How do shy people cope with job interviews?
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Title : How do shy people cope with job interviews?
link : How do shy people cope with job interviews?
You are now reading the article How do shy people cope with job interviews? With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-do-shy-people-cope-with-job.html
Title : How do shy people cope with job interviews?
link : How do shy people cope with job interviews?
news-today.world | Hello again and happy holidays. I have received a question which I think will be a fun one to try to answer. I have talked a lot about the difference between being a student at university and the huge adjustment one has to make when entering the working world. I have also talked about how tough interviews can be for some of the better jobs out there - let's face it, don't we all one a good job? How many people would settle for a poorly paid, lousy job just to be able to get a job easily and quickly? Well, this brings us neatly to our question of the day. This reader has asked me not to reveal her real name, so let's go with "Cinnamon" since I'm drinking a cup of coffee sprinkled with cinnamon. Here's her question:
"I hope you can help me please Limpeh. I am a final year student at a university in Singapore and am only too aware of the fact that I need to find a job pretty soon. I am totally dreading the process of having to go for job interviews because I am a very shy person. I even get nervous and panic during things like oral exams at school because I don't cope well with the pressure, like I feel like I am being scrutinized and the teacher is noting down every single error I make when talking. I swear I am a good student: I'm smart, I work hard, my assignments always score quite well. You see, I'm not really a very social person, I find it quite daunting to talk to strangers and make new friends - it is very much just the way I was brought up in a very traditional family, like the children are not meant to make noises to disturb the parents, students are meant to keep their mouths shut and listen to the teacher in class. I was always complimented for being very well behaved in school - the talkative, disruptive kids were the ones who always got punished. Furthermore, I find it easier to express myself through social media - it is easy to speak up online, post a comment, send a tweet, join a discussion online and express an opinion like that rather than in person. I'm afraid that area of my 'soft skills' just hasn't been developed much and I'm wondering how I can prepare myself for my first job interview please? Many thanks."
Well Cinnamon, you're right that this is going to be a problem for you and I'm glad you're at least seeking help about it. Some people would rather ignore a problem they can't solve easily and hope for it to go away, but that's not how life works. Allow me to address this from a very pragmatic point of view: in my current job, I am asked by my boss to do a range of tasks - some of which I am good at and enjoy, others I am not so good at and dread and there's everything in between the two extremes. So for example, I am currently working on a lot of projects in the Indian market and I really enjoy dealing with our Indian clients because I am studying Hindi now, so I get the chance to use my Hindi with them during our conference calls and meetings. There's a lot of more mundane work I have to do with due diligence, that means sorting out a huge volume of documents to prepare the investment deals - that is extremely boring but I have no choice but to have to do as I am told. Such is the nature of working life - you cannot realistically hope to get a job where you will enjoy every single aspect of it. Likewise, with the job interview process, allow me to assure you that it is not all horrible - there will be certain aspects of it you will find easier, some aspects you may even enjoy and then there will be some aspects that you will find a lot more challenging of course. Make sure you know exactly what you are dealing with.
Right now, from the way you have described your situation, I think you're giving in to blind panic about the whole process when really, we need to break it down and discuss which aspects of the job interview process you find challenging or worrying. So with that in mind, let me run through a typical job interview, bearing in mind that not all job interviews follow this pattern but they don't often stray too far from the usual path. You'll be asked to introduce yourself and you should prepare a short summary of a few sentences: talk about your age, your background, where you've graduated from and maybe highlight an interesting hobby or something fascinating that you have done recently. Now this you can do in advance and run it by a few of your friends, you don't want to come across as too boring or too desperate. You want to stand out as an interesting individual who is confident without sounding too arrogant as well. So the interviewer can then ask you to elaborate on certain aspects of your strengths or weaknesses, perhaps picking up on something you have done in university or one of your hobbies. This is of course something you can practice in advance with your friends and family and the more practice you get prior to that first job interview, the less intimidating the process would seem.
