Interview Preparation - Learning to Ignore Nothing

Preparing for an interview, as far as most people can tell, comes down to thinking about the best responses to common interview questions, swotting up statistics about the company and personal trivia about the interviewer and the boss. This is all quite necessary, of course. But there are number of lessons you can learn from the mistakes other people make. As you'll see below, the mistakes often occur with things that you would never have thought of. Learn from these in your interview preparation.

The interview preparation process tends to go particularly well for people who really know what job they are interviewing for. When you go in through a recruiter, it isn't something you can take for granted that you'll be told ahead of time what kind of position you are interviewing for, as people have found. You need to be prepared for this kind of thing so that you don't end up at the interview asking your interviewer what the job is.

Humor can often be overrated. To a lot of us, answering any question with some kind of cheeky comeback is a lesson we've learned from watching too many sitcoms. That's not how it is supposed go in real life though. A lot of the stuff they do on sitcoms, the intonation, the words, the jokes themselves,  only sound right in carefully choreographed situations where there are no real feelings involved. When an interviewer asks you a question about something that you don't expect, often, especially with if you're young, your first instinct is to just come up with some kind of smarty-pants rejoinder the way you'd hear in a sitcom. For instance, if they ask you about what you did to beat stress at an earlier job, your cheeky comeback may be some kind of snide reference to a drinking or drug habit. You need to make sure that you drop all the sitcom lines at home before you come.

Sometimes, even if you send three copies of your resume to a company in pristine condition, companies being overwhelmed with job applications as they are, they tend to get misplaced. Sometimes, some bigwig at the company decides to walk in on the interview to look in and asks you personally for a copy of your resume even if the interviewer has one. You can't have nothing to hand out should anyone ask for a copy of your resume or anything else. You need to be equipped for these situations. Surprisingly, it happens all the time. This kind of interview preparation really leaves you confident.

And finally, remember that not all the interview preparation is going to substitute for politeness all around. Make sure that you are on your best behavior not just with the interviewer, but with everyone you meet, leading up to the interview. In fact, make sure that you're on your best behavior walking up the street to the building that the interview is to be in. You never know what people will be on the interviewing panel and whether they happen to be walking beside you as you walk up to the building.