As a part of my practice I often coach clients on improving their interviewing skills. Sometimes clients on the throes of a job interview call me asking to help them practice their interviewing skills. The other need clients have is when they come to me after several of their interviews do not result in a job offer. Their complaint is, often, that despite answering all the questions that were posed to them throughout the many encounters they had with different interviewers that they did not get to the next step or get the offer they thought that they were sure to get.
Why does this happen so often? The part that further frustrates many applicants is that they do not get any meaningful feedback from people in the know to help them improve their chances in the future. For legal and other reasons companies, as a policy, do not provide any interview feedback as a routine course.
There are three factors that come into play during job interviews: Chemistry (Ethos), Compatibility (Pathos), and Competency (Logos). In the interview vernacular they have come to be known as the three Cs.
Of these, Chemistry is something people decide on quickly and during the initial interview exchanges. Ethos is a Greek word that means Im like you; the character of an individual as represented by their values, beliefs, and attitudes.
Compatibility refers to the interviewers assessment of the candidates ability to fit into the culture of the team and to perform syncratically, despite the differences that exist individually. The Greek word for this is Pathos, which means I understand your pain (pathology) and I am here to alleviate it.
Competency is the final and the third leg of this stool, which has to do with your skills that will allow you to add value to the team. The Greek word is Logos, which speaks to your creative spirit, ideas, and rationality.
Although each of the three Cs is important and provides its own component to the successful outcome of an interview it is sometimes difficult to analyze what other factors come into play that elude many candidates that do not clear their job interviews.
The purpose of this blog is to bring into sharper focus just one aspect of a candidates behavior that can scuttle an interview. In this blog I would like to focus on how you may come across to the interviewer and defeat yourself, without having a clue why that happened:
One of the most obvious reasons you may offend an interviewer is by your scent. By this I mean what you deliberately wear to smell good using a perfume or a fragrance you choose to wear. The problem with using a synthetic fragrance is that you cannot smell it yourself. Many people are allergic to certain fragrances, besides their personal like or dislike to them. So, the best approach is to avoid wearing any perfume or fragrances to an interview.
If you have a smell that you are trying to mask, find the source and figure out how to deal with it. For example, if you suffer from bad breath, put a Tick Tack in your mouth before entering the interview room. If you fear your body odor will get in the way, learn how to deal with it without wearing a strong perfume to mask that odor. If you are not sure you have this problem, ask your roommate, spouse, or a partner to sniff you out.
Some people wear such strong perfumes that their smell enters a room before they do. Recently, I had a client, who came to do interview practice. I realized that the client had arrived as they entered the waiting area outside my office, just by the strong fragrance that permeated the entire space. Despite the difficult task of telling how this was coming across I was able to tell the client to deal with this before they went off on their next interview.
Wearing a perfume or a fragrance, both for men and women, is like going to a job interview wearing a campaign button. You do not know the interviewers views on the candidate, whose campaign button you may be wearing. So, the best approach is to not wear something that can get in the way of your success.
Good luck!
| About Author | |
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Dilip has distinguished himself as LinkedIn’s #1 career coach from among a global pool of over 1,000 peers ever since LinkedIn started ranking them professionally (LinkedIn selected 23 categories of professionals for this ranking and published this ranking from 2006 until 2012). Having worked with over 6,000 clients from all walks of professions and having worked with nearly the entire spectrum of age groups—from high-school graduates about to enter college to those in their 70s, not knowing what to do with their retirement—Dilip has developed a unique approach to bringing meaning to their professional and personal lives. Dilip’s professional success lies in his ability to codify what he has learned in his own varied life (he has changed careers four times and is currently in his fifth) and from those of his clients, and to apply the essence of that learning to each coaching situation. After getting his B.Tech. (Honors) from IIT-Bombay and Master’s in electrical engineering(MSEE) from Stanford University, Dilip worked at various organizations, starting as an individual contributor and then progressing to head an engineering organization of a division of a high-tech company, with $2B in sales, in California’s Silicon Valley. His current interest in coaching resulted from his career experiences spanning nearly four decades, at four very diverse organizations–and industries, including a major conglomerate in India, and from what it takes to re-invent oneself time and again, especially after a lay-off and with constraints that are beyond your control. During the 45-plus years since his graduation, Dilip has reinvented himself time and again to explore new career horizons. When he left the corporate world, as head of engineering of a technology company, he started his own technology consulting business, helping high-tech and biotech companies streamline their product development processes. Dilip’s third career was working as a marketing consultant helping Fortune-500 companies dramatically improve their sales, based on a novel concept. It is during this work that Dilip realized that the greatest challenge most corporations face is available leadership resources and effectiveness; too many followers looking up to rudderless leadership. Dilip then decided to work with corporations helping them understand the leadership process and how to increase leadership effectiveness at every level. Soon afterwards, when the job-market tanked in Silicon Valley in 2001, Dilip changed his career track yet again and decided to work initially with many high-tech refugees, who wanted expert guidance in their reinvention and reemployment. Quickly, Dilip expanded his practice to help professionals from all walks of life. Now in his fifth career, Dilip works with professionals in the Silicon Valley and around the world helping with reinvention to get their dream jobs or vocations. As a career counselor and life coach, Dilip’s focus has been career transitions for professionals at all levels and engaging them in a purposeful pursuit. Working with them, he has developed many groundbreaking approaches to career transition that are now published in five books, his weekly blogs, and hundreds of articles. He has worked with those looking for a change in their careers–re-invention–and jobs at levels ranging from CEOs to hospital orderlies. He has developed numerous seminars and workshops to complement his individual coaching for helping others with making career and life transitions. Dilip’s central theme in his practice is to help clients discover their latent genius and then build a value proposition around it to articulate a strong verbal brand. Throughout this journey, Dilip has come up with many groundbreaking practices such as an Inductive Résumé and the Genius Extraction Tool. Dilip owns two patents, has two publications in the Harvard Business Review and has led a CEO roundtable for Chief Executive on Customer Loyalty. Both Amazon and B&N list numerous reviews on his five books. Dilip is also listed in Who’s Who, has appeared several times on CNN Headline News/Comcast Local Edition, as well as in the San Francisco Chronicle in its career columns. Dilip is a contributing writer to several publications. Dilip is a sought-after speaker at public and private forums on jobs, careers, leadership challenges, and how to be an effective leader. |
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