The next part of the interview would then shift onto the job and the company: so the interviewer could ask you why you think you're right for the job or why you want to work for this company. Again, you need to anticipate these questions and do plenty of homework: you should have already read the company's website and know precisely what their products/services are, what they have made the news for recently and whom the directors are. It's like going for an exam - if you have prepared and revised, then there's nothing to be afraid of, you will feel very confident. But if you have done precious little to prepare yourself for the interview, then of course you're going to feel afraid of those questions. So for example, if the interviewer asks you, "where do you see yourself five years from now?" You should have a very clear idea about what you would have liked to have achieved by then in that field. Remember that the job interview is a conversation, not an exam: don't feel like there is only one right answer and they would hire you only if you say the magic words. No it doesn't work like that: so for example, if they ask you, "why should I consider hiring you?" That is a provocative question and you can answer a question with a question. "Well why did you invite me in for an interview then? That depends on what you're looking for - what kind of candidate would you like to hire? Someone who follows the rules with great attention to detail or someone who is able to think outside the box and break the rules to find you new solutions?"
If you've never ever had a job interview before, then you can do mock interviews with your friends or even on your own. Find a job you'll like to apply for and try to answer these ten questions found here. You need to then film yourself answering those questions and that is such an important process - you see, I do so many videos for Instagram and Youtube that I realize I never quite sound right in my own videos. The way we hear ourselves is radically different from the way others hear us - so for myself for example, I have to deliberately drop an octave or two to give myself more gravitas. I find that having more bass and less treble makes me come across as more serious and less childlike - as a middle aged man at 41, I don't want to sound like a 16 year old and unfortunately, that's the way I can come across sometimes if I don't change my pitch. Watching yourself on tape can also help you deal with your body language as well - some people do certain things when they get nervous: when my friend Chris was being interviewed on the BBC, he was very nervous and he started nodding his head. At first you thought, is he just agreeing with what the other person is saying? Then you realize, no it is a nervous twitch, that's why he is nodding all the time. If you watch that interview clip, he came across as very odd and I'm already choosing my words kindly. It looked wrong on so many levels - in fact, he even told me, "I didn't even realize I was doing that." If we had done a mock interview before he went on live TV, then we could have at least made him aware of it and he could have controlled his body language.
One more thing that you have to bear in mind is the fact that not all interviewers are evil people trying to give you a hard time - on the contrary, they are just ordinary folks who have a job to do. Don't assume the worst before you even step into the room and meet the interview panel: they just want to find the right candidate for the job and whilst they could be nasty about it, most of the time they are not. In all my years, I have only met one interviewer who went out of his way to be nasty to me and I was told that's called a stress interview: that is a technique used by some interviewers to deliberately throw you off course to see how you would cope with an unusual or unexpected situation. If the job requires you to think on your feet and respond to anything that may come your way, some interviewers may go for this tactic just to see if you would rise to the occasion or crumble under pressure. The thing to do is not to give in to the negative thoughts which may pop into your head like, "oh no, this is a disaster, they hate me, I must have said something wrong to offend them." If you sense that there is tension in the room, then remain calm but be assertive: stress interviews are usually conducted to see if the candidate can asset him/herself in a stressful situation or not. Be bold enough to say, "look I can sense you're in a very bad mood and if you prefer, we can reschedule this interview to another time, okay?"
