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4 Mistakes You Should Avoid During Your Next Interview

The interview is arguably the most pivotal phase of the entire hiring process. After a candidate has been deemed to be a potentially good fit for a role based on his or her resume and cover letter, the interview is the chance for applicant and employer alike to determine if there truly is a match between the candidate’s personality, temperament, and ability, with the unique culture of the workplace that they would be entering into. It’s crucial, therefore, for candidates to know what they should expect during a typical interview, and how they should prepare.   

Knowing what to say, what to wear, and how to compose oneself during an interview is one thing; knowing what not to say and what sort of behaviors to avoid is quite another. In this post, we’ll walk you through four common mistakes that you should be careful to avoid in your next job interview. 

1. Failing to familiarize yourself beforehand with your interview.

In most cases, employers and hiring managers will let you know before your interview who it is that you’ll be speaking with once you arrive at your prospective workplace. By taking the time beforehand to read up on your interviewer’s (or interviewers’) profile(s), you will have a better sense going in of which points of your experience you should be sure to touch upon. It will also give you a chance to see if you have any professional connections with your employer that might provide some common ground. 

2. Asking questions with answers that were provided by the job post.

Before you head into an interview, always be sure to study (and study again) the job post or other resources from which you initially learned about the opening job. No job posting will be fully comprehensive in its description of the role and its responsibilities, but they will usually provide you with answers to the most basic questions. If you ask your interviewer questions with obvious answers, that could convey a message that you’re disorganized or unable to do your homework prior to an important meeting. 

3. Failing to dress appropriately.

A candidate showing up to an interview looking scruffy, disheveled, or inappropriately dressed is sending a message that he or she might be equally careless with their work. Showing up to an interview looking groomed and sharp, on the other hand, sends a clear message that you have respect for the interviewer and that you take your professionalism seriously.

4. Being distracted by your phone.

For many of us, glancing at our phones during a conversation has become such a deeply ingrained habit that we tend to do it almost unconsciously. This may be (more or less) okay during a normal social interaction, but it can greatly harm your chances of success during a job interview. Before you go into an interview, be sure to turn your phone off so that you’ll be fully present and undistracted by incoming messages or calls.

At RightStone, we’re working with IT candidates and top employers to find connections that last. If you’re ready to start looking for an exciting new role in IT, check out our jobs page. 


5 Benefits Video Interviews Can Bring to Your IT Talent Search

The practices and technologies that drive the hiring process are constantly changing. As new communication technologies become commonplace, it’s critical for employers and job seekers alike to be able to quickly integrate them into their search for their next star employee, or for their next role. Video interviews are a prime example of an emergent communication technology that is changing the hiring process across the IT industry. Rather than having candidates come into the office for a face-to-face interview, an increasing number of employers are opting to have their prospective employees submit recorded responses to a set of predetermined questions. In this way, they’re able to cut back on the time, resources, and energy that is usually spent finding the perfect candidate.  

By integrating video interviews into your recruitment and hiring process, you can greatly increase your chances of quickly getting in touch with talented employees. 

Here are five major benefits of conducting video interviews:  

1. Accelerates your hiring process.

Finding time for a prospective employee to come into the office for an interview can be a long and frustrating process. Asking candidates to record and submit their responses to a set of questions, on the other hand, can dramatically cut back on the time that is taken up by introductions, small-talk, and travel by traditional in-person interviews.

2. Enables you to screen more candidates.

Most hiring managers out there will have found themselves in the awkward position of being less than one minute into an interview and realizing that a candidate isn’t a good fit for a particular role. Video interviews allow hiring managers to quickly assess a candidate’s suitability and quickly move on to the next applicant if it’s quickly determined that there isn’t a fit. 

3. Brings consistency to the interview process.

Even when hiring managers go into an interview with a list of questions, in-person conversations can quickly become sidetracked into other topics. All too often, the result is that candidates end up providing responses to different questions. By asking your applicants to record and submit their responses to a consistent set of questions, you’ll be ensuring that you receive equally consistent and comparable responses. 

4. It allows candidates to be more relaxed.

Meeting with an employer in person for an interview can be a stressful experience for a candidate. Even if their experience and skills make them a great fit, having to sit across a table from a hiring manager can make often make a candidate flustered and nervous. Answering questions in front of a webcam, however, is a far less daunting prospect – particularly when applicants are allowed to record multiple takes until they’re satisfied with their responses.  

5. Quickly screens out technologically-impaired candidates.

It’s important for any employer in the IT industry to quickly eliminate candidates who aren’t able to follow basic technological instructions. Recording and submitting responses to a video interview is by no means challenging (to most candidates), but there will be some who will be either too lazy or too perplexed to carry out the task, and they will be left in the wake of other, more competent candidates.

