The job interview

“It’s been a while since I was interviewed for a job. I’ve had promotions – one quite recent one in fact – but because I’ve had a healthy set of opportunities to climb the career ladder at Matrix Networks, I haven’t wanted or needed to start scouring the job market. I have interviewed a fair few people though and as we’re about to embark on a fairly ambitious recruitment drive at Matrix Networks, I thought it might be worth sharing my thoughts on how to succeed in the interview room.

“I’m not going to talk about the experience and qualifications you might have needed to be able to apply for a job in the first place, because that’s a given. You wouldn’t be offered an interview if we didn’t think you had the right skill set. The interview is about who you are. I’m not impressed by people who try to impress me. It doesn’t work. And I can confidently say that my colleagues at Matrix would say the same. The question after ‘Can you do the job?’, is ‘Are you going to get on with us?’, and ‘How well will you fit in?’.

“I’m looking for people who are genuinely interested in what we do and want to help us achieve our goals. Those candidates who are just looking for their next step up the career ladder before they move on to somewhere else, aren’t of any interest. So, I’d recommend doing some research on our business before you arrive for the interview – you’d be surprised at how many people don’t. This shows me you’ve thought about who you’re applying for a job with, you know what we do, who we work for and what’s important to us as a Company.

“I’d also say don’t worry about the interview. You’re just sitting in a room in front of one or two other people (possibly virtually) and we want you to be yourself. You should be professional of course, but just relax and talk to us. The difficult bit is knowing how to do the job you’re interested in, but you’ve already shown us evidence of that in your application, so just be yourself.

“We’ll ask you some difficult questions – it’s our job to, but if you don’t know the answer, just say so. There’s nothing worse than watching someone sweat under the pressure of trying to think of an answer when they don’t know what it is. It might be that question wasn’t very important to us anyway, we just want to see how you react.

“It’s a bit of a cliché, but it really is a ‘people thing’. If you’ve got the right skillset for the job we’re advertising for and you want to work for us, then apply. The rest is down to who you are as a person and no one can demonstrate that better than you.”