John is a verification engineer with seven years of experience. He has successfully completed multiple projects in his career and has also led a team of five people. However, despite having a clear track record of being good at his job, John often performs poorly in interviews and makes a wrong impression. Why is this happening?
When you work in a service company – specifically, in a service company that provides digital verification services – one of the most disliked things is having interviews for clients for every new project. Rarely does anybody like having interviews, especially if you have already been employed for years.
Actually, I’ve seen many experienced engineers perform poorly in interviews despite the fact they are good at what they do.
In this blog, I want to provide an easy tip to never again “fail” at interviews.
Here it is:
At the beginning of the interview, highlight your track record and then say openly that sometimes, in interviews, you get confused and nervous and that you may seem less competent than you are.
This may seem counterintuitive, right? But remember all those TED talks that begin with speakers saying they have a fear of public presentations? Also, a few studies show that being honest in an interview is better than pretending to be something you are not.
Make no mistake, I am not suggesting you go to an interview and start talking about how you don’t know anything (even though that sometimes works; see here). The point here is to simply acknowledge your “weakness”. This act will relax you, allowing your brain to enter winning mode. The interviewer will appreciate your honesty and will be more focused on what you know than what you don’t.
I have worked with one engineer who is a top star when it comes to executing her work. But she simply has a fear of interviews and repeatedly performs poorly in them. My goal was to help her overcome this, and we focused on what she already knew. She is, de facto, a good engineer and has all the resources to do the job! So, it doesn’t make sense to be scared of the interview. Aside from the one I mentioned here, she overcame this fear with a few other techniques, which is a topic for another blog.
There are many other tips for performing well in the interview, but I love this one since it addresses the fear of failing while acknowledging that the fear exists. My experience shows it’s very effective, and yet it’s so simple.
