Dear Friends,
Preparing for an interview has become a natural part of how our education system and the subsequent employment system has evolved. We have interviews for taking admission to schools and colleges, to get a good job.. and believe it or not, there's a lesser known fact to this story - the same technique is used to fire people from jobs as well!
Some of us attend preparation classes with coaching institutes, while some of us rely on the experienced folks to give us the gyan on how to crack this one little hurdle to whatever you are looking forward to next. Our team also went through some interesting experiences and now bring to you some thoughts from the HR Store Room on how to prepare for interviews.
A due note of caution: This article is not a magic potion for the inept to crack interviews. This article is for those with potential who need help with preparing for interviews.
What do we want?
Before going for an interview, we need to reassess on what we want out of the interview. There has to an aspired position, role or opportunity. Something like - "I want to be a student at IIM-A" or "I want to be a Software Engineer at Infosys" or "I want to be a Junior Research Fellow at DRDO" or "I want an opportunity to learn the business of Book Publication at Forbes".
We often ignore this step, rather we do not explicitly say it out. It is somewhere there in the back of our minds, but we just allow it to remain there. What does this question do? This question spins-off answers to all other questions that one may have on how to prepare of this interview.
This questions just makes our preparation more focused.
Preparing the mind - Understand the Perspectives
Many would love to guide us on this topic from their own perspectives. Some of our guides would have never been part of the interview processes itself. And it is natural to think only from where we stand, when we are in our own shoes! But, we need to understand that an interview is not just about how well you prepare - it also about what the person on the other side of the table, what do they want?
Many of us take this as an implicit part of the interview preparation stage, we assume on what the other side would want. And this assumption does not arise from any well-thought research, these set of assumptions are formed from what we hear from others who experienced the same. So the questions that arise in our minds should not really be - "What should I wear?", "How firm should by hand-shake be?", "What should be my poise, my body-language?"; our question to ourselves should be "If I was at the other side of the table, what would I want to assess/see in my candidate?".
This one question would form the basis of our entire understanding and preparation of the interview.
For example, if you are going for an interview to a B-school - you would want to model your preparation to ensure that when the interview panel sees, talks and listens to you - they see their future student. It is not as easy as reading this, but the intention is to prep your mind to see the other side.
