Often when you have a job interview, you have to meet with HR first. As a former staffing manager for a Fortune 500 company, and a career and job coach, I have seven insights to share about what HR is thinking as they interview you. Knowing these will help make your interview with HR count.

1. How prepared are you? We hope you did not only check our website.
The last thing that Human Resources wants to hear is you asking us how many employees we have or what states we are in, since you can easily find that information online. Before you go to an interview, learn something about us – our products, our history and our challenges, and apply that knowledge to formulate thoughtful questions or ideas. Asking for information that can be easily found on our website will ensure you will sink to the bottom of our list and may not even make it to the next step. (more…)

Ideally, let’s not make mistakes on an interview. However, job seekers are human. Humans make mistakes. So mistakes will happen. I think an interview mistake can be an opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.

When I recruited for my team and for the clients for whom I found talent as a search firm recruiter, I would actually welcome the mistakes made by candidates. I did not automatically weed out those candidates that made errors and I did not immediately move on those that interviewed without a misstep. How candidates handled the mistake, the type of mistake they made and the level of perfection achieved on the interview by candidates factored into my decision to advance a candidate to the next round of interviews. What should you do if it happens to you? (more…)

The cardinal rule of interviewing seems to be “never say anything negative on an interview.” But that does not mean the hiring manager will not ask you about the blemish, challenge or failure in your past that you would prefer not to talk about, if given the choice. Despite your best efforts, the interviewer will find a way to ask you about your unreasonable boss, the company that went bankrupt, your layoff, the sales plan you missed, the budget you exceeded, the gap in your resume or your nutty co-workers. Or maybe you were fired—<gasp>. How do you diplomatically and confidently discuss these issues with a prospective employer, when what you really want to do is hide in the nearest corner when they arise? (more…)

(1) Go into a new field without major research
(2) Send the same thank you note to all interviewers
(3) Think they have to have 100% clarity as to what they want before they start to look
(4) Only submit to job postings and never reach out to people at companies directly
(5) Assume the tactics that worked for their job search three years ago will work for them now (more…)

Yes, I landed what I would call an interview a couple of weeks ago without looking for a job or to work for an outside company. How did it happen? I was reading a blog post from a fellow career services professional who runs a group at a large career management firm. This person made a great point in how successful job seekers at all levels (in their particular case they cater to the executive job seeker) are repackaging their skill sets to reinvent themselves within their existing profession or an entirely new profession. (more…)