how i approach and prepare for job interviews

You probably don’t take requests, but i was wondering how you would advise someone autistic to approach a job interview. it would be interesting and useful public service information for your audience!

now, i have no idea if this person is secretly spying on me, because i am, in fact, just considering that i may need to look for another job (not sure), and in looking for another job there are so many details: realignment of focus, researching companies, agencies, networking, updating resume, updating portfolio, if you’re a print designer having a print version of your portfolio, new business cards, need interviewing clothes, how in the heck do you dress for interviews if you ride a motorcycle, and hell, does this mean i won’t be able to wear jeans and t-shirts to work anymore, and do i have to start dressing like a girl again?

well, that may not be the process for someone else looking for a job, but it’s my own. possibly me, being on the spectrum, how i prepare for interviews may wind up being similar to ways other aspies and such go about it too. maybe, maybe not. let’s give it a shot.

what to wear

dress one level above the job you’re going for. if it’s a nonprofit and they dress casual, interview wearing business casual. if it’s a small law firm and supporting staff dresses business casual, dress corporate casual. etc. (but don’t go too far, i.e., don’t wear a $800 suit and tie to a job at a record store.) this may be confusing to some people; i’ve temped, all over the united states, in a wide variety of situations, from nonprofit to small office to medium-sized organization to multi-billion dollar high profile law firm, and with experience you just develop an instinct for how to dress for a particular kind of job.

however, i do have to say this: yes, i have the instinct, and i am aware of how i should dress. i personally, however, wind up pushing it a little counterculture, meaning, i wear my doc marten leather boots under skirt, etc. this might be aspie-ness, hate being told to follow arbitrary rules, or that may be just me. i absolutely refuse to wear 1) a costume and 2) nylons. any job that tells me i have to wear a skirt, you can find yourself someone else to work for you. i live in san francisco, and you can get away with this, if the rest of your interview package is polished. i think i also get away with it because i generally apply for the kinds of job where super-polished corporate attire isn’t required, i do more back-end things, behind the scenes.

do not bluff

i once went to an interview where i not only 1) did not know what job i was applying for, as i’d been sent from an agency, 2) i didn’t even know the name of the person i was interviewing with. i tried to bluff my way thru it, but it was so obvious, and it did not go well. i was quite young at the time.

do not bluff. they know it. if you don’t know, say you don’t know, but in a proactive way, meaning, “hmm, i hadn’t looked at it that way, but it seems fascinating, and i can see how researching it would be helpful for this line of business.” or, “i do not know off the top of my head, but i will find the information for you.” that kind of approach.

research the company

however, your goal is to not have moments of “i don’t know.” you want to appear competent, ready, informed, involved. a major factor involved in this is researching up about their company. go to their website, read thru the copy. read up financial reports. read up employee’s experiences, reviews. has this organization accomplished anything special, what is its corporate philosophy? the reason you need to know this because it’s highly likely they are going to ask you a question like “why do you want to work for this company?” or “what do you know about ABC Inc.?” and if, in that moment, you can take everything you learned about the company and given them an educated answer, you look really good. score one point for you.

faking interest in a company

don’t fake this, though, they know. i hate to be all doomsdayish, but if you have to fake interest in a company to get a job, it’s not really the ideal job for you. however, everyone does it, someone you need to, and i’ve done it many times. when this happens, be a tiny bit honest, and refocus your enthusiasm. there are many different things to be enthusiastic about, the company itself, or the actual job you’d be doing, or the experience it will put on your resume, possibilities for advancement. which leads us to another question you’re likely to be asked:

Why are you interested in this job?

now the focus is on you, specifically. who are you, and why should they consider you for this position? with this, you are going to have thought about who you are, where you are in terms of where you want to be, and you have goals. it is important you have this, that every thing you do, you have a purpose, a goal. this looks really, really good to people. it means you are a forward thinker, that you have plans, are growing. explain your honest enthusiasm for the job you’re applying for, how it’s related to work you’ve done before, what it is you like about that kind of work. you can even do this for fast food, i mean, working fast food when i was 18, i absolutely loved the mechanics of the production line, how if you’re working taco bar you can streamline things to get product out faster.

