How to Impress In a Job Interview

Do you have an upcoming interview and you want to make the best impression possible? Than you need to learn and master the skills of interview success.

Knowing how to impress in a job interview is crucial in getting a job. You can be a highly competent professional and yet, without knowing how to project this and astonish at interviews, you won’t get the job.
As a communication coach, I’ve noticed that many professionals lack the skills of selling themselves effectively at job interviews. Thus, people who are less competent than they are often get ahead of them, because they know how to communicate and behave in order to impress.

The good news is that there are simple and practical ideas that you can put into practice and get much better results at job interviews. So, I’m going to help you learn how to impress in a job interview, by presenting you these ideas.

1. Be On Time

If you’re late for an interview, you haven’t started with the right foot forward. Sure, you can compensate for that and still make a good impression, but things will go much smoother if you make a good impression from the start.

Ideally, you want to arrive for an interview a few minute earlier, to create the best impression. In order to ensure this, anticipate possible delays and plan ahead for them: rush hour, road restoration work, car problems etc. You never know when things go badly, and it may be right when you’re going to a job interview.

2. Dress for Success

Make no mistake about it: a recruiter will judge you not only based on the content of your CV and the way you present yourself verbally, but also based on the way you present yourself non-verbally. Therefore, how you dress will have some significance and it’s best to pay attention to it.

You want to achieve the kind of look that communicates professionalism and success. You want to transmit that you’re a successful professional when you walk into the room. Make sure you pick a quality business outfit to wear, which is clean, fits you very well and compliments your look.

3. Speak With Confidence

The more confident you appear when you speak, the more you demonstrate that you trust your own competencies and you believe you are the right person for the job. Now, notice that I didn’t say you need to be confident, just that you need to appear confident. And luckily, you can fake this impression to some extent.

The first thing to focus on in order to project confidence is your eye-contact. Look at the interviewer at least 2/3 of the time when you’re talking to them. The second thing is your posture: stand up straight, keep your hands where they can be seen and don’t fidget them. Last but not least, speak in a firm and clear voice.

4. Don’t Share, Prove

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they’re speaking about their professional experience in a job interview is that they simply tell the interviewer what they did, but they don’t really prove anything. You want to focus on proving, not on sharing.

Talk about results, challenges you’ve overcome and things you’ve learned. Show that you did your job well, as convincingly as you can. Overall, you integrity, your nonverbal and your verbal persuasiveness will contribute the most to impressing in a job interview.