8 tips to feel confident, articulate, and in control at your next interview

Today I am guest blogging over at The Works, the Northeastern University Career Development Blog. You can read all about my best advice for landing your dream job at The Works.

Growing my career in the male-dominated high tech industry has prepared me for one of the more stressful aspects of the job lifecycle: interviewing. Although I've certainly suffered from my own bouts of impostor syndrome, especially since I entered the technical field from a non-traditional background of English and publishing, I have been able to overcome this and hone my interviewing persona thanks to a lot of helpful advice. I've also gleaned tips about confidence, posture, and presentation from role models like Sheryl Sandberg, Grace Hopper, and Duy-Loan Le (who delivered the best keynote I've ever seen at the Grace Hopper 2010 conference). I enjoy sharing what works for me by coaching my friends and colleagues in the hopes that it can help them in their next interview or stressful job situation. Anecdotally, these tips seem to Anecdotally, these tips seem to work well for all industries, not just technology. I hope that you will find them useful, too!

1. Be engaged. Let your personality and enthusiasm for the job shine through. Make sure that you take a couple of notes so that you can put an impressive detail or two in your thank you note, but don’t take so many that you are not making as much eye contact as you need.

2. Prepare. To borrow a phrase from the 90s, “duh,” but hear me out. If a recruiter or potential manager calls to discuss business, and you’re in the car or otherwise engaged, ask to call back at a more convenient time. You don’t want to be responding to detailed salary or other questions without your head completely in the game, or you run the risk of making a costly mistake. Being prepared also means that you know to ask if the job title is negotiable, and that you fully understand the level at which you are entering the organization. Confusing and varying titles mean different things at different companies. If you don’t have this discussion, then you run the risk of entering an organization at a lower title and pay scale than you realize.

3. Be ready to formulate articulate answers. I value the advice I received from my online moms’ forum about the right way to answer a question: Stop, listen, breathe, then speak. This has the two-fold benefit of giving yourself a chance to collect your thoughts and prepare a reply while minimizing the number of times you use “like” or “um.” This allows you to present the best, most polished version of yourself.

4. Ask intelligent, relevant questions. A job interview is a two-way street, and you need to ensure that the company and role are as good a fit for you as you are for them. Transcend the hackneyed “what’s a typical day like?” and really dig deep for questions that will help you better understand the role and company culture. Feel free to ask what the interviewer likes and dislikes about the group, or what advice an outside consultant might give the company.

5. Be aware of your body language. If you haven’t seen Amy Cuddy’s touching TED Talk, do it now. Confident body posture is an outstanding way to show your potential employers that you are professional and prepared. Before an interview, I practice a power pose for about 2 minutes by raising my arms overhead, and breathing deeply. This is best done in a bathroom stall for privacy’s sake.

6. Take time to visualize. My friend, who just used this tip to get her new job as a professor, calls this my Jedi mind trick. I got this tip from a couple of guys on the sales team at my publishing company. It’s so simple, yet so powerful. Just before your interview, make eye contact with yourself in the mirror and give yourself a pep talk. Mine goes something like: “You deserve to be here. You are articulate, intelligent, and confident. You are going to [fill in the blank with desired outcome: get a second interview, run a successful meeting, get offered the job].” To accomplish this, I arrive at an interview at least 15 minutes early and wait for the bathroom to clear out, or do the technique in my car’s sunshade mirror. I combine this with tip #5 for maximum impact. I realize that this idea sounds so corny, but just try it. Everything in me changes after I give this little talk. I stand up straighter, act with more conviction, and feel professional and together. You can put on this “fake it ‘til you make it” attitude in almost any situation: a big meeting, a first date, or any other potentially stressful encounter. This success vizualization also works wonders: https://youtu.be/yYptprQq-Fo.

7. Close the deal. I always end my interview with this question or a variation on it. “I really want this job. If you have any concerns or questions about my candidacy, I would very much appreciate an opportunity to address them with you before you make your final decision.” This is effective in two ways: you express your willingness to accept the role given the right offer, plus you have a chance to counter any potential roadblocks to getting that offer.

8. Negotiate. Once you have an offer for a job, be sure not to neglect the last, critical step. Think creatively about what is important to you: salary, benefits, vacation time, flexibility, stock options, travel and training opportunities, tuition reimbursement, anything else that has value for you. Realize that the way you prioritize these criteria in your 20s may be very different from the items that you value in your 40s. It’s normal that you would seek out travel opportunities in your 20s, for example, but might not welcome frequent travel later in your career.

Getting to Yes, Never Split the Difference, and Difficult Conversations are  excellent books that can help you to maximize your next job offer. For a bulletproof way to approach your next salary negotiation, check out the Get a Raise Prep School program and its sister site Work Options, which offers several templates for negotiating telecommuting, a higher salary, and other flexible options. Founder Pat Katepoo’s professional writing and solid research will enable you to effectively prepare and confidently negotiate the aspects of your job that you value the most.
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Why Technology?

People often ask me how I got into technology, given my upbringing in rural Maine and my undergrad education at Bates College in English literature and French. I began my career logically enough, as an editor. I was teaching readers how to use a software called SAP, with articles specializing in finance, HR, supply chain management, and data warehousing. The challenge was that a lot of our authors were subject matter experts, and some were decent writers. However, many more of them spoke English as a second or third language. So on top of the language barrier, they were attempting to explain a complex technology. They all had day jobs and the articles were at best a side project and at worst a nuicance, so the article drafts were often hurried, confusing, and missing vital steps.

So imagine you're an English literature major trying to decipher how some consultant wants to optimally structure your InfoCubes in an ideal data warehouse. There was a lot of jargon, acronyms, and ideas to research before I could even get at what I thought the author might be saying. I often ended up learning about the topic online, rewriting the article based on what I thought the author had been getting at, and asking for a fact check of the new article I'd written. What I discovered through this process is that I was fascinated by what SAP software could do to streamline, automate, and transform a business. With my background, the editing came second nature, but the technology grabbed my attention.

Realizing how exciting technology was, I founded a research department at the publishing company to study what users wanted, and ultimately deliver articles, newsletters, and conferences to meet their needs. I later learned that this is considered product management, which I fell in love with all over again in grad school.

I had the good fortune to land a job at this software company I had written articles about, SAP, for almost 5 years. While at SAP I attended a conference that transformed my future in technology, the Grace Hopper conference for Women in Computing. Even though I was working for a software company, I still suffered from impostor syndrome, a term Sheryl Sandberg popularized in Lean In. Attending this conference, surrounded by thousands of technical women, instilled a new confidence in me that allowed me to apply to, and graduate with honors from, the high tech MBA at Northeastern University.

So my career in technology has been a circuitous route. But I wouldn't have it any other way, because I bring a unique perspective that someone with a more traditional business or computer degree lacks. As my classmates and colleagues inform me, I "write good." :)