At RightStone, we’re working with IT candidates and top employers to make connections that last. To learn more about how to get connected with top talent, we’re here to help. 

 


Do You Love Your Job? 3 Signs It May Be Time to Move On

It’s easy to know when you love your job. When you’re happy in your current industry, company, and role, you feel excited and energized at the beginning of each day (or at least most days). You’re able to foster mutually rewarding benefits with your coworkers. And at the end of the day, you tend to feel a genuine sense of satisfaction. Arriving at the realization that we don’t love our jobs, on the other hand, is not nearly as straightforward. In many cases, people might continue working at a job that they don’t enjoy for years, simply because it’s able to provide security and stability. In others, employees might continue to put up with toxic work environments or responsibilities that they don’t enjoy because they imagine that there will be some reward awaiting them in the future which will justify all of their present dissatisfaction. 

There are plenty of tech professionals out there who dislike their current role, but who are hesitant to leave, not least because of the competitive nature of their industry. Sometimes, it’s best to deal with the temporary frustrations and stay put. Other times, it’s time to move on and look for something better.  

Here are three reliable signs that it might be time to leave your current job: 

You don’t feel challenged by your work.

In order to feel satisfied, useful, and engaged at work, it’s important for most of us to be challenged by our roles and responsibilities. Not too much, but enough that we genuinely feel that we’re growing personally, professionally, and intellectually. If you feel that you barely have to put in any real effort in order to be successful at your current job, that’s a reliable sign that your time and energy would be better spent somewhere new.

You often feel sick, tired, or stressed.

There’s a certain amount of stress that will come with the territory of any job. Consistent stress, on the other hand – whether it’s the result of your workload, work environment, boss, or all of the above – can have seriously negative consequences on your physical and mental health. If you start noticing that you’re regularly achy, tired, anxious, or maybe just not always the most pleasant person to engage in conversation, it’s probably not just you – it could be the demands of your current job. 

Employees at your company tend to not stick around for very long.

If you feel satisfied (or maybe you just feel neutral) at your current job, but you start to notice that new faces around the office seem to rapidly come and go, be careful. That’s a reliable sign that there may be some unresolved or unspoken problems at the workplace, and also that there are better places to work that are out there. 

If you’re ready to begin looking for your next role in the IT industry, check out our jobs page. 


How to Improve the Candidate Experience During Your Next Hiring Campaign

For job candidates, the search for a new role can often be a frustratingly slow and tedious process. Unresponsive prospective employers, long and arduous email threads, automated email responses; all of these are factors which job candidates encounter all too often in the job search and which can quickly disenchant them from a particular role. A smooth, efficient, and rapid recruiting process, on the other hand, is sure to make a positive impression on job candidates and will maximize an employer’s chances of receiving an application.  

It can be challenging, however, for employers to identify the specific aspects of their current recruitment and hiring models that are in need of improvement. With this in mind, this post will walk you through four simple ways to improve the candidate experience in your next hiring campaign. 

Write a clear and up-to-date job description.

It’s not uncommon for job candidates to apply or even to interview for a role, only to discover down the line that the skills and responsibilities required by that position do not, in fact, match with their own experience. In many of those cases, a considerable amount of time and resources could have been saved if the employer had taken the time at the early stages of the process to write a comprehensive job description. 

Set expectations early on about your recruitment process.

In the search for a new role, time is of the essence. It’s important, therefore, for candidates to understand early on what they should expect in terms of timeline and communication. Every company will have a slightly different recruitment process; clarifying the details of yours to a prospective employee will make it much less likely that they’ll become frustrated and disappear.  

Keep the ball rolling with communication.

This one is crucial. Recent research has demonstrated that a lack of communication on the part of employers is the number one most frustrating part of a candidate’s job search. It stands to reason, then, that devising a strategy aimed at consistent and helpful communication is perhaps the most effective thing that any employer could do to improve a candidate’s recruitment experience. 

Go the extra mile when conducting interviews.

The interview is arguably the most critical point of the recruitment process. It is the first opportunity for candidates to meet with their prospective managers and colleagues in person and to get a glimpse of their potential future workplace. In order to ensure that it’s a positive experience for candidates, it’s important for employers to prepare appropriately. This goes beyond merely preparing the appropriate questions (although that’s important, too); proper interview preparation also means gathering the right people into the room, respecting a candidate’s time, and (as we mentioned earlier) being clear about what they should expect for next steps. 

At RightStone, we’re working with IT candidates and top employers to make connections that last. To learn more about how to get connected with top talent, we’re here to help.