Hello and welcome to the Job Hunting Podcast. Are you new here? Because if you are, please press the subscribe button. I think this podcast is for you. We have almost 300 episodes for you to binge on. My name is Renata Bernadi. I am the host. I’m also a career coach. And if you’re tuning in today, chances are you saw the title and you thought I have recently walked out of an interview.
feeling like something didn’t go quite right. I’ve been there too. In fact, I once got a job, even though I failed at the job interview. I can tell you that story today. Maybe you stumbled over your questions. Maybe the connection wasn’t there. Either the face to face, people to people connection, or maybe it was the Zoom connection or the Teams connection. Something went wrong with your presentation.
Or perhaps the energy in the room just felt off. How many times I’ve been interviewed by people that never looked me in the eye and that can be so disconcerting. So this episode is definitely for you if you’ve been in one of those situations. But if you haven’t, please keep listening because you might find yourself in one of those situations in the future as well. I also do episodes for professionals that are
usually over with a lot of experience under their belts. But if you’re younger, you know, it will be you in the future who have the self-awareness, who knows when something didn’t land quite well. You have that intuition because of your years of experience. But you are unsure how to recover from the situation, how to learn and how to move forward.
Sometimes when interviews go bad, we just want to forget about it and never think about it again. And we end up not learning what we could improve for the next time. So whether you are in between roles or you’re actively trying to secure your next position, be it an executive role, a middle management role, an expert position, a team’s manager position, we’re going to unpack why interviews go badly from time to time, a lot of the time sometimes.
and how to bounce back and how to use that misstep as a catalyst for improvement. Let’s keep going.
Okay, so why? Why interviews go off track when you know so much about your career and you know that you can do this job and you’ve practiced and you’ve done everything that you thought could possibly be done to get yourself ready? Let’s start with something we don’t say enough. Even senior professionals, people that are highly experienced and know their stuff, even them, they have bad interviews. I’ve interviewed them.
I’ve been one of them. I know it happens all the time and it doesn’t always mean you are not the right person for the job. There are so many things that can happen as you’re getting ready for an interview that makes it just a little bit harder that day. Maybe you woke up with a cold, maybe you woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
things just didn’t feel quite right. Here are some of the reasons why interviews go sideways. They’re not all of the reasons, but let’s, you know, we can’t have an episode that goes on and on forever. One of them that I think is actually the most common is you were off form. You were not up to it yet. You know, sometimes we lose our jobs or we want another job even if we want
We have one and we go for the interview, but you’re just not prepared to talk about yourself that much. You haven’t done it in a long time. It could also be that the off form comes from a bad night’s sleep. And that is probably why inside my resources, the optimized job search schedule sleep is like the most important thing that you should do as a job seeker. It is so hard.
to perform under pressure, to be creative and innovative in the way that you’re answering questions that are being thrown at you when you’re tired, when you didn’t sleep well. Or the nerves get better of you, you know, when you haven’t been interviewed in a while or when you’ve been interviewed time and time again and you just got into a sort of ⁓ self doubt situation.
you are going to spin out, you know, and not have the self control to keep yourself sharp and crisp and clear in your answers. And I think that nerve and sleep are two things that are really correlated. If you sleep better, not just the night before of the interview, but if you sleep better consistently over time as a job seeker, you will really benefit when you are cold.
out of the blue by a recruiter. When you are booked an interview the next day and you don’t have time to prepare, sleeping is the most important thing. And if you don’t want to be off form, then sleep is your best friend. And over time, as you do more and more interviews, I want you to think about the nervous system as you getting better and better at something that is uncomfortable rather than
worse than worse at something that you don’t like. Right? Those are two different mindsets and you need one is a better mindset for job seekers than the other, of course.
Then the second reason why I think many of my clients and people that book consultations with me struggle with interviews is the fit between you and the job was never quite right. Okay? Sometimes we get desperate or we just want to make sure that we do all we can and we apply for a lot of jobs and we go for an interview for a job that we really didn’t connect with in the first place. I just saw
a client ⁓ now, know, a client that’s working with me on a retainer and she emailed me, should I continue with this? I just read the job description. I don’t feel like it’s quite right for me. And then we workshopped what to do next. But sometimes you don’t see it clearly until you have the job description or until you are in the interview room. Right. I want to remind you that interviews go
They go both ways. It’s them interviewing you, but it’s you getting to know the organization. So follow the breadcrumbs. Follow what’s been given to you. If you’re having a bad experience as a job seeker with an organization, guess what? Chances are it’s not going to be an easy onboarding and it’s not going to be an easy organization to work for.
