How to Stay Graceful in a Stress Interview

Most commonly used in investment banking, stress interviewing is the deliberate creation of an uncomfortable situation in order to test how the candidate reacts to pressure.The ethics of this kind of interviewing are questionable, and it is far from certain that the stress created is similar to what would occur on the job. However, it's also true that one person's stress situation is another person's fair, if tough, question.


Common Examples of Stress-Creating Techniques

The interviewer doesn't say anything for the first five or ten minutes of the interview.
The interviewer is reading the paper when the candidate comes into the room.
The interviewer asks a tough question right off the bat, without even introducing himself.
The interviewer challenges your answer by disagreeing with you.
The interviewer pauses for a long time after listening to your response.
The interviewer ridicules your background.
The interviewer takes you into a department meeting with no introduction.
The interviewer is deliberately very late, then keeps looking at his or her watch.
The interviewer pretends to fall asleep.


How to Handle Such a Situation—if You Still Want the Job
If the interviewer ignores you when you walk in the room, just dive in with something like, "I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce myself and tell you why I think I'm the right person for this job." After a long pause, you might say, "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear." Then explain your previous response.

If the manager ridicules your background, you could say, "Perhaps you expected different qualifications, but these have served me well so far and I intend to continue to build on them."

If the manager thrusts you into a department meeting without an introduction, just introduce yourself and ask the other people for their names, then explain that you are happy to meet them and learn more about the department.

If the interviewer pretends to fall asleep, write a note saying, "I enjoyed meeting you," put it in front of the interviewer, and rise to leave. Chances are, you'll get the interviewer's full attention.

The important thing, if you're unfortunate enough to encounter this form of interviewing, is to keep your cool, maintain your dignity, and find a way to use the situation to your advantage.


How to Handle Psychological Interviews

It's Just a "Fit" Test
In responsible hands, the purpose of a psychological interview is to determine whether you are one of the 90 percent of people who are honest and try to do their work well—or if you're someone who might terrorize the office, steal from your employer, or file fraudulent legal claims. A secondary goal, if you are in the 90 percent majority, might be to identify what type of assignment and management style to you would respond to best.

Most of the questions are likely to focus on your aspirations and your family background, with an effort to find a linkage between the two. Others may deal with topics such as what provides you the greatest satisfaction, what you would like to avoid, and past experiences that you enjoyed or didn't enjoy.

Relax and Tell the Truth
The most important thing to remember if you are to be interviewed by a professional psychologist is to be yourself (you don't want to look like you have something to hide). The second most important thing is not to overly dramatize your family background. If you have 14 siblings, just say you grew up in a large family, unless you're probed further. If you had an abusive parent, focus on the other parent. Don't give the psychologist a lot to feed on in terms of difficulties in your relationships with your family.

Work Questions Get Work Answers
In responding to work-related questions, use the types of answers recommended for other forms of interviewing. You want to be as proud and confident as you are in your other interviews. And avoid deception, inconsistencies, nervousness, or anxiety in your answers. You don't want to be one of the ten percent labeled untrustworthy.

In the Case of Weird Questions
Unfortunately, a few unqualified interviewers may try to play the psychologist role, coming up with such oddball questions as "If you were a tree, what kind would it be?" or "Picture yourself as a championship athlete. What sport and what position would you play?"Give a boring but unchallengeable response. To the first question, oak (stable), maple (well liked), and redwood (long lasting) are great answers. To the second, basketball, tennis, baseball, and golf are fine. Running marathons is a bit iconoclastic, and rugby or ice hockey might suggest latent aggressiveness.


Prepare for Your Behavioral Interview

Companies have increasingly adopted behavioral interviewing techniques as a key technique in screening candidates.

What is a behavioral interview?
Basically, it's an interview designed to elicit information that will tell the interviewer how you will perform on the job. The principle behind the technique is the belief that the best indicator of future behavior is past behavior. The technique involves asking a series of questions designed to get the candidate to talk about how he or she handled certain situations in the past.

Stressful situation
For example, if a company has a high-stress environment, the interviewer might ask a candidate to talk about whether she has ever been in a stressful situation in the past.

If she says yes, the interviewer would proceed with a line of questions about what she had done in the situation, how it made her feel, how others had responded to her actions, how she relieved the stress of the situation, and so on.

Typically, the interviewer will have determined three or four behavioral characteristics that would be most important for on-the-job success and will have written out a definition of each such characteristic.

Examples:
Good listening: The ability to listen empathetically to a client's problems, asking appropriate questions and paraphrasing the responses.
Written communication: The ability to capture, in a succinct manner, the most important issues to be resolved, the recommended action plan, and the desired outcomes.
Project management: Taking responsibility for organizing tasks, reaching agreement on individual responsibilities and goals, monitoring progress, resolving problems, and reporting on status.

In a behavioral interview, you will be provided with such definitions of desirable characteristics and asked for examples of situations in which you have exhibited those characteristics. Sometimes, after you have provided one example, you will be asked for another, just to test the depth of your experience.

One of the supposed benefits of this technique for employers is that candidates cannot prepare for these questions in advance. However, you can help yourself by anticipating the types of questions you might receive and dredging your memory for examples of past behavior. You may be able to guess at some of the questions by analyzing the job requirements beforehand.

Behavioral interviewing is a challenge, but preparation will help. You may feel that you didn't have perfect answers to each question, yet still be seen as much better suited than the other candidates who didn't anticipate behavioral questions.As one swimmer said to the other upon sighting a shark: "Fortunately, I don't have to swim faster than the shark. I only have to swim faster than you."