How to Reduce the Effects of Problems With Your Employment Part 2

In the last post, we discussed the reasons that you may not want to hide the parts of your history that may not reflect that highly on your candidacy. Here, we’ll look at one possible solution for reducing the effects of your “flaws.”

Bring the Flaw Up in the Beginning

Flaws are irrelevant if their impact is minimized. One possible solution for minimizing your weaknesses is to bring it up in the beginning of the interview, before the interview gets underway.

The interviewer has somewhere between 1 and 4 hours scheduled for your job interview. They expect to take all 1-4 hours to decide if you are right for the job. They are going to try their best to learn as much as they can about you during that period of time.

So if they hear you have a weakness up front, and you follow that weakness up with 4 hours of excellent interviewing, then the effect of that flaw is drastically minimized. The long interview makes the flaw seem much less relevant.

Consider the opposite. You have a long, great interview. The interviewer thinks they have the right person for the job. They think you are perfect. Then suddenly, at the end of the interview, they find out that you do not know how to do a very important part of the job. Boom. Their happiness falls. Suddenly you are not perfect, and they notice the huge drop in potential. Then the interview ends, and the last part of the interview leaves a foul taste in their mouth about the candidacy.

The first situation is much better than the second. In the first situation, you tell the person up front that something is wrong. They know that it’s wrong, it’s out in the open, and you spend the rest of the interview proving that you are still an excellent applicant. On the opposite side, you seemed like a great candidate, but then BOOM, a serious flaw.

Bringing it Up

If you are fairly certain your weakness is going to be discovered, bring it up in the beginning. Let’s say you lied on your resume, and you know you are going to be caught. Then rather than wait until they figured it out, say the following:

“Before we begin, I just wanted to let you know that there was an error on my resume. I never worked with NetSuite Small Business or Cougar Mountain software like I had originally listed on my resume. Those were lines I had kept in a first draft of an ideal resume I was crafting and sent over the wrong copy to your organization. I apologize for my error, but I will teach myself the software before I start if I am selected for the role.”

Then the rest of the interview you can do your best to prove that you are still a great candidate, and minimize the effect of the weakness on your candidacy.

When you know the weakness will come up in the job interview, and you know it will affect your interview chances, consider bringing it up in the beginning. The earlier you bring it up, the longer time you have to help the interviewer forget it.

Take Away Interview Tips

• Minimize your flaws.

How to Reduce the Effects of Problems With Your Employment Part 1

Job interviews often seem like a delicate dance that requires you to make yourself look like the perfect person for the position while avoiding any potential flaws. You have benefits and you have weaknesses, but ideally the company only learns about the benefits, because the weaknesses may prevent you from getting the job.

However, avoiding potential negative points is very difficult. Interviewers are not stupid. They will look for negatives, because they want to know what you don’t bring to the table. Examples of weaknesses that could be a problem are:

• Poor skill level in a particular area.
• Inexperience with a program or in the field.
• Termination due to a particular event, like insubordination.
• You have extensive gaps in your work history.
• You have spent time in prison.

These are some serious issues to the employer. There is a temptation to not bring them up at the interview and hope that they do not affect employment.

Should You Hide Your Flaws?

It’s a strong temptation. If you hide your flaws they may not come up, but if you share your flaws, you might not get the job. That is the logic, correct?

Yet really, how easy is it to hide these flaws? If you are asked how to use a program, chances are your weakness will be apparent. When you fill out paperwork on your criminal history, you have to put it down. Most flaws come out somehow, and when they do, you can drastically alter your job chances. Especially if they come up at the end of the interview, or during a critical part of the interview.

Hiding your flaws may not be a good idea. A better idea is to minimize them. In the next post, we will look at possible ways to minimize your flaws during the interview.

Take Away Interview Tips

• Hiding flaws may not always be possible.