How To Kill Every Interview

Don’t you just hate wasting time on job interviews?

 

Why would you want to put yourself in a position where you might end up forced to expend precious mental energy evaluating a lucrative offer for your dream job?

 

To save a lot of time and energy, here are some tried and true methods to ensure you kill off those interviews as quickly as possible.

 

First, why bother to apply for something where you are only a 95% match to the job requirements.  You know hiring managers only hire someone who meets 100%.  Sure, your friend Jim landed a job where he only met 70% of the reqs, but that was only because he had worked to find internal advocates who could speak on his behalf, and you don’t want to waste time and energy doing that, do you?

 

Second, if you get called for an interview, immediately start asking about salary, benefits, time off and all of the other plusses that might come with the job.  Obviously you can do the job, so why bother to focus on that first?  I’m sure an employer will be impressed with your savvy in showing how much more important those other things are to you than the job itself.

 

Third, be sure to give as little attention as possible to the ‘little people’ you might have contact with along they way – they obviously aren’t important.  No one would ever ask the receptionist, HR generalist, or administrative assistant about you.  And why would they draw any conclusions about how you treat others by how you treat unimportant people you meet during the process?

 

Fourth, don’t bother with research.  That’s just a big time-waster. After all, if there’s something important you need to know about the job, the company, its goals, etc., the interviewer will tell you. That’s their job.

 

In particular, why spend any time in advance of the interview poring over job descriptions, reviewing key information on the company website, reading the company’s annual report and press releases, and reaching out to your network to see who can give you insights into the company’s challenges, key players in the department, etc. Who’s going to be impressed by your efforts, anyway? It’s not like they are paying you to do any of that.

 

Plus, if you end up not getting the job, that will all have been wasted effort.  There’s no way better knowledge of a particular company and their issues, or key players in the industry, could ever be useful in any other context.

 

And why bother to ask for the departmental organization chart, or an interview schedule with names and titles of the interviewers?  Clearly the company wouldn’t want to share any of that and have you actually come into the interview better prepared.  And you’re not going to Google them or look them up on LinkedIn or other vehicles ahead of time, are you?  You’ll get introduced to them as you go along, so why rush it?

 

I’ll get into more ideas next time; in the meanwhile, let me know what ideas you have!