9 Things I Tell Myself Before I Go To A Job Interview — A Successful Job Hunter’s Mentality Toby Tuckerman Follow Mar 6 · 9 min read

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Over the years, I have learned, that my previous job experience, the skills I possess and the references I carry with me — none of that matters, if I do not enter the interview room with the right mentality. Your mentality can either set you up for a successful interview or create roadblocks that will make you look like a poor candidate for the job. Probably the most obvious of roadblocks that come from mentality as an example would be the “I am not good enough for this job” type of thinking. also known as Impostor’s Syndrome. I have especially suffered from this roadblock for way too long, It is a nasty thing to carry around with you, and even to this day, it still finds a way to creep into my life. This or other negative thoughts and uncertainties in life is something you must learn to defeat. To do that, you will need to prepare yourself mentally for an interview. The goal of prepping yourself mentally is by coming to a realization, that you’re the only one who knows the full story of your job experience and therefore, you are the only person who is best equipped at creating the most believable story about yourself. Telling this story will come with its own set of challenges. Here’s how I have been prepping myself mentally and what sort of challenges I expect to encounter when I enter the interview room:

My Enthusiasm Is Key To Keeping The Conversation Lively

Excitement helps to escalate the awkwardness of interviewing into a more relaxed setting. To most people, talking about yourself is a vulnerable subject. The same applies to the interviewer, who may or may not be comfortable asking personal questions about you. To defuse tension in the room, I start by showing off I am enthusiastic about the job, when the introductory questions roll in (things like, “why do you want to work for us” or “how did you learn about the job” etc.). I always make it appear as if the question they’ve asked is very stimulating for me. You shouldn’t answer every question this way, because then you end up looking disingenuous, but showing that you’re listening and happy to answer is proof, that you can handle yourself in very personal situations.

2. If I Wasn’t Good Enough For The Job, I Wouldn’t Be Sitting In This Interview Room

They reached out to you. A meeting has been set-up. They are taking time out of their day to talk with you. Your resume was reviewed and they decided, you might have a future with them. All of this suggests you are now being considered for the position. Leave behind the doubt whether you’re good enough and focus instead of figuring out how this company wants you to help them solve their problems.

3. I Am Instrumental, To The Jobs I Do

If a story you just told does not involve you as the centerpiece, then it’s a story not worth telling. Any past accomplishments must be built around you — the person who made it happen. There’s a notion that’s going around that some people feel bad about themselves when they try to oversell what they do at their jobs. I personally think that a lot of things are overrated in life, such as superhero movies or owning an expensive set of steak knives. Heck, if you think about it, a lot of companies, when they put out their job listings, try to oversell on things as simple as office coffee machines. Or put meaningless fluff in their ads, such as “working with a creative and innovative team of people”. Tell me you haven’t seen that at least once in an ad. So put aside your modesty and when the time comes to tell them what you’re currently working on, just be damn sure to convince them, that you’re the hero of that story.

4. I Am Always Looking For Ways To Grow As A Professional

Whether the job requires you to flip burgers or draft legal documents, the key principle always remains the same — you need to learn and adapt to your new work environment. Interviewers are always looking for candidates who are willing to learn new things. What I like to do myself during an interview, is talk briefly about one of the optional job requirements that I do not possess, but already have spent time researching or practicing it. Usually, it’s a low effort leg, but it shows them that I have spent some time figuring out the job requirements by myself. It never hurts and leaves the interviewer pleased with my curiosity.

5. I Am Interested In The Company And Its Business Model

No matter what position you’re applying to, it’s always important to show the interviewer, why the company excites you. When I was applying to a specialist position, that is exclusively technical and never gets exposed to the business side of the company, I took my time to talk about why I liked that company’s business model. hAfterwards, in later stages of interviewing, the hiring manager who interviewed, made a remark, that I left a strong impression for him because of my interest in the company’s business side.

6. I Can Deal With Curveball Questions

When you start the meeting, it’s important for you to begin as a calm and confident candidate. It just so happens, that quite often an interviewer, especially if its a technical one, will throw you what’s known as a curveball question — something that usually has nothing to do with the job. Its main purpose is to catch you off-guard. Imagine if someone asks you what ice is made of. When you’re calm and collected, you can laugh it off and even decline to answer it, because it’s that obvious. But when you’re in a high-stress situation, especially if that someone who is asking you appears to be more knowledgeable and intimidating, maybe even words the question differently, let’s say asks you to “Tell me what are the main properties of ice” and you then start to panic, give away the answer reluctantly — “I think it’s water, right?”. You just made yourself appear weak and lose the confidence you previously entered with. If you can detect a curveball question being asked, your best bet is to laugh it off or act pleasantly insulted that you’re getting asked something so simple or irrelevant. Sometimes, professionalism needs to be put aside and dominance has to enter the play. You need to show that you take yourself seriously as a professional. Now, if you cannot detect a curveball question, because you don’t know an answer to it, you need to stay calm. Ask them to repeat the question. Put on your best, puzzled look you have and stare off into a distance like you’re trying to understand the question itself. You can brush it off as an excuse for being hard to interpret. Everyone’s mind works differently and if you’ve ever tried explaining something unusual, each person ends up with different comprehension. Same thing with interview questions — most of the things you get asked are easy to comprehend, but you can blame curveball questions for being intelligible.

