How To Take Control Of Your Next Job Interview

Traditionally, we treat job interviews as a tricky ego dance in which you’re called upon to present your best self and to strike the delicate balance between being eager and being obsequious. This antiquated idea of the job interview as a an audition or first date does the job seeker no favors, though. When you get overly focused on impressing the other party, you lose sight of whether or not they’re making an effort to impress you.

If you want to get more out of your job interviews, you need to start taking charge of them.  This begins with flipping your thinking. Ask yourself how the hottest, most in-demand candidate, one who had been head-hunted relentlessly for months, would treat this meeting. It’s not (only) about impressing the hiring manager, it’s about using your face-to-face time to determine if this is the job for you. The interview is your shot at evaluating whether or not you want to work for this employer, so your approach to the interaction should be built around helping you to answer this question. Here are three strategies to ensure you’re interviewing like a true boss.

Make sure you’re connecting to the power players.

Who are you being interviewed by and what is their relative level of seniority within the company and their relationship to the role you’re interviewing for? You want to be talking to someone who not only has the experience and skills to accurately evaluate your skills and experience, but who can provide relevant insight on company culture, answer role-specific questions you might have, etc. If you’re initially being screened by a junior employee, there’s no need to bang on the table and demand to see the CEO. Simply ask about the next steps in the hiring process and whether those involve meeting your potential boss and colleagues. You want to make it clear that determining fit is critical to you and the only way to make that determination is via talking to those you’d be working with most closely.

Pivot to your talking points.

Evaluate the questions being thrown your way. Does it sound like the interviewer is just running through a standard script and is uncomfortable deviating from it, even when one of your answers (“...and that was how I used a can of silly string and a cattle prod to solve the continuing conflict between our sales and engineering departments.”) fairly begs for a follow up?  Are the questions so generic that your gut tells you there’s no way anyone could get a sense of your true value from the answers? It’s time to take control. Watch any politician being interviewed. They rarely directly answer the question being asked, instead using it as a jump off  or pivot to make the point they’d really like to get across. Do likewise. Answer what the interviewer asked and then spin their bland inquiry to your strengths -- “Here’s my experience doing A. I also think B is critically important in this role and here’s why.” Your goal isn’t to answer the interviewer’s questions better than all the other candidates, but to use those questions as a springboard to exploring what differentiates you from them.

Make your questions count.

Given time constraints, you have a limited number of questions you can reasonably ask within the interview, so don’t waste them on softballs. If you’re serious about figuring out if this job is a good fit for you, ask questions that get at that and shed some light on the company’s operations. If you’re interviewing at a place that you know has just undergone a round of layoffs, don’t shy away from addressing that. If this is a new role, ask about why it was created. You want to know if there’s been real thought given to how your work would integrate with that of other members of the team or if someone just complained long and loud enough that the firm finally decided to advertise for a new project manager to keep the peace. Don't be combative, but be frank and curious.

(Forbes)