The Master Key to Reducing Nervousness in an Interview

It can be summed up in two words: thorough preparation. And it begins long before anyone responds to your resume.

• Clear the decks for your incoming calls. Before you can perform well in an interview, you must secure that interview.

If you invest considerable time, expense and effort to generate qualified job leads, it only makes sense to be ready to capture them when opportunity knocks!

First and foremost, remember that when someone in the business world places a phone call, he or she is accustomed to getting through to someone: a secretary, receptionist or voice mailbox, capable of taking a message.



This expectation carries over to you, even though you may be out of work and using your home as your new "office." Make sure that you have some way to receive incoming calls at all times, even if it's an answering machine.
If you have just one phone line that you and your family tie up for long periods, the smartest thing you can do is install a second phone line during your search. If a potential employer enthusiastically responds to your resume but gets a busy signal two or three times in a row, you may have lost that lead forever.

Make sure that the initial impression the caller gets is a first-class image. Always have a responsible, English-speaking adult or reliable answering machine available to answer your phone.

If you have an answering machine, never use one of those novelty tapes to answer your phone (imitations of celebrity voices, musical messages, etc.). Neither should you have one of your children record the message. You should record it, and re-record it if necessary, until it sounds highly professional.

If you're using an answering machine and you go on a trip, try to be in touch with your recorded messages every day. Few things are more irritating to someone who's trying to reach you than receiving the same recorded message several times in a week, without a clue as to how long you'll be gone or when you can return the call. It's most unprofessional and damaging to your chances of employment with that caller.

At least once a week, call your answering machine yourself and leave yourself a message. You'll not only appreciate how someone else perceives your message, but you'll be double-checking the reliability of the machine.

• To minimize nervousness and fear of rejection, realize that you're playing a numbers game.

The real reason that some athletes choke in a big game is not because they lack skill or don't care enough. It's because they care too much. They want success so badly that they try to force their skills, making themselves so nervous and so tight that they simply cannot relax enough to let their skills perform to their highest level. The same can happen to you in your job campaign.

A certain amount of nervousness is always going to be present during a job interview. But if you find yourself so nervous that your tightness is not allowing the real you to shine through, then take a tip from master salespeople who face this problem all the time.

To succeed, on the one hand, you must prepare thoroughly. But on the other hand, you cannot allow yourself to want this position too much. Obviously, this can be hard to do, especially when you're out of work, desperate for money and your "dream job" is riding on the outcome of your interview.

But precisely because the stakes are so high, you must learn the skill of lowering your desire in order to loiter your level of nervousness. You will give yourself your best shot of capturing the position only if the "best you" shines through, and that can take place only when you are not in the death grip of desperation and fear of blowing the opportunity.

You must tell yourself before the interview that if landing this position is meant to be, it's meant to be.
You must also look at your job search as a numbers game, just as master salespeople do. They get rid of nervousness by not trying to force each situation their way. Rather, they rehearse themselves and polish their presentation until they are truly masterful in knowing their information cold. But they never know which specific prospect is going to be the one out of three or one out of fifty who buys. So they don't worry about it.

They know if they give fifty masterful presentations, somewhere along the line they will get their ample share of sales. This strategy of thinking of the interview process as a numbers game is the key to being able to relax enough in all your interviews to let your knowledge and genuine personality come through. Paradoxically, by having a more relaxed attitude, you will raise your "closing ratio" (number of job offers) much higher.

• Know that your interviewer's greatest emotional need is almost certainly SAFETY.

All great salespeople know that you will be far more successful in selling or persuading anyone if you address their emotional needs during the sale.

In your job search, this means that you will do much better in interviews if you go into them realizing that your interviewer is quite anxious and his or her greatest emotional need is most likely the safety of his or her hiring decision.

To understand this, you must realize that for most executives, interviewing is a function performed only occasionally. So it brings with it the inherent discomfort of unfamiliarity. As a rule, most executives would much rather be doing what they do best instead of interviewing you.

Greatly magnifying the inherent discomfort of performing an activity outside their daily comfort zone is the onerous consequences of making a mistake. If they hire someone who turns out to be a disaster, that disaster may be hung around their neck like an albatross. So a bad hiring decision can impede their career. It can also cause them a loss of prestige at the firm; disrupt previously harmonious work teams, hurt employee morale and lower productivity. Hiring someone who doesn't work out can also mean that pet projects get botched or essential work is postponed until someone qualified is found.