First impressions

I recently had a learning experience interviewing people for a job. It was my first experience with something like that and what a learning experience it was to sit on the other side of the table and look at the situation from a completely different perspective. I thought that I would try to summarize some key things to keep in mind if and when I'm on the "regular" side of the table again in the future...

1) First impression matters. Exclamation mark. Seriously, it's a cliche, but I would say that judging by my experience it held very much true. The impression that I got from the first few minutes would typically hold true for the entire course of the interview. So try to get that right.

2) Be prepared and have your papers in order. Due to various reasons I didn't have the possibility to get very much acquainted with the CVs in advance, so it would be beneficial to bring a complete set of all relevant documents to the interview. If you intend to show something, be prepared in advance; asking the interviewer to lend you a laptop for showing something from online is somewhat awkward.

3) Answer the questions. It was quite surprising to me to run across some cases where people wouldn't answer the question they were asked. They would instead circle around the question. If you don't know the answer, the next best thing from my view would be to admit it. If you may have some clue, you could open up your thinking by explaining out loud, but in this case it should be clear where you're going with your answer. As a spin off of this, know what you know and more importantly know what you don't know. Trying to bluff the interviewer is hazardous: it is very much possible that the interviewer will know more than you and if you get caught bluffing, that is not good.

4) Open questions are a lot more fun for the interviewer. If, however, the interviewer starts asking simple and direct, closed questions, this may potentially be a bad sign. In my case once I didn't get satisfactory answers for open questions and I needed to just see if the interviewee knew anything of the subject, I would narrow my questions and form them more like exam questions and ditch the discussion or dialogue approach.

5) Be active. If the interviewer needs to drag out all the bits and details from you, it reflects somewhat badly on the perception that people are getting from you: are you really the go-getter type of person? Ask questions, show interest.

I guess there were also other things I noticed, but these were some of the top things that came to my mind. Now that I've written them down on paper, most of them seem like common sense. And I guess they are precisely that.