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Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#101

Post by _swfb »

david38 wrote: post #98
_swfb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually do appreciate the advice and blunt feedback, because you're right, I'm a little tired of affirmations. I honestly forgot about the tweets from years ago where I was pretty burnt out. I will be deleting those shortly. The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.

LinkedIn is not a place to air grievances. It’s a place to post your job history, post jobs, and “like” when others have been promoted

I agree that's what it should be, but that absolutely not what it is and it hasn't been that way for many years. People treat LinkedIn like Facebook and post their opinions on things.

Most of the potentially worrisome stuff I've posted has been comments responding to other peoples' posts. I went and deleted nearly all of those, though.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#102

Post by scarface_74 »

ativzzz wrote: post #90
codingdave wrote: post #19

Don't change who you are for an interview. It will just result in a job where you aren't happy being a different version of yourself. I know it is frustrating to not find work, but finding work that isn't right for you brings whole new levels of frustration later. And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, y…

100% untrue. Hiring is a social game. You want to put your best foot forward, and then slowly let out your truer self over time. Much like dating - you don't want to air all your dirty laundry on the first date. Don't lie about who you are but at the same time people are more tolerant of your quirks once they get to know you better

While I completely agree with hiding who you are for work, I code switch for work with the best of them. I am a customer facing consultant in rooms with decision makers, I aired all of my dirty laundry with my now wife because I didn’t want to waste my time or hers.

We had been working together for two years. But not in the same department. I just started talking to her one day in the parking lot and she finally said “are you going to stop staring at me and ask for my number”.

I was not thinking about dating at the time. I had just come out of a bad situation less than a year earlier and I was trying to get my financial house in order - it was 2011 and I had made some bad real estate decisions before the housing crash and I was trying to get my career on track.

I was happy with just hanging out with my long term female friends at the time and they provided all of the emotional and companionship needs I had with no complications. My friends and I traveled together, went out on “dates” (do you call it that when you are just doing date like things with no emotional or physical expectations?) etc.

When I told my now wife all I was going through it didn’t scare her away. She was just as up front with me. We were married seven months later. 15 years in, I still don’t feel like she kept anything from me that I didn’t know about her during the first two weeks and vice versa.

This though is horrible general advice as far as dating. I wasn’t pursuing her. We knew of each other from work so I wasn’t a complete stranger and we were both in our mid 30s and divorced then and she had two boys.

I wasn’t in the headspace to seriously be in the “dating scene” then.

I know how to small talk now and have studied conversational skills for my career. If I were out there now, I would do things differently.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#103

Post by yieldcrv »

_swfb wrote: post #97
yieldcrv wrote: post #53

I’ve had many interview loops like this I stay interviewing while I have a job so the consequences aren’t as large but over on cscareers and blind, many people have the same experience I wouldn’t over think this from one employer

It's not just this one employer. It's been months and I've had pretty limited success. This has happened with dozens of employers and after a certain point I have to assume I'm doing something wrong.

okay, that’s pragmatic then, time to do mock interviews

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#104

Post by _swfb »

yieldcrv wrote: post #103
_swfb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just this one employer. It's been months and I've had pretty limited success. This has happened with dozens of employers and after a certain point I have to assume I'm doing something wrong.

okay, that’s pragmatic then, time to do mock interviews

Yep, definitely think that’s a pretty good idea.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#105

Post by AnalLubeInvader »

_swfb wrote: post #62
loa_in_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good reason to not have social media. Thinking if my vent post will upset a future employer on a Saturday afternoon is not the future I want.

I was declined from a job recently specifically because I wrote a blog post about my history with depression and medication for it [1]. That's not me justifying after the fact, they actually told me this. I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name. [1] To be clear, the blog pos…

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#107

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

_swfb wrote: post #85
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has done a lot of interviewing of candidates - being long winded or an otherwise poor communicator is one of the most common reasons to reject someone. It's definitely worth practicing to be concise and clear in your responses (and don't waffle on - something I'm guilty of). Learn when to stop talking too.

It's just tough for me, because I kind of take pride in being accurate and technical questions often have a lot of edge cases and caveats that I feel compelled to point out because I don't want to say inaccurate stuff. But of course that can go onto infinity; at some point you need to summarize and accept you can't be 100% accurate. I guess I need to figure out how to strike a balance between "blathering on" and "han…

You can just refer to the edge cases or caveats (so it's clear you are aware of them) and let the interviewer follow up on them if they want to. This makes the interview a bit more conversational and helps build rapport with the interviewer.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#108

Post by iamflimflam1 »

The job market is pretty tough at the moment and every job will have many qualified candidates applying.

I would not take this failure too much to heart. There will be quite a few other people who applied and also went all the way through the process only to be rejected at the end.

In these circumstances it can be very marginal things that sway the balance in favour or against one candidate.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#109

Post by pyb »

blindriver wrote: post #12

This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view. There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes. Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of th…

There are 300 random candidates but probably only 3 viable candidates.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#110

Post by austin-cheney »

This sounds incredibly autistic. You assume the failure is something about your personality for absolutely no reason. Second, you assume lying about your personality during an interview will get you a job or keep you employed.

I have an autistic child who goes through this. They have absolutely no idea why they could be annoying and just assume they are otherwise awesome.

I am not sure that abysmally low social intelligence due to neurodivergence can be fixed. But, you can improve your capacity for nonverbal listening and ask for feedback.

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