The Negative: Being Precise in the Interview

The Negative: Being Precise in the Interview

Why can being precise be a problem in a Management Interview. We will probe this in 3 possible ways

1) The image portrayed by the candidate and his perspective

2) The perception created in the minds of the interviewers,

3) Is the candidate not a right fit for the organization?

And then we will look towards possible ways where this problem can be sorted.

1) Understanding the perspective of the candidate: - The candidate when given a chance or shortlist for a particular interview creates a mental image of what all he has to communicate in the interview, in order to win over the interviewers' confidence and bag the internship.

The candidate may feel that he has to communicate a lot of things in the interviews, so he usually has answers prepared for these questions in advance. Usually the typical interview questions like Introduce yourself are the one for which a candidate invests time and prepares answers to these questions. From the perspective of the candidate these are his window of opportunity where he can communicate the maximum information about him to the interviewer, and this way, has to cover all the possible points that have happened in his life, so that everything is covered and communicated to the interviewer. The perception of the candidate is also to introduce as much details for the relevant components of the introduction so that if feasible he or she may get a chance to drive the interview, if the interview gets interested in a particular point.

Moving towards other questions that are directed at the Interviewee by the interviewer, the interviewee again has the inside feeling to give out maximum possible information about the question asked, so as to make sure, that the genuine answer is understood and appreciated by the interviewer. In this way the interviewee tries to form a story that wives around all the intricate details from the start to the end of the relevant points towards a particular question.

Also a point comes, when the interviewee has been answering the same question for quite some time, when the interviewer wishes to interrupt the interviewee, and the interviewee seeing this and expecting that the interviewer is going to interrupt starts to change over his tone and continue with his answer, in a bid to include the last points that the interview considers important to be communicated in the particular answer.

Also from the perspective of the candidate, he does not know or feel the fast movement of the time when he is answering a particular question. Which the interviewer, being on the other side of the communication feels and gets reluctant about the continuous bombardment of words.

The perspective of the Interviewer: From the perspective of the interviewer, the interviewer is just interested in verifying and judging several other factors that are mentioned below, through the answers that are asked in behavioral interview questions being thrown at candidates in an interview. These factors are listed as below:

1) Confidence

2) Team Work

3) Trust to delegate tasks

4) The We and not the I

5) Patience

6) Willingness to learn

As can be seen from the above list, the questions that are asked by the interviewer to the interviewee, might not be directly relevant to what answers the interviewee gives, instead they may be relevant to the way the interviewee is answering the question. So even if a technical question is asked to the candidate the interviewer may not actually be looking forward to a technical answer to the problem. The same goes with the logical ability questions that were being asked in the interviews, the interviewers are just expecting to see how the interviewee goes forward about the problem. However if an interviewee goes on and on about a particular answer this may cause disinterest and even reluctance in the interviewer and can lead to the rejection of the candidate.

From the perspective of the Interviewer, interviewers are looking at very precise answers to the questions that they put forward, they following is the structure of an answer that they desire from the candidate

1) Context/Situation :- What context a particular thing was done

2) Solution :- What was the solution proposed by the candidate

3) Impact