Interviewing the good, the bad and the ugly ...

Let us assume that your résumé actually makes sense, that it is perfectly to the point and that you are called for an interview. This is where the fun really begins.

The first, golden rule of interviewing is – be prepared. Back when I was an enthusiastic college graduate, hunting for my very first job, I would spend hours and hours in the library researching the Agencies I’d decided to apply for. Spending time in the library is now a sweetly old fashioned concept, but back then, in the early nineties, The Internet Didn’t Exist. I know that seems a completely impossible scenario to anyone who was born after 1990, but back then we had no option but to read books and newspapers, make handwritten notes and carry sheafs of paperwork around. Despite the effort of doing all that, my university career counsellors drummed into us the importance of research, research research … and so I spent literally hours poring over facts and figures about each and every company before I met them. Being well prepared is essential to give you the confidence to handle anything an interviewer throws at you. This might seem blindingly obvious, even to the Google generation, but I am always amazed by how many people do not take the time to conduct even the most basic investigation into the company they apparently wish to work for.

During any interview, I always ask a candidate the seemingly straightforward question, “why do you want to work here”. That question is unfortunately invariably met with a blank look. Some wily candidates will turn it smartly around, “well, I would really love it if you could give me your perspective, as an insider”. No, smart alec, you cannot pass the buck. I want to know from you, what you know about the company you are applying to work with. More importantly, I want to know why you think that said company will be a good match for your skills, a good cultural fit for your personality, and a good career choice overall.

It is brutally clear, however, that the vast majority of candidates do not think that spending even a few minutes researching their career destination of choice is a good use of their time. This baffles me - with the advent of smart phones, you can at least Google the basic facts on your way to the interview.  When applying for a job, you really need to convince the interviewer that you are passionate about his or her company. That you are clear about your reasons for applying, and that you’ve been smart enough to prepare yourself in advance. It also helps, by the way, to research the interviewer and the senior members of staff. Sites like Linked In and even Twitter and Facebook will give you all the information you need, to understand a little bit about the person who is firing questions about you, their background, interests and what drives them. I recently conducted an interview during which the interviewee rattled off my entire career history to me, and questioned me (gently) about my own career choices. It was slightly precocious, but a refreshing change from the majority of slack jawed, blank eyed responses to my simple question, “why do you want to work here?”.  The more you research and rehearse, the more confident you will be. Practice by answering questions, on your own, at home, to ensure that on the day the answers trip confidently from your lips. This can also have the added benefit of ensuring that you avoid making silly grammatical mistakes and faux pas in the interview. I recently asked a candidate why he wanted to work for my company, and was amazed as he replied, “I want to expose myself”. Another told me that, “if aroused, I promise to work hard”.  On both occasions, I had to excuse myself from the room and go howl with laughter in the loo. Similarly, don’t be afraid to ask questions during the interview if you don’t understand what is being asked. As a Brit who is usually interviewing Indians, I try to speak slowly and ensure that my questions are clear and easily understood, although my British accent has an unfortunate tendency of becoming more and more pronounced the slower I speak, and I often forget that this can be tricky to understand. The Queen’s English may be perfectly proper but my own husband sometimes struggles to understand what I’m going on about, let alone a perfect stranger. If in doubt, ask.

These rules apply even if you are being interviewed for an internship position. Although interns are often used, in India and overseas, as “cheap labour”, the fact of the matter is that interning can be a fantastic way to get some practical experience, to learn a bit about a particular industry, and give a young person the confidence to push themselves harder to achieve results. It also benefits the company, as long as its employees and hopefully its HR department take the time to create a meaningful experience for the intern, rather than just using him or her for the morning coffee run or endless, pointless desk research. An internship should be seen as an opportunity rather than a chore, a foot in the door rather than something to keep demanding parents happy, but I am always amazed at how many fresh out of college kids are either too lazy or uninspired to take the time to research a company when applying for an internship. The rules of preparation apply equally to an interview for an internship, if not more so, as you have to persuade me to let you loose in my company without any prior work experience. Unfortunately, many people don’t take it that seriously. A few weeks ago I hired a young college graduate for what I thought was a fabulous position in our marketing team. He was pretty clueless about what he wanted to do with his life and why he wanted to spend time interning with us, but he was charming and polite, well spoken and I assumed that his lack of focus would translate into passion and vigour on the job, and that every young college kid would kill for an opportunity like this. His role was clearly defined by an internal mentor who would ensure that his time with us would be meaningful, his office hours stipulated as 10 til 6, and he was offered a small stipend. College Boy was twenty minutes late on the first day, and I put it down to adjusting to a new routine. He was three hours late on the second day, and took the morning off on the third day as he was “hungover”, by his own admission. On the fourth day, he didn’t show up at all, and didn’t answer our calls or text messages. I never really found out what happened, but I guessed that he preferred to sit at home being fussed around by his parents, than jump into the thralls of office life. Which is fine, in principle, but he wasted our time. Looking back, I should have spotted the signs during the interview and not been lenient just because I (wrongly) assumed that everyone starting off in their career would be as desperate to get a foot in the door as I had been, over twenty years earlier.

