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Article from The Sunday Times, 06 May 2007
How do I sell myself well during interviews?
I am a 45-year-old Indian information technology (IT) professional who has been working in Singapore for over a decade.
My family and I love Singapore and would like to stay here for as long as I can find meaningful work here.
I am currently heading a regional IT team, numbering eight IT professionals. I have been working at the same American multinational company for more than seven years.
About a year ago, there were rumours that my company would be acquired by a competitor.
Many of us in the company are feeling insecure about our future and some of us, including myself, have been secretly looking for alternative jobs.
The trouble is, jobs at my level (department head) are few and far between. Many such roles have been made redundant because of outsourcing activities, while others have been redesigned.
I have a degree in computer science and have been in IT for my entire career.
Over the past year, I have been to just four interviews, and have been unsuccessful each time. I am feeling very stressed out and this has had an impact on my family life and relationships.
Besides looking out for career opportunities in the local papers, how else can I find job leads? In hindsight, I realized that I never went beyond the first interview – I suspect I am lacking in interview skills.
Paul’s response
I can understand why you and your family would prefer to stay put here in Singapore. I’ve worked with many transition managers from the United States and European countries, and many of them feel the same way.
I believe there are two key factors causing you to be “stressed out”. One is the uncertainty surrounding the future of your job.
The bad news is, if the one-year-old rumour has not turned into reality yet, it may do so soon. Then again, you may have to go through more agonizing months.
The good news is, you can decide how you want to manage this uncertainty henceforth – by simply acknowledging that there is absolutely nothing you can do to either make it happen or will it away.
In life, if you are unable to influence the outcome of events, leave it alone. Focus instead on your job – you can either continue doing a great job and/or continue looking for greener pastures.
This brings us to the second key factor – you are probably feeling frustrated over your unsuccessful attempts to secure alternative employment.
Start by doing a post-mortem of the four interviews you attended. What did you do well? What do you have to be better prepared to do much more effectively?
The keys to successful interviewing are preparation, confidence and delivery. You have to prepare yourself well – and not just by researching the prospective employer, preparing your responses to commonly asked questions and so forth.
You also have to be psychologically positive. You must feel confident of the value that you can bring to the table. Once you have achieved this, then you should feel confident about selling yourself.
And interviewing is all about that: packaging and selling yourself as an attractive product – your qualifications, experience, leadership skills, people skills, personality and so forth.
They say your body language “speaks” louder than the spoken word. Be wary of how you sit, how you shake hands, how effective your eye contact is and so on. Finally, don’t forget to smile.
They say the most critical period is the first three minutes of the interview – you must get the interviewer to feel positive about you.
Once you achieve this, they are likely to find reasons during the interview to place you on their shortlist of candidates. If you can, get a friend to role-play an interview session with you – you may be pleasantly surprised how helpful the feedback can be.
Four interviews in 12 months – something is not right. You need to try assessing more job leads. Besides the local papers, you should engage with reputable headhunters – meaning those that have an interest in your career development.
You can of course use the Internet job sites too. Another job search strategy would be to follow the news closely and write in to hiring managers directly when you find out that a particular company is hiring, expanding their operations and so on.
Take the integrated resort projects, for example. You can be proactive and write in to the global chief information officer before they start their recruitment exercise. You know for sure that they will need IT talent.
Lastly, the most effective means of job search is to use your network. Networking is not about asking your contacts for a job offer – it is about having them share related information that you can use to secure job leads.
Paul Heng
Founder
NeXT Career Consulting Group, Asia
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