Monica Torres
Rule #1: Interviewers want a highlight reel, not an exhaustive list of everything you have done.
Job candidates are guaranteed to be asked some version of “Tell us about yourself” and “Why are you interested in our company/role?” said Anyelis Cordero, founder of Propel on Purpose Coaching, a career coaching service designed for first-generation professionals.
You may think you can just repeat what your resume says. But that would be a mistake.
“Interviewers
are going to expect [you] to be able to concisely walk them through
your career. This is an area many experienced professionals struggle
with, especially first-gen professionals, because the unspoken rule here
is that the interview wants the highlight reel,” Cordero said.
“Since
most interviews are 30 minutes, if you don’t practice, you’ll make the
mistake of spending too much time on this answer and not leave enough
time to answer other questions.”
Other job interview questions come with silent subtext and expectations, too.
The job search is all about demonstrating your competence, commitment, and compatibility, said Gorick Ng, a career adviser at Harvard University and the author of “The Unspoken Rules: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right.”
“The
interview question ‘Tell us about a time when…?’ is really a competence
question of ‘Have you done a similar job before?’ and ‘Do you have a
good head on your shoulders?’ The interview question ‘Do you have any
questions for me?’ is really a commitment question of ‘Do you care
enough about us to do enough research to ask a question that you
couldn’t have found the answer to on Google?’ And the interview question
‘Tell us about yourself’ is really a competence, commitment, and
compatibility question,” Ng said.
Rule #2: To be a stronger candidate, you need to understand the role of each person you interview with.
Tailoring
your questions and answers based on the roles that individual
interviewers hold is one of the best unwritten rules to a successful
interview, saidDaniel Space, a senior human resources business partner
for large tech companies.
“The way I answer what a peer is
going to ask me in an interview is going to be a little different than
what I tell a manager,” he said. “I know what the peer wants is: ‘Can
Daniel do his job? Can he hold up the team? Is he good for
collaboration?’ What the manager wants to know is ‘Can Daniel do his job
without a lot of interference from me? Can I trust him to make tough
decisions? What level of support do I need to provide him?’”
It’s
important to go into a job search process knowing how to tell the story
of your career. But if you want to be an even stronger candidate, you
need more than one story to tell interviewers, because often, they
debrief each other.
Sharai Johnson,
a sourcer for Latinx and Black engineering talent for a large tech
company, said she wants job candidates to understand the differences
between a sourcer, a recruiter and a hiring manager. Johnson said a
sourcer’s job is to gain the interest of passive talent; sourcers may
schedule the first interview, then pass off duties to a recruiter, who
will be in contact with candidates through the end of the hiring process
but doesn’t make final hiring decisions.
“A
recruiter and a sourcer can advocate on behalf of a candidate, but at
the end of the day, the hiring manager is the one that actually can get
the budget approval and send the ‘yes’ or the ‘no,’” Johnson said. “It’s
just important to understand those moving parts and those people, so
you know who to reach out to and who to direct questions to.”
Rule #4: You need to be prepared with more than one career story to tell.
It’s important to go into a job search process knowing how to tell the story of your career.
But if you want to be an even stronger candidate, you need more than
one story to tell interviewers, because often, they debrief each other.
Space
said that ideally, you should have three or four success stories that
you can rotate between interviewers because he has seen hiring panels in
which it counted against candidates if they told the same story to
every person they talked with.
“If they have that one amazing
story of how they sold that really difficult client, if all five people
were told that story, sometimes it helps them because it helps reinforce
it,” he said. “But in other cases, it actually helps to have different
stories.”
Read the complete Yahoo Finance article for all 7 rules
** I half disagree with #5 and #6 so take them for what they are worth **