Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2013. The references to “since the crisis hit” and to hiring practices and social-media screening reflect 2013.
What better way to learn the mistakes to avoid in a job interview than to ask interviewers themselves what they think candidates get wrong? We asked 10 working recruiters to tell us, sincerely and honestly, the reasons why they reject candidates. Because of how frank they were, their names will remain anonymous.
One small observation: there is no common rule when you ask them to be honest, so some give more weight to certain things while others see them as trivial details. In other words, the outcome of the interview will vary depending on the interviewer.
1. Neglecting the cover letter
Eight of the 10 interviewers agree on the importance of a good cover letter: among hundreds of CVs, a cover letter can be an excellent way to get more attention and stand out from other candidates. It shouldn’t be generic, but tailored to the company in question. You should write a unique cover letter for each company. Not everyone takes advantage of this, and nowadays interviewers attach a lot of importance to it. “We receive many CVs online that come without a cover letter, and sometimes we don’t even stop to open that person’s CV. We want to know something about them before spending more time, especially when we have hundreds or thousands of candidates.”
2. Appearance
As it happens, older recruiters (aged 40–55) are not very used to candidates wearing earrings or sporting mohawks. “We believe a person’s appearance should convey self-assurance and confidence, and I’m not inspired with much confidence by someone who needs to decorate themselves or follow the latest fashion. One of the companies I work for is still very conservative, so they would not accept someone for an executive position whose appearance didn’t match that of its former directors. Call us old-fashioned, but it’s company policy.”
3. Nerves
“We understand that someone might be nervous in a job interview, but some people show so many nerves that it gives us a lot to think about. We are wary of someone who cannot control their nerves, because we think they couldn’t handle the stress of a management position. We are looking for people who can cope with pressure, because in difficult times pressure is the order of the day.”
4. Too much ego
“We understand that self-confidence is very important, but some people should know that the best person in their job or position has already come through here 100 times this week. This may be one of the most frequent mistakes we have noticed in candidates since the crisis hit: because they need a job, many inflate their skills and knowledge as much as possible, and they all claim to be the best. There are other ways to show us that someone is right for the job, but never so directly. And you should never use anything that could be taken as boasting.”
5. Speaking badly of a former company or former bosses
“It may sound like a cliché, but it still happens in job interviews today. I understand that many people are unhappy with how their bosses used to manage, and they were probably treated unfairly at the company, but when you criticise your former company, all we think is that tomorrow we could be the ones being criticised, so it is still frowned upon.”
6. Hesitating at very specific questions or not knowing what to answer
“We don’t expect people to arrive with the job interview rehearsed at home; we just want them to tell us the truth. And the fact is that with questions as simple as ‘What have you done in the last six months you’ve been out of work?’, we often get overly thoughtful pauses, which means the candidate is trying to embellish an answer to convince us, or in other words, to lie to us. At other times, when we ask what position they held at company X, we get an answer that isn’t the one on their CV.”
7. Talking too much
“We’re not looking for one-word answers, but with some candidates it’s hard to ‘cut them off’. At other times the conversation goes off on tangents that lead nowhere. In short, they don’t know when to let the other person speak, nor do they read the interviewer’s body language to work out that they are tiring us. We interpret this as a symptom of the candidate’s nervousness.”
8. Do they really pay as much attention to body language as people say?
When we asked whether they really analyse candidates’ body language, they agreed that they don’t go as far as watching for pupil dilation in response to a question (they were joking), but they do notice the most common gestures, such as how a candidate sits, how they move their hands when talking, or how attentive they are. Four of them say they still give importance to the handshake, especially nowadays when everyone knows you should shake hands strongly, firmly and confidently. (Read: 7 body language techniques.)
9. The most outrageous mistakes they have witnessed
After we went through some of the most outrageous job interview mistakes we published a while ago, they admitted that the only one they have seen fairly often is candidates bringing someone with them to the interview. “I’ve seen a candidate for a management position turn up to the interview with his mother, and once, in the middle of an interview, the candidate’s wife knocked on the door to ask if we’d be much longer, because her car was double-parked. Apart from that, people don’t show up in jeans and a T-shirt, or eating or chewing gum, although we have found chewing gum stuck under the chairs in the waiting room.”
10. One-off incidents
Three of the 10 interviewers acknowledge that people can be however they want in their free time, but sitting in the waiting room and giving certain looks to some of the company’s female employees can be grounds for immediate rejection. “On several occasions, after interviewing a candidate and moving them on to the next stage, we’ve seen them trying to chat up the secretary and asking her out for a drink. They were rejected immediately, because a company is not a nightclub; you don’t come here (at least in principle) with those intentions.”
These are the things the recruiters we interviewed pay most attention to when ruling out candidates, although they admit that they are sometimes swayed by good vibes from certain candidates, since part of their job is intuition and the feeling they get when they sit across from someone. They insist on the cover letter and a clear, concise and detailed CV, and please, don’t try to lie, because these days lies get caught very quickly.
As for whether they really look candidates up on social media, they admit they do, but they also agree that unless they see something really serious on a profile, how a candidate comes across on social media is generally not decisive. “We do appreciate someone who knows how to hide certain photos on social media that show them in situations that wouldn’t reflect well on the company hiring them, although for executive positions we rarely see anything on profiles that makes us rule out a candidate.”
Further reading
Featured image: Rondal Partridge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