7. I Answer Pervasive Questions In A Genuine Way

There will be questions that will try to poke at your weaknesses or past failures. You must avoid by all means providing crappy cookie-cutter answers such as “I am too hardworking” or “I wasn’t able to attend my CEO’s wedding”. That last part might actually crack a smile. Still, when I get asked to talk about my failures, I am looking to tell a story, in which I can self-critique myself so that I can show I am self-aware of my shortcomings. These are my favorite questions to answer because you can get the interviewer to sympathize with you.

8. My Answers Are Concise And To The Point

Just because you’ve got invited for an interview, does not mean that the interviewer will give his full attention to you. These days, everyone’s attention span has become much shorter, due to how technology has impacted our daily lives. Add the fact that you’re not the first person to come for an interview, things you start saying will repeat themselves from other candidates. Learning to get your points across fast and simple is a key skill you must adopt for the interviewing mentality. If you’re the type of person who likes to talk a lot, practice answering them by first writing down on paper and then removing words or even sentences that add little to no value to your answer. As an alternative, record yourself giving an answer, listen to the recording and make a new recording with an even shorter answer. Aim to answer even the most difficult of questions under a minute.

9. I Understand The Responsibilities Of The Offered Job

There will be a time when you will be juggling several job interviews. Part of the interviewer’s job is figuring out how motivated you are for the position they’re offering. You will need to keep yourself informed about each job you’re applying to, to pass the motivation check. It’s a big red flag for the interviewer if you have only a vague understanding of the job position and have no way of relating your existing skillset to it. Fear not, I understand that the biggest motivation for a job, quite often, is money. It also happens, that quite often, because HR or recruitment agencies themselves do not know exactly what the company is looking for, they create vague job descriptions. The easiest way of transitioning into understanding job requirements is by asking what the company is doing right now — what are their projects, how does their organizational structure look like, which department you would be working at, how many people in the department, whom you would be reporting to, who would be your teammates and so on. By asking these questions, you start to build an understanding of the company, its projects and the people work there. It becomes easier to pinpoint and understand the responsibilities of the job. Rule of thumb is to first ask as many questions as you can about the job, before proceeding to explain how you would be fit for the job. Always remember to research every word of the job listing that you’re unfamiliar with. Try to find ways of relating your skills to the job requirements, before going into the interview. A combination of preparing before the interview and the on-site interview answers should net you a rough idea of what the hell the company actually wants you to do. The reality is that not every job is attractive. Companies tend to sugar coat, over-promise or straight up lie about what you’ll be doing for them, just to entice you to come for work for them. Interviewers themselves know the position’s turnover rate. Its often these are entry-level job positions, but candidates who’ve been working for years might not even be able to recognize what position they are applying to. The same can be reversed and it could be a high-level position, without the candidate realizing it. I personally believe that the biggest deal-breaker in an interview is the failure to comprehend the job position. Interviewers are not stupid — they can detect desperation and even worse — they can figure out your true motivation. They will come to a conclusion you’re only here for the money if you’re not asking enough questions about the job and the company. So when the interview is about to conclude and it’s your time to do the final pitch, remember all the details you’ve gathered about the job and create a narrative of why you’re the perfect candidate for the job.

Conclusion

The first interviews are always the hardest. Whether you’re going to them after a long break or you’re a fresh college student, interviewing itself is a skill that proves how well you sell yourself. And like any other skill, without constant practice, it will deteriorate over time. But learning how to sell yourself for the job is also the question of how motivated you are. The majority of our time, we feel uninspired and our life switches to autopilot. It can get really depressive when someone asks you to recall what you’ve done last week and you stumble to collect your memories. Most of our days are unexciting and the jobs we work, no matter how engaging they were at the beginning, have become as part of our routine. We get so self-absorbed in our own lives, that we forget how to tell our story to strangers. During an interview, you must get rid of monotony from your life and highlight key points of your career that you can use to craft a powerful message to the interviewer about yourself. I have found, that these key points for preparing yourself mentally should help you evoke your interviewing skills and set you on the right track.