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

I just got declined for a job and it has gotten under my skin much more than it should.

(Under the advisement of my lawyer (ChatGPT) I won't say the company's name).

It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.

The only thing I can think of is that they just didn't like my personality during the interviews, which is honestly the most frustrating. If I had messed up the technical portion then that would be a goal to work towards by learning more technical stuff, but I'm not 100% sure what about my personality is screwing up these interviews, and even less sure on how I'm supposed to change anything about it.

It's hard to stay motivated but I guess I don't have much of a choice since I still need to pay my mortgage, so I was curious if anyone here had any advice on how to best tune my personality to do better in interviews? Preferably I'd prefer to stay honest (if for no other reason than I'm a pretty terrible liar).

You have no idea what you even did wrong. What you need to do is call up your friends and have them mock interview you, there's even free platforms and exchanges where you can do that. Get some actual feedback, don't act on wild conjectures.

Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.

The rejection might also be random and out of your control. E.g. if they already filled the position or the higher-ups decided to save costs by taking back open headcount. Frustrating for sure, but not actionable.

From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.

At its core is better "selling skills" In my last job I noticed how much better people that did jobs like waitressing before were more likeable by Clients. Small things like saying at the end "John thanks for your time..." Put the name first, people like that. But in the end you might have done well and failed you on salary requirements...

> don't act on wild conjectures.

The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.

Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.

A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".

Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.