Right? So there are lots of red flags and green flags that job seekers can identify if they’re smart enough and intuitive enough to identify during the recruitment and selection process. So be mindful of that. And it’s okay to go for an interview, see a complete disconnect of culture, values, job descriptions, and then let them know, look, following the interview, I did not feel like I’m…
the right candidate to pursue this role. I wish you all the best of luck, but I’m going to pull out of the race. And that’s very common. It’s more common than you think. And I think it should be even more common, to be honest. I want candidates to have more control of the recruitment and selection process. Right now, as you probably know, if you’ve been in the job market, ⁓ employers have so much control, right? So…
think about it and pull out if you don’t see that it’s the right fit for you. Then let’s go back to you identifying what’s going wrong with the interview. The third thing I wanted to discuss with you is the interviewer didn’t ask the right questions. Now, that’s the thing. We sometimes think that we are so unprepared and we need to, you know, prepare for the interview questions and
And then we go to the interview and it’s completely bonkers. Have you been to those interviews where you go there and it’s just them doing the talking? They don’t even ask you questions or they ask you wacky questions that are completely borderline, not legal. I know I have clients all over the world, so I get the most bizarre situations. But even here in Australia where everything is so regulated from time to time.
People just go completely off script, right? They don’t ask you questions. They don’t understand what their job is. They haven’t been trained properly to do interviews. So poor interviewing can really derail you as a candidate because here you are, you’re prepared. You’re there to answer the questions and where are the questions? They’re not coming, right? And you don’t know what to do with all of the information that they’re sharing with you. And it doesn’t seem like an interview and you get confused.
The other thing that I see happening is the role was misinterpreted. They may realize halfway through that they actually need someone completely different. And that can be really frustrating for candidates. But if you think about it from an employer’s perspective, that is actually quite common. If a company is going through growth and as an executive myself, that’s usually what I used to do.
I used to get something that was a project and grow it as a fully fledged ⁓ organization, foundation, strategy. And you’re sort of making forecasts and trying to identify how to best grow. But until you reach the job market and you start talking to people, all you have is theory. All of a sudden you’re talking to candidates and things start to become
clearer and then you might change your mind and that can be so frustrating and I get it. But I think if you don’t take this personally and you understand that this is a normal process for businesses, you can then say, all right, even though you are looking for somebody different, is there still a way of me plugging in into a contract, for example? There are situations where you can identify those.
opportunities to step in on an entering basis, a contract basis. So think about that and be open for those opportunities. Then ⁓ the other thing I wanted to say is you go for an interview and this is so sad, but you go for an interview and they have already made up their minds. Think about how interviews are booked when
a recruiter or an HR in-house talent acquisition professional identifies, let’s say, four five people for the selection panel to interview or for the employer to interview. They will book those interviews. Maybe they book them all in one day. Sometimes, most times, that doesn’t work quite well. They do it over a week, let’s say, or even longer. And then they interview somebody that they really, really clicked with.
right? So if it’s the first or the second candidate, the third, the fourth, the fifth candidate are in a disadvantage and that happens, okay? So I think there’s nothing they can do. They still need to go through the process of talking to everybody, but they have already made up their minds. I have been in that situation more than once, but definitely one that sticks out to me is when
I could tell nobody was looking me in the eye. And then later on, when the recruiter was able to share with me that I wasn’t successful and that they had chosen somebody else, I mentioned to him that I felt that in the room. they said, you know, I’m so sorry. The candidate that they saw before you ⁓ was Canberra based. So this was a Canberra role. The candidate was Canberra based. I was in Melbourne. I would have to move. They made their case really clear.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted that job, to be honest. So of course, you know, they had a much better experience with the previous candidate than they had with me. And you were brought in because that’s how it is. You know, the recruiter identified four or five candidates and they have to see everybody. But you then become a backup or a benchmark for the
the candidate that they have already preferred. And talking about experiences, one that’s not mine, I’m thinking about a client who came out of an interview feeling really, really flat. And I remember him saying, I don’t think they were even interested, right? And that can be so heartbreaking because…
as a candidate you have so much going on in your mind in trying to impress others and as it turns out in this situation he was brought in to justify the promotion of an internal candidate there was nothing he could have done to get that job but because of company policies and the due diligence and the good governance they can’t just promote somebody internally they have to go through a proper search
and make sure that that person is in fact the best person to lead the team. And that’s the reality of running a corporation or a small business. You want to make sure, you want to back up your intuition through identifying other candidates and putting your best internal candidate against the best external candidates out there. And sometimes the internal candidate wins and sometimes the external candidate wins.