The chances of you finding yourself in a stress interview are pretty darn low - like I said, for all the years I had been in the working world, I have only had one stress interview. If I may be honest, I crumbled under pressure because I was young and inexperienced then: it came out of the blue and I wasn't prepared. Thus if you want to be prepared for anything, then you can easily do a mock stress interview with a friend just to see if you can respond to the difficult questions. Once again, my favourite tip for difficult questions is not to worry about answering them - if you watch politicians during difficult interviews, they know how to control the situation to the point where they steer the conversation away from the question they have no desire of answering. So if for example, you didn't do any internships in your final year at university, the interviewer could ask something like, "didn't you realize how important it was to do an internship in your final year? Why didn't you try to do an internship?" Let's say you tried but failed to find a decent internship and decided that your time is better spent pursuing other activities than to do a crap internship - rather than groveling and apologizing, you could ask the interviewer to clarify his/her position. "Do you only hire graduates who have done certain internships? Why are you putting so much emphasis on the internships? Does your company offer internships and if so, do you hire the graduates who did those internships with you?" Answering a question with a question allows you to gain control of the interview, so it feels more like a conversation rather than an interrogation. It also demonstrates that you are assertive, a very valuable trait.
I would like to assure you that most job interviews these days will have some element of psychometric evaluation, so you will be evaluated in other ways apart from the traditional interview. But at the end of the day, if you want the job bad enough, then you have to do whatever it takes to ace that job interview. There's no point in letting yourself down by performing badly in the job interview because I can guarantee you that you will always be facing very stiff competition for good jobs out there. If you crumble under stress and totally mess up your interview, then they will most probably give the job to someone who coped well under the stress and excelled at the interview. If it is a job you truly like and want, then how far are you prepared to go in order to secure the job? After all, you can hide behind the excuse of "I'm so incredibly shy", but at the end of day, who is that excuse for? Your teachers? Your parents? Yourself? Who is going to be satisfied with that excuse when you fail to secure the job you really want? Giving yourself excuses isn't going to fix the situation - the only way to fix it is to face your fears, take control of the situation and say, "I am going to overcome my shyness and learn how to perform well at those job interviews!" There is no real alternative and you can't be a student forever!
I could continue giving you interview tips but at the end of the day, you need to get used to talking to strangers even if it is something you weren't used to doing. I encountered that a lot in my NS days when we were tested in so many ways and made to do things we were used to doing. Gosh, when I lived at home with my parents, at least I had my own room and was used to having some privacy when I slept. Try going from that to living in a bunk with like 20 other soldiers - that is a shock to the system to say the least, but there's no point in complaining about how difficult the adjustment is, we all just had to get used to whatever NS threw at us. I remember one of the things we had to do in BMT was the rope climb - some of us found it easy, others had never ever climbed a rope before and found it extremely difficult. But we were all still expected to do it whether we found it challenging or not and we just got on with it. One very useful lesson NS taught us was the way it shocked many of us out of our comfort zones and forced us to face our fears in a most pragmatic way. Thus since Cinnamon is a Singaporean woman, she has not had to suffer through NS the way her male counterparts have done, thus that may account for her discomfort when it comes to being dragged out of her comfort zone.
I would like to share with you a video I like from the LangFocus Youtube channel below, in which the host Paul talks about his experience meeting the Bedouin girls in Egypt who made a living selling souvenirs to the tourists. These girls may be about 8 or 9 years old, yet they are not only working but often spoke about 5 or 6 languages in order to be able to sell to the tourists from various countries. For these girls, they had a lot of incentive to earn, to sell enough souvenirs as they needed to make a living: if they didn't sell, they didn't eat and thus they had a lot of incentive to learn these foreign languages in order to sell more souvenirs. Many of us in the developed world often make excuses as to why we cannot do something like learn a new language or do an activity which we're not good at, but not these young Bedouin girls. They don't have the luxury of making excuses when they are desperately poor and have to sell these trinkets to tourists to make ends meet. Do watch the video in full as the message is very inspiring indeed. There is much we can learn from the attitude of these young Bedouin girls. Can you imagine one of them saying, "no I can't go selling today as I am way too shy to talk to strangers on the beach." No, they just have to get over their fears and get to work.