Why should we hire you?

aw, this is when the ego kicks in. your answer is going to be slightly related to “why do you want this job,” but this time, a bit more focus on you. if you’re big-headed like me and naturally cocky, these questions are easier. i point to my very well-prepared resume, my testing scores, i have answered all their questions intelligently, proactively, asked discerning questions. it’s generally not a good idea to say things like “i’m ethical, sturdy, a hard worker”. those are the qualities of pack animals, and are not good descriptive terms. for instance, if i am a web designer and am asked this question, i will say, “whoever has been working on the information architecture for your website has been doing a really good job, i can access the information easily, and the basic navigation is already there. i would like to take your website to the next level, however, by adding an additional layer of user-friendly design….” and then i give the geeky, tech details on how i’d accomplish such a thing.

when they ask “why should we hire you?” they are not asking you to describe your personality. they’re asking you how you can distinguish yourselves from all the other interviewees, and what matters is how much better you could do the job. show them how good you’d be, walk them thru it.

resume

it would really help if you could bring your resume to someone who either reviews resumes for a living, or a designer, or perhaps a career center. i’ve seen some disastrous resumes, a cheap piece of paper with an uninspiring list of previous jobs.

your resume is not a summary of your past job experience. it is who you are. your resume is a chance to paint a descriptive picture of the growing, talented person that is you. in those little paragraphs where you describe your job responsibilities, don’t say things like “worked nights shift, fulfilled orders, swept.” instead, make it engaging, pull out numbers, facts, and say “managed the organization of the store during nights, effectively negotiated with suppliers, customer satisfaction rose 300%….”

imagine that the person who you want your resume to catch the attention of has yours in a stack along 500 other resumes. one very effective way to make yours stand out is to turn your resume into a story, give them facts, interesting details, show that you are a dynamic, proactive person who gets things done.

paper quality and design of your resume

harking back to what i said earlier, get someone, if you don’t have any design skills, to upgrade the design of your resume. microsoft word has some office free templates you can use. spellcheck, for crissakes, spellcheck, have several people read over your resume, ask them to proofread. i once had an i thought flawless resume that i used for a year in new york city to impress people with and get jobs, til i had one very quiet guy in a small office point to one of the top paragraphs and say, “did you know you have a misspelling here?”

also, focus on the print quality, and the paper quality. i always print my resumes on good quality laser printers, using 80# bright white cover stock. may seem odd, but it’s worked, the texture stands out, they remember it more.

“What is your biggest flaw?”

oh, i love this question. i like to have fun with it. DO NOT BE HONEST. but don’t lie either. do not tell them that you watch porn when you should be working, that sometimes you don’t wear underwear, that you don’t really know what it is you want to do regarding your career. answers i’ve given to this question have included, “there are many ways to approach that, as any “flaw” in somebody is instead an opportunity for improvement. for instance, i am a very detailed person, and i’ve found in my experiences working with people that others are not as necessarily detail-oriented at me. i see the small things that no one else sees. i learned long ago that rather than be frustrated by other people, i instead can help other people, and use this to do a better job.”

i honestly don’t think this interview question, when asked, ever has a purpose other than to catch you off guard, fuck with your head.

composure, posture

be showered. never get a haircut the morning of an interview. clothes are clean, not wrinkled. check to see if your fly is zipped, your shoes tied. show up 5 minutes early so you can check yourself out in the bathroom, or elevator mirror, compose, breathe, get ready. you should have brushed your teeth, breath mints. don’t chew gum, stand straight, but not ramrod straight. smile at them easily, rise to greet them, take the hand, quick pressure looking them in the eyes saying hello, then release. stand at ready, not military ready, but interested and paying attention to what they are saying. turn your cell-phone off, do not scratch yourself, do not pick your nose. do not slouch back in your chair, but don’t hang all eager forward over the interview table either. indicate interest by pointing eyes and head at them, open body language, hands lightly on sides of chair, or folded loosely in lap, and remember to keep an interested, paying attention smile.

imagine your interviewer naked

i am serious. not in a weird, psycho, pathological way. i am naturally a very flirtatious person, am rather bold with my flirting, and i’ve learned over the years that i can use that. it doesn’t matter that if i flirt and get someone’s attention, i then discover i have absolutely nothing to say cuz i can’t do small talk. but these mischievous flirting skills i actually use in my interview.

i don’t know whether to recommend this to anyone else, though. i don’t leer at them, it’s not that i’m hitting on them, looking at them up and down, but i imagine in my head that this person is someone i’m picking up at a bar, and i do the bright, intelligent smile and just slightly leaned forward and very engaged, and having just a tiny bit of fun. it’s a performance.

length of interview

i enjoy the performance, as long as it’s performance. i start to break down around 30 minutes, though, start to crack. i need breaks, and hour, hour and a half interviews are hard. all i know to do is keep my posture straight, try to keep my mind clear to intelligently answer questions, and when i start getting stressed and frazzled, i imagine them naked again, that i’m picking up on them in a bar. usually amuses me enough to get thru the next 5-10 minutes.

