It can be challenging when you receive rejections, especially at the interview stage. Knowing that the coveted job was so close, and yet so far, can be difficult to accept, but the best way to recover from the failure, is to get up and try again. But you need to try again in the right way.
Interview Skills Coaching is an effective and critical method of boosting yourself to recover from any setbacks that you may have had from failed interviews. Remember that it is hard for anyone to see their own weaknesses, and this is especially true with regards to interview skills. An interview is a highly niche situation, one which is never replicated again in your everyday life and therefore, you or even your friends and your family members may not be able to identify what you are doing wrong. Without understanding the gaps, it will be difficult to improve. Seek professional help to get an assessment as to where you may have gone wrong.
The most important step you need to take after receiving rejections, is to apply for another job. Do not give up, and be smart about your next steps. Here are 3 tips to help you get back on your feet and ace your next interview.
Tip 1: Do not make it personal
The job market is very challenging at this point and highly competent people are facing struggles to achieve their career goals as well. It is very important to garner strength to pick yourself up to continue the race to secure a job, and not allow yourself to feel an energy drain. One way of doing this is to not take the rejections personally. The rejections are temporary setbacks, unless you allow it to become a permanent one.
Tip 2: Take steps to improve
Improvement requires a deliberate choice and an open mind. Be as honest as you can be with yourself and reflect upon your interviews. It is hard to view your own experience in the eyes of a third party, but try to see what you could have done better. Some things that interviewers do not view positively but many candidates continue to do without even being aware of it includes:
· Reacting to questions with non-verbal cues that portrayed defensiveness, nervousness, insecurity
· Answering questions using memorized scripts
· Providing generic answers
Tip 3: Practice right
The skillsets required during an interview requires practice, but you need to practice right in order to achieve real improvements. We have clients who come to us saying that they have definitely put in the effort and time to practice for their interviews, but still fail to get a “yes” during their interviews. In many cases, the reason for this is that they were practicing using the wrong methods, making the error even more ingrained into their habits.
Some good practice tips include:
· Practice verbal delivery of your answers, instead of relying on written or typed out answers
· Practice all types of questions, including questions that are deemed left-field, unexpected, trivia, those that may be deemed superficial. The more types of questions you are ready for, the better prepared you will be.
· Understand the difference between waiting for a suitable question to talk about your strengths and being able to weave in your strengths in almost any question
There are many nuances in an interview that makes a difference to the success rate of the individual and each of these small nuances add up to a big variance in the final decision of the most suitable candidate. In a difficult job search environment, it is important to maximize the probability of success. Do pick yourself up after a rejection, but what is more crucial is not to stay frozen in place but to move forward. Seek improvements and techniques to correct yourself. Our clients usually find that within one session of interview coaching, they discover something about themselves they did not realise they were doing wrong. And this is a critical first step towards growing and improving yourself to achieve your next career goal.
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Written by Siew Ling Hwang, Founder of Discovering Potential
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