So yeah, that's the message I am going to leave you with Cinnamon. Just get on with it, start preparing for your job interview with your friends and family - learn a thing or two from the work ethic of these Bedouin girls and the sooner you start preparing, the more ready you will be for that first job interview. What do you guys think? Are there other tips for job interviews that I haven't covered? How else can one be totally prepared for these job interviews? How do you overcome shyness? Have you ever had a stress interview? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
 |
| Are you terrified at the thought of a job interview?> |
"I hope you can help me please Limpeh. I am a final year student at a university in Singapore and am only too aware of the fact that I need to find a job pretty soon. I am totally dreading the process of having to go for job interviews because I am a very shy person. I even get nervous and panic during things like oral exams at school because I don't cope well with the pressure, like I feel like I am being scrutinized and the teacher is noting down every single error I make when talking. I swear I am a good student: I'm smart, I work hard, my assignments always score quite well. You see, I'm not really a very social person, I find it quite daunting to talk to strangers and make new friends - it is very much just the way I was brought up in a very traditional family, like the children are not meant to make noises to disturb the parents, students are meant to keep their mouths shut and listen to the teacher in class. I was always complimented for being very well behaved in school - the talkative, disruptive kids were the ones who always got punished. Furthermore, I find it easier to express myself through social media - it is easy to speak up online, post a comment, send a tweet, join a discussion online and express an opinion like that rather than in person. I'm afraid that area of my 'soft skills' just hasn't been developed much and I'm wondering how I can prepare myself for my first job interview please? Many thanks."
Well Cinnamon, you're right that this is going to be a problem for you and I'm glad you're at least seeking help about it. Some people would rather ignore a problem they can't solve easily and hope for it to go away, but that's not how life works. Allow me to address this from a very pragmatic point of view: in my current job, I am asked by my boss to do a range of tasks - some of which I am good at and enjoy, others I am not so good at and dread and there's everything in between the two extremes. So for example, I am currently working on a lot of projects in the Indian market and I really enjoy dealing with our Indian clients because I am studying Hindi now, so I get the chance to use my Hindi with them during our conference calls and meetings. There's a lot of more mundane work I have to do with due diligence, that means sorting out a huge volume of documents to prepare the investment deals - that is extremely boring but I have no choice but to have to do as I am told. Such is the nature of working life - you cannot realistically hope to get a job where you will enjoy every single aspect of it. Likewise, with the job interview process, allow me to assure you that it is not all horrible - there will be certain aspects of it you will find easier, some aspects you may even enjoy and then there will be some aspects that you will find a lot more challenging of course. Make sure you know exactly what you are dealing with.
 |
| Not every aspect of my job is fun. |
Right now, from the way you have described your situation, I think you're giving in to blind panic about the whole process when really, we need to break it down and discuss which aspects of the job interview process you find challenging or worrying. So with that in mind, let me run through a typical job interview, bearing in mind that not all job interviews follow this pattern but they don't often stray too far from the usual path. You'll be asked to introduce yourself and you should prepare a short summary of a few sentences: talk about your age, your background, where you've graduated from and maybe highlight an interesting hobby or something fascinating that you have done recently. Now this you can do in advance and run it by a few of your friends, you don't want to come across as too boring or too desperate. You want to stand out as an interesting individual who is confident without sounding too arrogant as well. So the interviewer can then ask you to elaborate on certain aspects of your strengths or weaknesses, perhaps picking up on something you have done in university or one of your hobbies. This is of course something you can practice in advance with your friends and family and the more practice you get prior to that first job interview, the less intimidating the process would seem.