So I want you to go back to our archives and listen to an episode with Anita Zimmer where we discuss internal candidates. We booked this conversation because Anita and I were having lunch one day and started talking about internal candidates. And I said, wait, wait, wait, let’s stop talking about this. I want you to talk about it on the pod with me, because this is really, really good and important. And many people that work with me really fear internal candidates.
until of course they are one and then they want to have that promotion, right? So listen to that episode. I will put a link to it in the episode show notes. Okay. Then I want to talk to you about emotional recovery. Okay. So yes, the interview went badly. What do you do? Let’s acknowledge that emotionally you really do take a hit.
when you can feel that the interview just did not go down well. When a senior professional has a rough interview, it can really shake up their confidence and affect future interviews. And I don’t want that to happen to you. I want you to know that having a bad interview is completely normal and it happens and it will happen in the future. Again, it’s not uncommon and you don’t have to perform well in interviews every single time.
What you have is the opportunity now to review that interview situation with objective eyes and identify where things started to go wrong and see if you have any control in future interviews, not going down that path. Sometimes there is nothing you can do. are externalities and external factors that you cannot control.
but things that are within your control, that’s where I want you to focus on. So you’ve spent years, right, refining your expertise, working on becoming great at what you do, studying, working, ⁓ doing certifications, professional development, and then an interview can undermine all of that for you and you walk out feeling misunderstood.
And it’s more than disappointing. It’s really destabilizing. It doesn’t have to be like that. It’s just a pointing time and it’s not a reflection on your work experience or your reputation even. Right. I think I mentioned before in the beginning of this episode that I was hired for a job and I was told you interviewed really poorly. And I said, well, it’s because
I found out about this interview the night before and I had to fly out here ⁓ and I didn’t really have much time to prepare. You got me unaware, right? And I still got that job. So I want you to know that interviewing is really tricky because sometimes there are other things that will add up to the decision-making process. It’s your reputation, it’s your brand equity, it’s the advocacy that’s done on your behalf.
which in my case was really strong for that job. ⁓ It’s how you present on the second and third interviews. So there are usually more opportunities for you to showcase your expertise. And that’s exactly again what happened. So they said, all right, let’s book another interview, giving you more time to prepare, giving you a case study for you to present to us, because we really want to get to know you better. Right. So.
I recommend that you give yourself a grace period and not overthink it and think that everything has gone to waste because the interview went bad. ⁓ There may be opportunities there for you to recover, but even if there aren’t opportunities to recover for that specific job, there is definitely opportunities for you to do continuous improvement so that next time you can do better.
I don’t want you to overanalyze or ruminate immediately in going to negative mode. Don’t call your network and say, blew it because the other thing that can also happen that I haven’t discussed is what about the other candidates? Maybe they all blew it. Right? I think interviews are hard for everybody, not just you. So, and I want you to kind of think about it.
And if you are still feeling, I, you know, one of the early episodes that I always tell people to watch is the one about the three thank yous. I’ll put the link in the episode show notes. Now you have to please forgive me. That episode was one of the first ones I recorded. I think I recorded it on my phone. So the sound’s bad. I was really raw and not very professional back then.
But again, the content is great. It’s about the three thank yous that you have to do during your interview phase. And even though I believe sending a thank you after an interview is really important as soon as possible, as immediate as possible as you walk out the interview, you know, find a computer, send a thank you. Don’t send that thank you email if you’re feeling raw. If you’re feeling…
not stable at all if you feel like you blew it and you’re feeling really, you might not be able to write the right thank you note for the recruiter or the employer in that case. Instead, I want you to take a time, breathe, go for a walk, talk to someone you trust, sleep on it so that you can build a better perspective. And when you write back with the email and that thank you note, your perspective will shift.
from that rest and that distance. The other thing that I want you to, it’s a counterpoint here that I want you to remember and this is quite tricky is this. Sometimes we blow the interview completely and we still work out of the interview feeling very happy. Now this might be very confusing but there is a reason for it. It’s in psychology.
