Page 174 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Fearless Interviewing

Tim was the head of a lighting crew for a local television news sta-
tion in Salt Lake City, Utah. After four years of working on the
crew and finally becoming the chief lighting designer, he figured
he had paid his dues and was ready to move to Los Angeles to get
a job in the film industry.
With no binding family ties or other obligations, he packed
up his pickup truck and headed for Hollywood. It was four
months before he landed his first interview, a meeting with the
director of photography for a network movie-of-the-week. He
was willing to start at the bottom, but unfortunately, the interview
failed to yield the chance to do even that.
“It was like an interrogation,” he protested when he called me.
“I never expected to have to tell my life story just to get a job on a
movie! Their questions were impossible. I’m not a brain surgeon.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he reflected. “When they asked
those questions about my weaknesses and my failures, my mouth
went dry, and it was like my jaw couldn’t move. I just sat there and
totally froze! They must have thought I was a moron! I walked out
of there shaking inside, feeling like I was a total idiot. There’s no way
I’m ever going to go through anything like that again!”
You’re certainly not alone if you have some negative feelings
about interviewing. Most people consider interviews to be some-
where between mildly unpleasant and absolutely terrifying. This
section will give you specific strategies for conquering that anxi-
ety and quieting those negative voices.

The Most Common Interview Fears

The 11 most common fears that people have voiced to me about
interviewing are contained in the following checklist. Check the
box next to any of these fears you have right now. Be sure to use
a pencil! You’re going to go back over this list at the end of read-
ing this section, and I can safely predict that many of the fears
you have now will most certainly have been “erased” by then.

I fear they will ask me a question I don’t know the answer to.
Chapters 2 through 5, plus the sample interviews at the
end of the section, will leave you with no doubt about
how to strategically answer any of the four types of
interview questions.

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