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.