I don’t know exactly what the term is, but if you’re going through something really, really, really stressful that brings a lot of anxiety to you, as soon as it’s done, you feel happy about it because it’s in the past, it’s over, right? So even though you’ve blown it, you still feel some sort of exhilaration. Some people feel that. I see that because I talk to people that go through interviews
all the time, right? It’s my job. So I see it a lot. People that feel, my God, thank goodness. I’m so happy it’s over. And I asked them, how did you do? And they can’t even remember how they did. I can’t even remember. It’s like completely, you know, I zoned out. I can’t remember. So they don’t do well, but because they felt so good, they kind of forget that they don’t, they didn’t do well.
If you’ve been in that situation, try to reflect on this and see if I’m right, right? You feel so relieved, you feel so happy and exhilarated after an interview. Then you find out you didn’t get the job and you can’t figure out why, because you don’t remember that you actually blew it at the interview. So I see this quite often and I just wanted to add it here because I think it’s quite interesting how our brain protects ourselves. ⁓
and sometimes play tricks on us. Okay, so what next? Let’s talk about recalibrating and learning from interview failures. Once the emotions have settled, it’s time for us to look at what you can control. And here’s how you turn a bad experience into valuable information that you can use for future interviews, because chances are,
You are going through a recruitment phase and there will be other interviews either with the same organization or with other organizations. And like I said, it happened to me, it happens to many of my clients that a lot of the decision making is not exactly, ⁓ waited only on the interview that they have with the recruiter, maybe the first interview and it
It could be a series of interviews plus the advocacy that was done for you, plus your reputation, plus your job application, plus your LinkedIn profile, all of these things together. So there are times when recruiters have told my clients, you didn’t perform quite well in this interview, but we’re going to move you forward. And I recommend that you practice this or that, and they give some feedback. Those are the best recruiters. It’s so good when that happens.
And it’s quite funny because they come back to me and say, Renata, you’re not going to like this. They said I didn’t interview well. And I’m like, my friend, haven’t interviewed in like 15 years. It’s your first interview. It’s all right. It’s OK. Right. It’s not because you’re working with a coach that your first interview will be perfect. That’s what I’m here to help you with. What’s the feedback? Let’s workshop it and let’s prep for the next one so you can do better.
that specific client I’m thinking about just got a job offer by the way so you know it worked for him. So I want you to remember to ask for feedback. I know feedback is not as good as it used to be but if you have somebody like me who knows how to read between the lines even the most vanilla feedback I ask my clients to bring to me so that we can unpack it together and I want you to reach out to recruiters that
have interviewed you, even if it was a short call, and ask them to give as much feedback as possible and then try to unpack that either by yourself or with the help of a mentor or a coach. And frame it as part of your own development. Tell them that it would be important for you as you go through the recruitment and selection phases in future job interviews.
that as much feedbacks as they can provide, it will be fantastic. And then do that self-reflection, right? Being kind to yourself, but being also very objective. What did you sense didn’t work? Okay. With or without recruiter feedback, what did you sense did not work? Did you talk too much? Right? Did you go on and on and on about the ⁓ problem?
Did you ⁓ go through that format that recruiters love you to address questions, which is to explain the situation, explain what your task was or what your strategy was, then what the action was and then what was the result. Sometimes people just love to talk about the situation and then the situation is important to you and it’s easier for you to talk about, but it’s rather immaterial for your listeners.
What they really want to know is can you action and what was the result? ⁓ With this client that I was just mentioning, the situation with him and the feedback he received was the opposite. It was that he was not talking hardly enough. So he was being too succinct and there was nothing that they could sort of make out of those sort of theoretical statements.
So for my client, it was just so obvious that he had the experience. He wasn’t spending enough time sharing stories with the interviewer. And I think that that’s really underestimated in the corporate world, the importance of storytelling. The other thing that I want you to ask yourself is, were you being too technical?
because I find that a lot of my clients use very heavy jargons with recruiters that are generalists. If a recruiter is working for an organization as an internal talent acquisition, and I’m just thinking again about another client where that person that they’re talking to might be one day hiring a lawyer, the next day hiring a marketing manager, the next day marketing, hiring a tech ⁓ professional.