The next part of the interview would then shift onto the job and the company: so the interviewer could ask you why you think you're right for the job or why you want to work for this company. Again, you need to anticipate these questions and do plenty of homework: you should have already read the company's website and know precisely what their products/services are, what they have made the news for recently and whom the directors are. It's like going for an exam - if you have prepared and revised, then there's nothing to be afraid of, you will feel very confident. But if you have done precious little to prepare yourself for the interview, then of course you're going to feel afraid of those questions. So for example, if the interviewer asks you, "where do you see yourself five years from now?" You should have a very clear idea about what you would have liked to have achieved by then in that field. Remember that the job interview is a conversation, not an exam: don't feel like there is only one right answer and they would hire you only if you say the magic words. No it doesn't work like that: so for example, if they ask you, "why should I consider hiring you?" That is a provocative question and you can answer a question with a question. "Well why did you invite me in for an interview then? That depends on what you're looking for - what kind of candidate would you like to hire? Someone who follows the rules with great attention to detail or someone who is able to think outside the box and break the rules to find you new solutions?"
 |
| I love answering a question with a question. |
If you've never ever had a job interview before, then you can do mock interviews with your friends or even on your own. Find a job you'll like to apply for and try to answer these ten questions found here. You need to then film yourself answering those questions and that is such an important process - you see, I do so many videos for Instagram and Youtube that I realize I never quite sound right in my own videos. The way we hear ourselves is radically different from the way others hear us - so for myself for example, I have to deliberately drop an octave or two to give myself more gravitas. I find that having more bass and less treble makes me come across as more serious and less childlike - as a middle aged man at 41, I don't want to sound like a 16 year old and unfortunately, that's the way I can come across sometimes if I don't change my pitch. Watching yourself on tape can also help you deal with your body language as well - some people do certain things when they get nervous: when my friend Chris was being interviewed on the BBC, he was very nervous and he started nodding his head. At first you thought, is he just agreeing with what the other person is saying? Then you realize, no it is a nervous twitch, that's why he is nodding all the time. If you watch that interview clip, he came across as very odd and I'm already choosing my words kindly. It looked wrong on so many levels - in fact, he even told me, "I didn't even realize I was doing that." If we had done a mock interview before he went on live TV, then we could have at least made him aware of it and he could have controlled his body language.
One more thing that you have to bear in mind is the fact that not all interviewers are evil people trying to give you a hard time - on the contrary, they are just ordinary folks who have a job to do. Don't assume the worst before you even step into the room and meet the interview panel: they just want to find the right candidate for the job and whilst they could be nasty about it, most of the time they are not. In all my years, I have only met one interviewer who went out of his way to be nasty to me and I was told that's called a stress interview: that is a technique used by some interviewers to deliberately throw you off course to see how you would cope with an unusual or unexpected situation. If the job requires you to think on your feet and respond to anything that may come your way, some interviewers may go for this tactic just to see if you would rise to the occasion or crumble under pressure. The thing to do is not to give in to the negative thoughts which may pop into your head like, "oh no, this is a disaster, they hate me, I must have said something wrong to offend them." If you sense that there is tension in the room, then remain calm but be assertive: stress interviews are usually conducted to see if the candidate can asset him/herself in a stressful situation or not. Be bold enough to say, "look I can sense you're in a very bad mood and if you prefer, we can reschedule this interview to another time, okay?"
 |
| Behold: the legendary stress interview. |
The chances of you finding yourself in a stress interview are pretty darn low - like I said, for all the years I had been in the working world, I have only had one stress interview. If I may be honest, I crumbled under pressure because I was young and inexperienced then: it came out of the blue and I wasn't prepared. Thus if you want to be prepared for anything, then you can easily do a mock stress interview with a friend just to see if you can respond to the difficult questions. Once again, my favourite tip for difficult questions is not to worry about answering them - if you watch politicians during difficult interviews, they know how to control the situation to the point where they steer the conversation away from the question they have no desire of answering. So if for example, you didn't do any internships in your final year at university, the interviewer could ask something like, "didn't you realize how important it was to do an internship in your final year? Why didn't you try to do an internship?" Let's say you tried but failed to find a decent internship and decided that your time is better spent pursuing other activities than to do a crap internship - rather than groveling and apologizing, you could ask the interviewer to clarify his/her position. "Do you only hire graduates who have done certain internships? Why are you putting so much emphasis on the internships? Does your company offer internships and if so, do you hire the graduates who did those internships with you?" Answering a question with a question allows you to gain control of the interview, so it feels more like a conversation rather than an interrogation. It also demonstrates that you are assertive, a very valuable trait.
