All of us face interviews at multiple points in our lifetime, be it as a part of college admissions or while applying to internships and jobs. While one may be highly skilled in their field, they often lack confidence in an interview, resulting in poor performance. While we are busy building our core competencies and skills, it is also essential to work on our interview skills. This article will share multiple strategies to build confidence for giving interviews.
Techniques to build confidence for interviews:
The first and most important thing is to prepare extensively for your interview. Just like anything else in life, the more you prepare, the more confident you are to tackle it.
Frame basic answers for questions that you expect in your interview. Two points of caution here: (a) Don’t restrict your preparation to only these ‘expected questions’ (b) You needn’t memorize your answers, just have the key points in mind
Drawing from the tradition of public speaking, practice sharing your responses to interview questions in front of a mirror to observe your body language, posture, etc. Say your answers out loud and not in your mind.
Give a lot of mock interviews. They can help you feel comfortable with an interview set-up. Especially if you haven’t given a lot of interviews before in your life, it is essential to give a few mocks. While picking mock interviews, try to have someone you aren’t very familiar or comfortable with to take your interview, to simulate an actual interview set-up.
You can also go give some actual interviews at places that you aren’t too keen on joining. This can help you practice without the pressure of the outcome, before the big interview that really matters to you.
Attempt to strike conversations with strangers. This will also help you overcome the fear of being judged and being able to share your thoughts with strangers, as is in an actual interview.
While all the above techniques can help you improve your confidence, during your interview, certain topics or questions may arise that you find difficult to engage with. In such cases, you can use techniques to redirect an interviewer towards topics you want to talk about in your interview. Read this article (Interview Tactics: The Hook) to understand such techniques.
You now have an idea of the various techniques you can use to help build your confidence for giving interviews. You need to apply these techniques to reap results for yourself.
All the best for your upcoming interviews.
Here are some additional links that you may want to visit:
Further Reading:
How to build a professional CV to get shortlisted
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