difficulties speaking, organizing thoughts

i tend to get confused very easily when talking with people, overwhelmed by conversation. i have auditory processing disorder. a lot of times people speaking, it’s pure static, noise. inchoately, interviews are a nightmare, and were, when i was younger. but this is what i did:

i practiced. for years and years, over and over, i practiced. i compiled lists of common interview questions from online, and i had practice interviews with myself, sitting in a room, i’d ask myself the question, and rehearse how i’d respond. i started to see how most interviews follow a certain pattern, there are certain rules to follow, pretty easy rules, that most questions are broken down into a few key groups, and i look at the interview conversation as being modular, which means i can arrange it visually in my head. once i’ve got a visual of a conversation in my head, then i know i’m getting somewhere.

i also tend to be proactive, take charge of conversations. you can’t necessarily do this in interviews, but you can turn an interview into a dialogue in certain situations, asking them questions about their company, working them thru run-throughs of you fulfilling your job duties. speak using active verbs, not passive, and oddly enough, i can’t quite explain why, a conversation with somebody filled with active verbs rather than passive will lean more toward the aspie side. passive seems to be the neurotypical verb of choice.

so what i did was practice, practice, rehearsed these same interview questions over and over. and over. and over. for years. so that now, get me into an interview, someone throws me a doozie of a question, that’d normally trip someone up, and i simply access that spot in the hard drive of my mind, find i already have a document prepared, pull it out, read what i’d written in my mind, and then smile calmly, casually, and give a perfectly lucid, intelligent response.

immense practice went into that.

film yourself

i took multimedia classes at a bay area organization where they had us be filmed while we interviewed. it was the first time i’d ever seen me on film. i responded intelligently, competently, to every question, but i was shocked to find how much i slouched, and how mouse-quiet my voice was.

if you’ve got a mac, this is great, cuz with isight you can film yourself easily, even have someone you know read you questions from a script, and you film yourself answering, and then review the tapes to find out how you’re coming across. perhaps you’re being too aggressive with your posture, maybe you keep scratching your head, maybe you’re tapping your foot maniacally.

seeing yourself on film is invaluable for coming to an understanding as to how you appear to the other humans on this planet

arrive early, give yourself time

i have a tendency to get really stressed out, caught up in things. i like to arrange my transit so that i arrive near the interview half an hour early. i walk very slowly, distracting myself with other things, to give my brain a chance to normalize itself. i have some sort of clock on me, and tested it against time.gov. i walk very slowly, breathing from the diaphragm, the various relaxation techniques i tend to do automatically anymore. i arrive at the building 5 minutes early, and walk casually to the elevator bank, ride to the top floor, and before i walk into the office i stop, check myself in a mirror, take a look at myself, just hold it. waiting for me to be aware that all the stress, anxiety has gone away. and only then do i walk in.

oh, by the way, i can’t cite the study, but it’s generally good to show up for your interview approximately 2-3 minutes early. 5-10 minutes early? starts pushing it. and never be late.

also, ALWAYS be nice to the receptionist. you would not believe what power they have sometimes. your interview starts once you walk thru the door.

being clumsy

i, innately, am a very clumsy person. i tend to drop things a lot, scattered, distracted. this is a disaster, obviously, in an interview.

you prevent this by preparing. arrange your bag, your purse on you, so that it is optimally usable. no difficult zippers or latches, all compartments easily accessible. generally not a good thing to try something new on the day of an interview. make sure your pockets are clean, that everything is in its proper space. i personally tend to have rituals, for instance, wallet is always in right jacket pocket, keys attached to wallet, phone in bag, ipod in left jacket wallet, motorcycle key in front right pocket… if, because of the clothes you’ll be wearing to the interview, you’d need to change that routine, then you need to make allowances for this. set yourself up a second “interview’ routine, get it clearly in your mind, where important things are going to go, cultivate the routine around you, til it’s natural, til you breath it comfortably, without stress. this may sound silly, but the day before the interview, sit yourself at home, your bags on you, imagine yourself walking thru the door. imagine where you’re going to move after greeting the receptionist, how you’ll sit down, where you’ll place your bag, how you’ll hold your hands. these are important things, and when you show up for an interview and wind up all agitated cuz you fumble with your bag and get agitated sitting in the chair (which has happened to me), that’s when you learn that healthy, careful preparation, rehearsal can go a long, long way into turning you into a success. also, always bring to an interview 2 or 3 copies of your resume, one to give to the interviewer, and one to have in front of you, so you can review it along with them. this helps me cuz i’m visual. also, keep your resume in a folder of some sort, and have it be a nice looking folder. (a gummi-bears folder probably wouldn’t be good.) no matter how hard you try, if you don’t keep your resume in a protective folder, it will manage to get bent or have things spilled on it on the way to the interview.

conclusion:

this is all off the top of my head, and i haven’t included everything, but i hope it helps somewhat.