Unlike job seekers who land a face-to-face interview all by their lonesome, when a recruiter presents a candidate for consideration to a company and the company wants to interview them, that candidate had better know what they’re doing.
After all, the candidate in question is reflecting upon the recruiter who presented them. If the candidate fares poorly, so does the recruiter—in more ways than one.
The candidate is basically telling the company (whether they realize it or not) what kind of candidates the company can expect the recruiter to present, which will likely determine if the recruiter receives more job orders in the future.
With that in mind, Mashable.com recently published an article by Brie Weiler Reynolds titled, “5 Common Job Interview Mistakes to Avoid.”
In the interest of brevity, those five mistakes are as follows (click the link above to read the entire article, which includes ways to avoid the mistakes):
- Forgetting the interviewer’s name
- Getting lost and arriving late
- Completely blanking on a tough question
- Not offering references
- Not asking questions
What I don’t understand is how these mistakes can be classified as “common.” It seems that anybody who would commit such interview sins isn’t truly interested in receiving an offer of employment. Instead, these blunders are more indicative of a lack of motivation.
Perhaps a better title, at least for a recruiter’s purposes, would be “5 COSTLY Job Interview Mistakes to Avoid.” For candidates represented by recruiters, I don’t know how common these mistakes are . . . but they certainly are costly.
What are your thoughts? Have you had candidates commit any of these blunders during a face-to-face interview with one of your clients?