Kevin went for a job interview, and the interviewer said they were looking for somebody who is responsible.

Kevin said, “I’m your guy!” The interviewer asked why.

“Well, at my old job, if something went wrong, something went missing, or somebody got hurt, they always said I was responsible.”

In my professional working life over the last 25 years, I have sat in on countless interviews. In a handful , I was the person being interviewed but for the most part I have been sitting across the table as an interviewer. An interview is an excruciatingly short and painful attempt at deciding if an employer will enter into a contractual relationship with someone who could end up being a resounding success or an unmitigated disaster of an employee. The prophetic powers of deduction, foresight and clairvoyance all come to play in the one hour that is allegedly needed to determine if a candidate is the right fit.

An effective interview technique is silence. After asking a question, the interviewer goes completely silent, not even proferring the conversational crutches that encourage discourse such as “mmm-hmmm” or the occasional head nod or a penetrating eye gaze that denotes interest and engagement.  Nature abhors a vacuum and interviewees abhor silence, so they typically fill the silence with talk. And talk. And more talk. In the process of this excessive verbal dysentery, an interviewee will reveal a lot about themselves, some of which might be extraordinarily revealing and much of which will be utterly useless.

Due to natural social pressures to keep dialogues going, many people do not know when to keep quiet or to allow silence to sit naturally in the conversational space. Keep three things in mind: Be present. Be still. Breathe. What does being present mean? It means being aware of the effect that you have on the interview panel. Are they engaged, meaning are they having a two way conversation with you? Are they disengaged and looking outside the window as you speak or doodling on a writing pad? Or, God forbid, displaying the worst form of disengagement by languidly scrolling on their phone? There are numerous non-verbal cues that demonstrate disengagement such as looking at one’s watch, tapping fingers on the table or seeing an interviewer’s eyes glaze over and become fixated on a spider web at the far wall.

If you are asked a question, please don’t assume that you have an abiding contract with time. Keep the answer short and to the point. If you’re still answering the question five minutes later, you’re either addressing the Soil Analysis Scientists Annual Conference or you’re leading your audience to catatonic boredom.

Five minutes sounds extremely short, right? Put your phone in front of you, turn on the clock app and do a countdown of 5 minutes. Do absolutely nothing. It will seem interminable. Now turn on the television or radio and start the timer again. If it’s an interesting show, you may not even notice the time go by. If it happens to be a boring show or speaker, I implore you to plough through all five minutes. All 300 seconds of it without the luxury of pressing a mute button or switching channels. Now ask yourself, when someone listens to me speak, does it sound like  300 savagely agonizing seconds or does time pass by so fast that the audience doesn’t even notice?

The best interviews are the ones that become a conversation. The interviewer follows up an answer with an anecdote or past experience they themselves have had and the session turns into a long but revealing conversation about the candidate’s experience based on the interviewer’s viewpoints thrown in. The worst interviews are the ones I have done on virtual platforms like Teams or Zoom which do not give the candidate the benefit of picking up on non-verbal cues. Candidates drone on and on, despite the fact that the confounded device they are using has a clock right at the top or the bottom of the screen. Which leads to the second step I raised before. Be still. When an interviewer asks a question, take a mental step back. Repeat the question in your mind. Form a framework for your response. Take the third step, which is to breathe. Then answer the question. The interviewers are there for you, they have set aside time just to speak to you. So they will indulge you in your requirement to be still, breathe and then answer. Especially if it means they will get a response inside of five minutes. Finally, always remember that silence is used as a trick by both interviewers and criminal interrogators to make you blab incessantly. Don’t fall for it.

X: @carolmusyoka

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