Soft Skills in a Hard Interview

‘Ok so this is the start of the formal interview; try to relax, answer the questions as thoroughly as possible, taking time to think if necessary, are you ready to begin…’

How much dread does that relatively cordial and benign sentence strike into you? If you are anything like me, quite a bit...

We all know interviews can be stressful. The mix of new surroundings, new faces, new mannerisms thrown together with answering a multitude of questions on all subjects related and often unrelated to the role you are applying for. I think we would all agree they are not the best forum to showcase your personality, never mind your skills and aptitude. What I intend to outline over the next 12 chapters is how to showcase you and what the interviewer is looking for from you. ‘You’ as the personality, you as the future co-worker, as the human and not the robot answering their questions.

This book will not tell you how to pass the technical aspects of an engineering interview, there are plenty of other brilliant books available to help you study for passing a coding example, a circuit design question or a mechanical model query. This book will help you understand and gain the skills to shine under the interview spotlight when you know the answers to the technical questions but, for some reason, can’t land the dream job. If this is the case, it is almost always down to the soft skills section of your interview. When I say section, I mean the whole thing! Because soft skills are not only evaluated through a series of questions akin to the technical section, they are something that you are marked against from the moment you walk in the door to the moment you leave. It is the toughest part of the interview because it is the entire interview.