The most important skill-set required for clearing an interview is CONFIDENCE! First you should believe in yourself before you can sell your skills to others!

Prepare yourself for the interview:

* Try to collect as much details as possible about the job you are interviewed for.

Instead of waiting to hear from the interviewer on the D-day about the job details, try to collect more details on your own from your friends or directly from the HR who contacted you about the interview.

This will help you to present yourself in a much better way.

For example say you are a Java professional. You are looking for a job shift and have applied for many jobs in a job portal that had the keyword “Java”. Ofcourse that’s what most of us do, so don’t feel bad!

Now you have got an email from a reputed company for a scheduled interview for the post “Java Software Engineer”.

This jargon means different things for different people. It can be a pure core Java role or it can be for advanced J2EE role.

If you can’t remember the job profile that you applied for, you can always contact the company’s HR and collect more details about the job.

You can also find more details from your friends or use your connections in social networks like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to understand what a “Java Software Engineer” is expected to do in that specific company.

But remember this might not get you the correct details. It’s possible that this generic role has different responsibilities in different projects and / or departments.

* Try to put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer.

Trust me, interviewing is a tiresome and costly process. None of the interviewers want to elongate the exercise. They want to select the best candidate as soon as possible.

Try to put yourself in the interviewer’s place and list down the key skills that he will expect from the candidate.

Plan and prepare to present yourself in a way to impress him.

For example, let us say that you are all set to attend an interview for a Sales man role. First list down the important skills of a sales man

1.  Good communication skills

2. Networking skills

3. Customer acquisition, engagement and satisfaction

4. Achieving results

And above all marketing skills!

So you need to present yourself in such a way that the interviewer will believe that you have all the required skills.

* Keep yourself prepared for commonly asked questions.

Keep answers handy for common questions like introduce yourself, why are you looking for a job change? Etc.

I will meet you again in couple of weeks with more tips!

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