Sweaty Palms

Ten Speed Press

Chapter One

A candidate I once interviewed for a secretarial position could type 90 words per minute and take shorthand at 120 words per minute. She was presentable and had good references. But in addition to showing up ten minutes late, she called me "Mr. Melody" throughout the interview. The two main things I remembered about her were that she had kept me waiting and that she had constantly mispronounced my name. I finally offered the position to someone whose typing and shorthand skills were not nearly as good.

Connie Brown Glaser and Barbara Steinberg Smalley, in their book More Power to You, tell the story of a lady who always wanted to be a teacher. When she graduated, she went to a nearby school for an interview. She noticed she had a small run in her stocking but didn't think it important enough to change. But when she arrived at the interview, the run had become enormous, and she spent much of the time positioning herself to hide it. She didn't get the job, and the principal explained to one of her friends, "If a person doesn't take the time to present her best image at an interview, what kind of teacher is she going to be?"

More often than not, it is the small things that occur in an interview that spell the difference between getting an offer and being rejected. As you will learn as you read on, the basic objective of a candidate in an interview is to spark a positive feeling in the interviewer-something Aristotle called pathos. It's a purely subjective feeling, so your close attention to little things is essential.

The Basics

Be certain of the time and place of the interview and the name of the interviewer. Sometimes candidates are so excited to get an interview that they neglect to ask for this essential information. Write it down and keep it with you until after the interview. If no one tells you your interviewer's name, ask. Sometimes the situation precludes finding out, but you're ahead of the game if you know it going in.

Make certain you are clean and appropriately dressed and coiffed. I have an entire chapter on dress, but if you have spots on your clothes or food on your teeth, you're not going to make a good impression.

Arrive early for the interview. If you plan on arriving at least fifteen minutes before the appointed time, you will have a cushion against unforeseen delays, such as a traffic tie-up or an elevator breakdown or an inability to find the right building or office, any of which could cause you to be late if you depended on split-second timing. Being early can also give the interviewer a good initial impression of your reliability and interest.

Bring a pen and notebook with you. The notebook should fit in a pocket or purse so that you don't walk into the interview room with it in hand. Its purpose is twofold. First, the interviewer may give you some information to write down. If you're prepared with your own writing material, you won't have to interrupt the interview to hunt down paper and pen. Don't, however, make notes during the interview unless the interviewer asks you to write something down.

Second, immediately after the interview you should make notes on what occurred during the interview and what your reactions were to the interviewer. This information can be very important in future interviews so that your replies remain consistent. Further, if you have many different interviews with different companies or different people in the same company, your notes will help your recall of each and aid in making a choice in jobs, should that become necessary.

Remember the interviewer's name. There is possibly no sweeter sound to the human ear than the sound of one's own name. If you don't learn the interviewer's name prior to the interview, concentrate on it when you are introduced and remember it. For some people this is very difficult. They are concentrating on themselves so much and thinking about how nervous they are that they forget the name or don't pay attention when they hear it for the first time.

The best thing to do is to repeat the name immediately after the introduction by saying something on the order of, "How do you do, Mr. Smith." Then repeat the name a couple of times during the first part of the interview. This repetition will help you remember the name. It will also have a pleasing effect on the interviewer.

When Katharine Hepburn was a young actress in the late 1930s, she was invited to have tea with President Franklin Roosevelt. They had never met, but during the conversation he asked about her mother and some of her friends, even one of her friend's daughter's husband. Kate asked him how he could remember all those names. He replied: "That's my job, and I concentrate on it. I meet someone and I say, 'You are Mr. Jones. That is your wife, Mrs. Jones.' I look at them. I absorb them. I remember them. And next time I say, 'Why, hello, Mr. Jones. How are you? And Mrs. Jones?' It makes a good impression."

Reader Joseph D. Lee of El Cerrito, California, writes about the importance of properly pronouncing an interviewer's name:

I recently had an interview for admission to a particular academic program; roughly one in three applicants met, as I did, with success. My interviewer had a Spanish surname, and I have the good fortune to have learned to speak Spanish well. I also had the good fortune to have heard the interviewer speak previously, so that I was certain that he was bilingual.

When I introduced myself to him, I pronounced his name as it would be pronounced in Spanish, rather than English (there is quite a difference!). The interviewer's response was notably positive. "You pronounce my name like you speak Spanish," he said, and immediately we were off to a friendly discussion of how I learned Spanish, how I hoped to be able to use it in the program, and the like. My pronunciation of his name not only opened the conversation on a positive note, it conveyed a sense of respect for another's language and culture. Thus I believe that this beginning was central to the success of my interview. A similar point should be made about difficult names: Those who possess them are frequently either proud of them or mortified by them. In either case, pronouncing them correctly can only be a plus. And, of course, there are many ways to ascertain the correct pronunciation of an interviewer's name: Call his or her receptionist or secretary anonymously; check with the job placement director, if the interview has been arranged by another; or ask someone who speaks Greek, Spanish, or whatever.

One caveat: Do not call the interviewer by his or her first name unless you are invited to do so (which is unlikely). Calling people by their first names without being asked to do so is a familiarity that offends a great many people.

In one of Christ's parables he compares the guest at a wedding feast who took a seat near the head of the table and was embarrassed by being asked to move farther down while the guest who sat at the lowest place was honored by being asked to move up. You have nothing to lose by addressing your interviewer formally as "Mr." (or Ms., Miss, or Mrs.), and nothing to gain by calling your interviewer "Charlie" or "Shirley." If your interviewer is a woman, notice whether she's wearing a...