There are a number of accepted ways to succeed in a job interview. Dressing in a nice, presentable fashion, being friendly, keeping eye contact with your interviewers, and providing concise and thoughtful answers to interview questions are all on the list. Unfortunately for all job searchers out there, for every tip toward a successful interview, there are probably a hundred different ways to fail. Some sure-fire interview blunders are common knowledge: showing up late, being rude to receptionists, or looking like a total slob are just a few behaviours that just about everyone knows will kill their employment chances.

However, there are also a few interview-killing behaviours that are a bit more subtle than arriving 10 minutes late, behavioural trends that are all too easy to fall into during an interview, and that can snap your employment chances before you even realize what you’ve done. Read on to learn about three of these interview missteps, as well as for tips on how you can avoid them.

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Four Common Job Interview Questions (And How to Answer Them)

When you apply for a new job, you open yourself up to an extensive employment screening process. Your prospective employers will want to run a background check to learn about any criminal history you may have; they will want to run a credit check to find out how you handle money; they will want to look into your educational past to see if your resume is telling the truth; and they will want to call your former employers or references to ask probing questions about the way you work and interact with others. All of this is enough to make anyone want to roll themselves up into a ball and never apply for another job again, and that’s without the above list even including the most obvious section of the screening process: the job interview itself.

Indeed, how you perform in a job interview will often be the determining factor for whether or not you earn yourself a job offer. With that in mind, it’s good to know which questions to expect on an interview, and luckily, many questions are standard across virtually all job interviews. Be warned though, sometimes, the most important thing isn’t what you say in response to these questions, but how you say it.

With that in mind, here are five tough questions you might find yourself facing during a job interview.

Read More “Four Common Job Interview Questions (And How to Answer Them)”

As a hiring manager, I often have to sift through many CV’s looking for candidates and then get people in for interview. The quality of CV and interview seems to vary greatly and I have some some developers who look OK on paper but performs terribly in an interview. In this article I want to offer some practical advice so anyone thinking of changing jobs based on my experiences of interviewing potential staff. Generally I interview software developers, but the advice in this article should be useful to anyone.

There is nothing in this article that is secret or about cheating the interview. What I want to do is help you present yourself the best you can to a potential employer. They don’t want to catch you out. An interviewer will want you do to the best you can, so a little bit of preparation can go along way. Also should anyone be coming for an interview with me, I would hope they do their research and google the interviewer (Stephen Haunts) and land on this page.

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