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Avoid including what you can’t defend in your resume

In the bid to impress your prospective employer, you may include more skills than you have or even exaggerate your skills. And it could earn you an interview, in fact, it could also earn you the job. But what if you need the skills to do the job?

Is it better to not have been hired than being fired for incompetence after a couple of days? It will now become incompetence and integrity issues. You will not only lose the job, you will also jeopardize your chances of working for the company and all its affiliates in future. Integrity issue is usually taken seriously by giant corporations.

To avoid that, just include all that you can defend during your interview. If you really are not qualified for a job, accept it in good fate and keep searching.

Avoid clichés in your resume

It is not the length of your resume that will impress your employer but the information in it. Qualities like “I can work under pressure” and “I am a team player” have been overused so much that if they are no longer being used, they will still bore interviewers 5 years from now.

By default, every candidate can work under pressure and they are team players so don’t make your resume ridiculous by including them.

Keep to the stipulated time

While lateness to an interview is unacceptable, being too early will not impress your interviewer either. Since they won’t have time for you until the stipulated time, why arrive too early? It could even count against you that you can’t follow a simple instruction. Arriving anytime longer than 10 minutes before the scheduled time is not ideal.

However, if you have to leave home early to escape traffic, then you can hang in the nearest eatery or café to the company until when it is just 5 or 10 minutes to the interview time.

Patience matters

When you arrive and have notified them, sit down, be patient and keep observing all you can observe. Sometimes, your interviewer may pretend like they have forgotten about you, just keep calm. They may be testing your patience level. That may be part of the interview process.

Read all the booklets and magazines at your disposal

You may be given a seat where there are several booklets about the company around you. Don’t ignore them. You are expected to read them. Don’t be surprised if the interviewers ask the questions whose answers are in the booklets you ignored.

The truth is that interviews can come in any form. Staffing agencies now adopt out-of-the-box strategies to hire the best candidates so they no longer rely solely on the verbal interviews. Remember, actions speak much louder than words.