I would like to assure you that most job interviews these days will have some element of psychometric evaluation, so you will be evaluated in other ways apart from the traditional interview. But at the end of the day, if you want the job bad enough, then you have to do whatever it takes to ace that job interview. There's no point in letting yourself down by performing badly in the job interview because I can guarantee you that you will always be facing very stiff competition for good jobs out there. If you crumble under stress and totally mess up your interview, then they will most probably give the job to someone who coped well under the stress and excelled at the interview. If it is a job you truly like and want, then how far are you prepared to go in order to secure the job? After all, you can hide behind the excuse of "I'm so incredibly shy", but at the end of day, who is that excuse for? Your teachers? Your parents? Yourself? Who is going to be satisfied with that excuse when you fail to secure the job you really want? Giving yourself excuses isn't going to fix the situation - the only way to fix it is to face your fears, take control of the situation and say, "I am going to overcome my shyness and learn how to perform well at those job interviews!" There is no real alternative and you can't be a student forever!
 |
| How badly do you want your dream job? |
I could continue giving you interview tips but at the end of the day, you need to get used to talking to strangers even if it is something you weren't used to doing. I encountered that a lot in my NS days when we were tested in so many ways and made to do things we were used to doing. Gosh, when I lived at home with my parents, at least I had my own room and was used to having some privacy when I slept. Try going from that to living in a bunk with like 20 other soldiers - that is a shock to the system to say the least, but there's no point in complaining about how difficult the adjustment is, we all just had to get used to whatever NS threw at us. I remember one of the things we had to do in BMT was the rope climb - some of us found it easy, others had never ever climbed a rope before and found it extremely difficult. But we were all still expected to do it whether we found it challenging or not and we just got on with it. One very useful lesson NS taught us was the way it shocked many of us out of our comfort zones and forced us to face our fears in a most pragmatic way. Thus since Cinnamon is a Singaporean woman, she has not had to suffer through NS the way her male counterparts have done, thus that may account for her discomfort when it comes to being dragged out of her comfort zone.
I would like to share with you a video I like from the LangFocus Youtube channel below, in which the host Paul talks about his experience meeting the Bedouin girls in Egypt who made a living selling souvenirs to the tourists. These girls may be about 8 or 9 years old, yet they are not only working but often spoke about 5 or 6 languages in order to be able to sell to the tourists from various countries. For these girls, they had a lot of incentive to earn, to sell enough souvenirs as they needed to make a living: if they didn't sell, they didn't eat and thus they had a lot of incentive to learn these foreign languages in order to sell more souvenirs. Many of us in the developed world often make excuses as to why we cannot do something like learn a new language or do an activity which we're not good at, but not these young Bedouin girls. They don't have the luxury of making excuses when they are desperately poor and have to sell these trinkets to tourists to make ends meet. Do watch the video in full as the message is very inspiring indeed. There is much we can learn from the attitude of these young Bedouin girls. Can you imagine one of them saying, "no I can't go selling today as I am way too shy to talk to strangers on the beach." No, they just have to get over their fears and get to work.
So yeah, that's the message I am going to leave you with Cinnamon. Just get on with it, start preparing for your job interview with your friends and family - learn a thing or two from the work ethic of these Bedouin girls and the sooner you start preparing, the more ready you will be for that first job interview. What do you guys think? Are there other tips for job interviews that I haven't covered? How else can one be totally prepared for these job interviews? How do you overcome shyness? Have you ever had a stress interview? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.
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You are now reading the article How do shy people cope with job interviews? With link address https://newstoday-ok.blogspot.com/2017/12/how-do-shy-people-cope-with-job.html