In job interview, passion packs a punch

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

If you’re not excited about a job or employer when you dive out of the job-hunting plane and apply for a new position, then you might as well leave your parachute at home.

Richard Nelson Bolles, author of “What Color is Your Parachute?”, maintains that landing a job once you get to the dreaded interview table is all about being enthusiastic and showing that to a prospective employer.

The following is the conclusion of my interview with the author of the best-selling book, still in print more than 30 years after its first edition:

Why is enthusiasm so important during the job interview?

You better be darn well interested in the interviewer and company. It’s deadly when you go to interview at a place, (and) you really don’t care if you get the job there or not.

The key is enthusiasm. Let’s say you’re somebody who is over 50, a baby boomer. What employers are looking for is they want to see energy. That comes from being fascinated by what you’re doing. You can hardly wait to get to work and have at it.

Lean forward in your chair, ask intelligent questions about the place and interview in places where you think you would love the work.

Author Richard Nelson Bolles

Once I hired a temp, I had seven employees at that time, I went up to her halfway through the first week and I said, “How do you like working here?” She said, “It’s a job.” I let her go at the end of the week.

A lot of people just want to coast until retirement. No employer wants to hire that.

If it’s a place that interests you, the rule of thumb is that the employer talks 20 to 50 percent of time and you should talk 50 to 80 percent of time. If you don’t talk, or talk too little, you leave the employer thinking you are trying to hide something. If you talk all the time, you leave the employer feeling you are self-centered and that you are so concerned with what you can get out of it that you don’t even consider the company.

How do you impress the interviewer?

Companies love to be loved. Do your research, and you should be truly interested in the company and job you’re applying to.

Hunting for a job is more like dating than anything else. You have to size up each other.

I insist that the person who is doing the hunting for work need to think of him or herself in a different way.

Normally people think they are job beggars, that the employer has all the power and you are begging for a job. But I have insisted that people think of themselves as resource brokers. They have a resource to offer. Both of them have the right to say, “Yes, I like this,” or “No, I don’t like this.”

The employee is not only at the mercy of the employer. They are at the mercy of each other.

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