Posted by Brian McCullough
If you have just found this post, you should know I have a follow up Part 2 post on this same topic here.
I told you last week that a lot of my Ask Brian emails have been reduced to a variation on the same theme: I can’t land a job. What am I doing wrong?
To that, I tend to answer: exactly. What are you doing wrong? I might not be able to tell you. The person with the best information… the person with access to the most clues is you. After all, you were the one in the interview.
Every interview can give you clues. Are you paying attention in your interviews? Are you keeping track of the little rejection clues? Are you learning what might be going wrong and changing your game a bit to maybe get a different result?
It might just be because you’re not paying enough attention.Be honest with yourself. If you can take your emotions out of it, I bet you can come out of every interview and answer two basic questions:
- What was the employer looking for?
- Why are they probably not going to hire you?
Think about it: that’s amazingly valuable information. You can learn what you’re doing wrong and improve yourself. Don’t just leave an interview and file it down the memory hole. Learn from it.
I’m being completely serious. After every interview, sit down with a piece of paper and answer those two questions. And then hang on to these lists. After several interviews, you might notice a pattern… or seven. Try to identify the patterns and then begin to adapt your application and interview behavior to eliminate your weak points.
If you are disciplined enough to sit down and rationalize analyze each and every interview (they’re probably not going to hire me because of x, y and z) then you’re not just banging your head against the wall making the same mistakes over and over again.
Every failed interview is chance to learn and get better!
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