
When you are looking at your interviewer from across the table, do you have the uncomfortable feeling that she is the cat and you are the canary? If you do, you are not alone. Yet many job seekers, in assuming a potential employer has her act totally together, are giving her too much credit and too little empathy. If you put yourself in her shoes for a moment, you will realize that she has as much at stake in this interview as you. What if she hires the wrong person? Someone who alienates her carefully nurtured team. Someone who isn't nearly as capable as she thought. Someone who covets her position enough to sabotage her at every turn.

She can't afford to make a mistake in choosing the best person for the job. She is under a lot of pressure, maybe even more than you. Think of her as just another nervous professional who puts on her mascara one eye at a time.
The last time you bought a car or a home, did you have a number of questions to ask concerning the financing, construction, reliability, etc.? Of course, you did. Is your next career move at least as important as your Lexus? Of course, it is. Do you want to impress your potential manager with your grasp of the position and knowledge of the company. Absolutely. If you agreed with the answers above, having your own list of questions for the interviewer should make a lot of sense.

Good questions serve two important functions in an interview. They give you the information you need to make an intelligent decision about the opening and they impress your interviewer. A savvy manager knows you have done your homework by the questions you ask. He realizes that you understand the position, because you are prepared to discuss its potential opportunities and challenges. And he enjoys the mental gymnastics required to answer your thought-provoking questions.

5. Ignoring Red Flags
Have you ever taken a position, knowing in your gut that is wasn't the right job for you? If you have had this experience, you probably rationalized that your misgivings were groundless and would disappear once you started working. Unfortunately, it only took you one or two miserable weeks to confirm that your intuition was correct.

In our left-brained culture we tend to give little credibility to our hunches, because they are instinctive and often illogical, yet, personal history usually proves they are right. The next time an interviewer embarrasses you, asks illegal questions, makes promises that are too good to be true, insults your intelligence, equivocates on an answer that should be black or white, or boasts that 60 hour weeks are "the way this company believes in doing business," finish the interview, write a pleasant, but noncommittal thank you note, and cross this job off your list. Life is too short to work with a jerk.

6. Focusing on Experience Rather Than Benefits
Anyone who has taken a sales course knows a potential buyer is more interested in how you can benefit him than how your product or service works. This is also true of a potential employer. While discussing your experience is useful, it isn't nearly as intriguing to an interviewer as how your background and skills will apply to his particular situation.

Fortunately, this basic tenet of human nature can be very helpful to a job seeker who hasn't already held a position like the one she is pursuing. If she can show an employer how her innate abilities and personality traits will benefit the company, she may win the position over other candidates who have more applicable experience, but don't know how to sell it. If a career changer can prevail over a career veteran by talking benefits, imagine how powerful a veteran's case can be, if his interviewing techniques equal his technical ability.

7. Accepting a Position Without Interviewing With Your Immediate Manager
Would you agree to marry someone you have never met? Not many Americans would, yet quite a few agree to work for a company without talking to their potential boss. This is especially true for young people who are looking for their first job out of college.

No one has more impact on your career than your immediate manager. His performance, feedback and attitude will have an effect on everything you do. His conversations with his boss (the one who has the real power to promote, reward, and fire you) may color higher management's perceptions of you for years to come.

Before you accept a job, get to know your boss. Ask probing questions to determine if you and he have compatible work styles and philosophies. Decide if he is someone whom you could admire and cultivate as a mentor. If he isn't, look for another professional who more closely mirrors your image of a good manager. There are many terrific supervisors out there looking for talented employees. With a little sleuthing, you can find them.

8. Assuming the Compensation Offered is an All-or-Nothing Deal
In the book, You Can Negotiate Anything, author Herb Cohen talks about the power of precedent. He says the written or spoken word of a person in authority is often perceived as being immutable. Yet very few things in life are as inflexible as we believe, including compensation packages. Most positions carry with them a range of salaries based partly upon the experience and education needed to perform them and partly upon what the market says they are worth.

If your job offer is less than your desired compensation, you probably have room to negotiate, especially if the number quoted is not at the top of the position's salary range. It's better to ask for what you want than feel exploited. If you don't, you may put a chip on your shoulder that grows every time you work overtime on a hot project for your Scrooge of a company.

9. Failing to Use Your Leverage
Interviewing mistake #9 is closely allied with a number of others in this article. What do they have in common? Fear that the employer is a rigid autocrat who expects the job candidate to do his bidding or else.

Many job seekers don't realize there are two needy parties in a job transaction. The employer is dependent upon finding the right candidate. The candidate is anxious to settle into the right job. Both people have an equal desire to develop the best possible match.

Yet many job seekers relinquish their power when they are chosen as the number one person for the job. Instead of using their blue ribbon status as leverage to ask for what they want, they squander their advantage worrying about what the employer will think. Will Mr. Jones say I'm greedy if I ask for the company to pay for my parking spot? Will he withdraw the offer if I don't take it as is?

When you are offered a job you haven't yet accepted, the balance of power between you and the employer is in your favor. If there is something you want, make a counter offer before you say "yes," because once you start working, your stock will take at least a year to rebuild.

10. Obsessing over Catastrophic Expectations
When you were a child, did you ever awaken in the middle of the night knowing there was a monster hiding under your bed or behind the closet door? While these shadowy creatures were pretty scary, they always lost their power when exposed to the light.

Few adults still worry about monsters under the bed, but many job seekers find themselves threatened by other, more insidious ones like:

• The I Will Never Work Again Monster
• The I Will End Up Sleeping Under a Bridge Monster
• The Phone Will Never Ring Again Monster
  and the scariest one of all
• The I Am Worthless Monster

Catastrophic expectations are much more deadly than bad dreams, because they linger in your conscious mind, capitalizing on every opportunity to frighten you into a state of emotional paralysis. It's no coincidence that people want to stay in bed and pull up the covers when the "I Am Worthless" monster comes to call.

Catastrophizing would be bad enough if it only affected the job seeker's self esteem, but it has an even more far-reaching consequence. People who feel worthless and desperate are very poor interviewees, because no matter how hard they try, they cannot disguise their negative feelings about themselves. They become victims of their own self-fulfilling prophesies. If you need to banish some psychological dragons, expose them to the light of rational thought. The next time you feel a catastrophic expectation about to take hold, confront it. Quantify the probability of your finding yourself sleeping under a bridge in the next three months. You may be amazed and embarrassed by how low the realistic number is. Develop some alternatives for what you would do should you be evicted from your home. Could you stay with relatives? Could you rent a room somewhere? Could you sleep at a homeless shelter?
Once you have considered the true probability of your catastrophic expectation and devised a plan to deal with it, you will conquer your fear and vanquish your dragon.