Job interviews can be stressful. You can prepare all you want and guess what you think they might ask you, but they always seem to ask you something you didn’t think of. We want you to nail your next interview and land that dream job, so we’re going to offer you a few tips. These are seven secret tricks that employers use in job interviews to see if you’re fit for the job.
7 Tricks Employers Use To Test You During Job Interviews
Wouldn’t it be nice if job interviews were always just perfectly straightforward? No guessing, no out-there questions, just simply regular inquiries about your past experience and what you will bring to this new job. Unfortunately, job interviews are about as straightforward as people are. Employers aren’t just trying to see if you are qualified for the position, they’re also trying to see if you will gel with the team and have similar values. They’re not just trying to learn what you can do, they’re trying to figure out who you are.
For this reason, they often use some pretty clever little tricks to figure that out. Many of these tricks you won’t even think about or notice. Thankfully, we’ve caught on and are here to give you the inside track. Keep these in mind the next time you head in for an interview and you’ll be sure to knock it out of the park.
1. The Coffee Trick
Have you ever been in a job interview and they’ve offered you a beverage – coffee, tea, juice, soda, or water? While yes, they are trying to be polite, but there may be another reason behind it. They are waiting to see what you will do with the cup at the end of the interview.
Will you ask them what you should do with the used cup or where it should go? Will you take it directly to the kitchen, wash it, and put it away without being prompted? Or, will you simply leave it there for someone else to take care of? The managing director of Xero Australia Trent Innes spoke openly about how and why he uses this tactic. He says it’s all about hiring people with the same values, and that starts from small things such as keeping the kitchen clean.
“We really want to make sure we have people that have a sense of ownership,” he explained. “Culture comes from the ground up.”
2. The Waiting Game
The waiting game – or purposely making you wait past your scheduled interview time to start – is a stress interview tactic. Stress interviews are ones in which employers put recruits in purposely stressful situations to see how they will react. They want to see how you react to stress and how you think on your feet.
Employers know that you are likely to be at least a little bit nervous heading into your interview. For this reason, keeping you waiting for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or more allows them to test you. This is a situation in which you have no control and is controlled by someone superior to you. How will you react? When you finally get to the interview stage, will you be calm and collected? Or, will you be flustered, stressed, or even appear a bit annoyed? How you handle this situation will tell your potential future employer about you.
3. Aggressive Behavior
This is usually in the form of aggressive questioning, but can also be in the way the interviewer asks you the question. Raising their voice while asking tough questions like “why were you fired from your last job?” or “what makes you think you are qualified for this job?” can be off-putting. If you’re feeling uncomfortable, then it is working.
This style of questioning is meant to make you feel that way. They want to see if you can stay calm and think clearly in situations where someone is angry or is asking tough questions on the job. If you can handle it in the interview, you can likely handle it in real life, too.
