Jobs: JobListIndia.com Follow us on Studyguideindia on Facebook Follow Studyguideindia.com on Google+ Studyguideindia on Twitter
Home »  Education News » Education News

How to handle Personal Interview !!

Updated on: Saturday, August 08, 2009

A personal interview can be really tough unless you are aware of what you have written in your form and are clear about what you are speaking.

How do you speak so as to differentiate yourself from the thousands of aspirants who are going to be put under the same scanner?
To explain with an example.....

Interviewing Officer: 'Well, what would be your requirements if you were to join our firm?'
Candidate: 'A car with a chauffer, an apartment in the best locale of this city, a six figure salary and a personal assistant.'
Interviewing Officer: 'We’ll give you two cars with four chauffeurs, a beach facing bungalow at the heart of the city, double the salary you have asked for and two personal assistants.'
Candidate: 'Sir, are you joking?'
Interviewing Officer: 'Yes, but I didn’t start it.'
 
Look at the relevance of his requirements to his job. The Officer would have at least considered a request for a bigger office, higher budgets, better team etc. But the candidate is only interested in himself and thus forgets the goal! Similarly, allow your answers to be in sync with the overall objective – respected people have been known to put the common good ahead of personal gains.
 
Take some time to answer – if you start rattling off as soon as the interviewer stops, it means either you know the answer by heart or your are going to garble some junk. Take a few micro seconds to understand the following: The question itself and the context in which the question is asked. Often, the line of discussion preceding the question dictates the context of the current question and it is better to understand and answer – especially when there are no points for answering quickly. But long pauses characterised with umms, aahs & oohs are no-nos as well.
 
Finally, how well can you deal with abuse or embarrassment? Interviewers often touch those raw areas that you are not very comfortable about. Some instances are mentioned below:
As soon as the candidate enters the room: 'I think you are ugly so I do not want to interview you.'
'Your scores in graduation suck – we think you must have cleared the CAT through luck or by cheating.'
'I see that you have been a loser for 21 years of your life and I am not willing to take the risk of giving you another chance to flounder.'
'We see that you belong to the XYZ caste and we do not take the members of this caste in to our institutions.'
 
Can you understand what is happening? The interviewer is trying to provoke you into making a decision (to answer/ respond or to not) in haste. There really may not be any answer to some such questions – and definitely, there is no formula to handle them. However, a two second silence with patience written all over you face might just be a remedy (don’t fake patience – be really patient). Just that there are too many instances in a manager’s life when he/ she has to put up with absolute nonsense without admitting it.
 
Finally, never give gyaan( Knowledge) to the interviewer – they are people who have already 'arrived' in life. You may feel you are gyaan guru after reading a couple of reports but that's not the point – finally, understand that they are the decision makers. You'd hate it too if someone came out of the blue and gyaaned you on management.
 
Always remember what you wrote on your form. If you have words like exceptional, extraordinary, outstanding etc. on your form, you better be in a position to prove it. Action-verbs and superlatives look great on the paper but are difficult exhibits in an interview. For e.g.: If someone says he has extraordinary motivation capabilities, he will be asked to narrate an occasion when his 'extraordinary motivation capabilities' made the difference; and if he talks about how he motivated someone to give up their share of masala dosa, it is not a given that he’ll score a lot of points. So leave those huge words alone and do not include anything just because they look good, be honest.

More Education news