Is It that you can think of to arrange an excessive amount of For An Interview?

where is the line between being neatly-prepared and sounding rehearsed?

November 12, 2015

we’ve coated various ways you must prepare for interviews and learn how to steer clear of making fashionable interview errors. but is it imaginable to be too prepared for an interview?

career skilled Alison green (aka Ask A manager) advises a job seeker that might be coming off as rehearsed as a substitute of genuine.

a few months in the past, I attended an interview and was once stopped halfway via the HR person to ask how I had prepared for the interview. I was once stunned, as I was once in the middle of answering a query, and that i answered that I had practiced loads with friends and colleagues.

The HR person mentioned, “Hmm ok.” I requested if there used to be any downside, and she stated that my answers had been a little bit too perfect and i was once too fluent in my answers. Naturally, this flustered me a bit of.

Is there this sort of factor as working towards an excessive amount of? Or was once she out of line? I had tailor-made my solutions to be able to resolution any query and to give particular examples of eventualities. Now i’ve some other interview at the same organization, for any other place, and i’m apprehensive. I all the time idea as an interviewee you will have to be prepared and organized. however it sounds as if there’s such a thing as too much? where is the high-quality line?


yes, there’s this kind of thing as overpreparing, if it will get you to the purpose that you’re sounding rehearsed.

making ready is normally an excellent thing. It means that you’ll have notion through how your historical past and expertise traces up with the needs of the job, it means that you’ll have come up with examples from your earlier that display the important thing traits they’re in search of, and it approach you’ll have thought out answers to difficult topics that would possibly come up (like income, or why you left that job you were fired from, or why you wish to have to alter fields, or so forth). It also signifies that you’ll have thought conscientiously about what you wish to have to search out out about the job, so that you’re able to do the information gathering that’s a part of your role in the interview.

alternatively, you certainly don’t need to sound rehearsed in an interview; you wish to have to sound like you’re having an actual dialog with the interviewer. That implies that it’s bad in case your answers sound stiff, or memorized, or like you’re studying them off a paper on your head.

making ready shouldn’t be about memorization. It must be concerning the prethinking that I described above, so that you just’re now not taking into consideration the interviewer’s questions for the very first time when you hear them in the interview room. the theory is that by the time you’re within the interview, you’ve already completed deep pondering on your fit for the function, and people thoughts are slightly easily retrievable and able to be changed into solutions.

but I have no idea in case you had been coming across as handing over memorized, overly rehearsed answers or no longer. And there’s a threat in placing too much weight on a single individual’s remarks to you, as a result of it’s possible that she was once off-base. “Fluent answers,” as your interviewer put it, aren’t a foul thing. We don’t comprehend if she actually supposed, “These answers are too excellent!” (which might be foolish) or if she supposed, “You sound such as you’re reciting this reasonably than actually having an actual conversation with me.”

She unquestionably wouldn’t be the first interviewer to ship silly comments that you simply shouldn’t act on. but then, you also wouldn’t be the first candidate to ship rehearsed-sounding answers. So I’d just take it as a flag for you to believe whether or not you feel rehearsed whilst you interview, and to work on counteracting that if you happen to do.


this text firstly regarded on Ask A manager and is reprinted with permission.

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