Getting a foot in the door - the Great Indian Resume

It all begins with the résumé. And, more pertinently, ensuring that said résumé is crammed full of qualifications, which should ideally begin stacking up from birth. From the moment that blue line appears indicating a positive pregnancy result, most Indian mothers are preparing themselves to ensure that their child will be competitively placed in the great scrum that is the Indian Workforce.  It is hardly surprising that competition is so fierce – slacking off, or failing to secure an acceptable monthly wage can mean that families literally starve. Unlike the majority of western countries, where social security systems (or at the very least subsidies) exist to cushion those who fall into financial difficulty, India has no such luxury. The daily sight of families eking out a living on the crowded, filthy streets of most of the major towns and cities in India is a stark reminder that there are only a very few degrees of separation between failing to hold on to a job, and setting up home on the pavement. And so, the fight to secure a place on the “ladder” starts early on.

The Indian résumé is generally a long affair, usually running to a few pages, and replete with glowing descriptions of awards gained, extra curricular activities, exam results, degrees, post graduate degrees and MBAs as well as a detailed and invariably hyper ambitious “career objective.”  In India, it seems as though an MBA is an absolute requirement for anyone with an iota of ambition. Back in the UK, MBAs and even postgraduate degrees for that matter, are generally reserved for the “nerds”, the swotty types, those who don’t really know what to do with their lives or who want to postpone having to earn a living for as long as possible. Here in India, anyone without a postgraduate degree is considered a complete idiot, and is virtually unhireable. Fortunately a new and enlightened breed of managers are emerging who believe, as I do, that while an MBA might be a fantastic addition to a person’s core skills and knowledge, it is not necessarily the be all and end all. I am a great believer in practical experience. Nothing can beat throwing yourself into the world of work and learning through doing it yourself. I do believe that an MBA can be a brilliant addition to that, but as a positive choice, a few years into a career. I lose count of the number of young people I have interviewed who proudly display their MBA on their résumé, yet who can barely string a sentence together and clearly have no common sense or ability whatsoever.

Whenever I receive a résumé, either solicited or unsolicited, which is only one or two pages long, I heave a sigh of relief. The concept of “less is more” is not easily understood, when it comes to creating a CV in India. The actual fact of the matter though is that a résumé is supposed to be a succinct career summary, not a novel. It is intended to list relevant skills and experiences, allowing an experienced interviewer to probe at will and build on the bare bones presented in the document. Unfortunately, many candidates don’t even get shortlisted for an interview, as their resume is just too long. Imagine yourself in a situation where you receive on average fifteen or twenty unsolicited résumés a day, and a further fifty to one hundred applications for a particular job posted. Now imagine yourself reading past page three of a résumé to get to the nitty gritty. Nope, it’s not going to happen.

At the other end of the extreme lies the “creative résumé”.  These range from the obscure (a bunch of fuzzy visuals and unfinished sentences) to résumés which are trying to be just too damn clever. There’s nothing wrong with making a résumé look great. Or wanting it to stand out in a sea of monochrome. But résumés which hurt the eyes or which contain links to heavy files which won’t open, or those which use cutesy metaphors to bring your “oh so creative” personality to life, generally fall at the first hurdle, ending up flung in the bin or dragged to the recycle icon.

Then there are those who believe that their application would benefit from a few endorsements. While it is always helpful to include references, attaching letters of recommendation from previous employers, particularly those stretching back a decade or more, may be a bit much. I recently interviewed an enthusiastic candidate who proudly showed me a fat bunch of e mails he had printed out from his previous clients, bosses, co-workers, subordinates and even college professors. The stack was at least an inch thick, and most of the endorsements seemed to refer to fairly rudimentary achievements, such as organising office parties and representing his college on an international trip. I could have understood it if a fresh graduate was sitting before me, keen to impress and without recourse to a great deal of work experience, but this particular candidate had been working for sixteen long years, and was applying for a job as a New Business Director.  He didn’t get the job.