They don’t, they won’t understand you, right? They are not technical enough to understand. So understanding that at the beginning of the process, you might be talking to somebody who is a toe-curter and they might cut you off because they don’t understand you. Whereas that cultural language, it’s probably better suited for down the track when you’re talking directly to your immediate manager, the hiring manager.
And they will probably really value the fact that you understand the technical language and you can speak in that jargon, but it’s not necessary at the beginning of the recruitment process. It’s just so much that we teach in my coaching program that sometimes it’s hard to sort of convey that here on the pod. But the other thing that could happen is not being strategic enough, right? So you’re giving examples all the time.
that are real, but they don’t really, you’re not tying it up to a strategy. And I see that happening a lot as well when I do interview preparations. And what we do is to understand, okay, let’s go back a step and understand why you’re sharing this story, because even I can’t understand why that story is being shared. And then once they start explaining, then we start creating a narrative that sits on top of that example that is
that acts like an umbrella to then explain why that example is relevant to the question being asked. I hope I’m making sense here. All right, then review your prep, right? So when you are preparing for a specific role, it’s important to use material that’s specific for that role, not just reusing old material. As you start interviewing more and more,
I think it’s really important to have some ready answers for questions that will happen all the time. But if you haven’t done the research to understand the exact situation of the organization that you were applying for, it will show in your answers. So that due diligence of understanding the organization, reading their annual reports, reading what’s in the news, knowing who is interviewing you, it’s really important.
And think about your energy. I sometimes see clients who come across into interviews that it seems like they are not interested when in fact what’s happening is they’re just really, really nervous. So they’re coming across with a body language of not being interested in the role as they’re playing cool. They’re not playing cool. They’re just…
they don’t know how to place their emotions. So when we review videos of mock interviews or when I’m talking to clients, I ask them to act as if I was the, in fact, the hiring manager so that I can look at their body language and expressions. And I think that that’s really important. Just a few tweaks and we can project a more confident…
professional presence that I think is what’s expected from a company that is trying to hire the best possible person to help them.
And then the next thing I want you to consider is your message. Maybe your story doesn’t quite align with the role. I think that this is a really hard thing to do because there might be some things in your career that you are really proud of and you want to mention them in an interview, but they’re just not really correlated with that organization. It may not resonate as well as you think it will. So.
you have the situation where you need to carve out experiences that might have been buried there in your resume or your memory, but they are much more aligned with what’s going on in that organization right now. And this is why, you know, doing interview preparations with a coach is very helpful, is to really identify those stories that will better resonate with the audience for that specific role.
Okay, so what now? How are we going to move forward and have better interviews, more strategic, more thought put into it so that you perform better with the things that you can control?
Okay, so the first thing that I want to say to you is this, if an interview didn’t go well with an organization, I don’t want you to feel like you can never apply for a job in that organization again. I have seen this happen with clients and I don’t think it’s true, right? You can reapply later. You can grow as a professional. You can become better at job interviews.
So just because it didn’t go down well once doesn’t mean that the door for that organization is shut forever. I want you to think of ways of ⁓ building that bridge back. It might be having a conversation with the recruiter, sending them an updated resume, showcasing that you’ve learned from the experiences of your previous interviews. ⁓
There are many things that you can do and again, I think might be working with a coach. If this is an important organization for your career, working with a coach to make sure that you build that bridge back is really important. Let’s talk about something else. I want you to consider using what you’ve learned to fine tune your next situation, be it an interview, be it a job application, things that are happening in your job search.
One thing that I find is that people just keep doing things without that continuous improvement ⁓ framework. So they apply, apply, apply, apply for jobs and they don’t hear back and they just think there’s something wrong with the market. That’s not the case. If you have sent a hundred applications for perfectly good jobs for you and you haven’t heard back, there’s something wrong with your application. Okay. Yes, the market is really tough, but these are technical things that we can learn.
And we can learn because we have to identify the patterns of success and the patterns of failure and keep tweaking things. And that can be said for interviews that go badly. So why did it go badly and how, can we learn as we move forward and look at other applications, look for other jobs and do other interviews in the future. So things that I want you to consider, are you targeting the right type of roles? Okay. That’s a perfectly.
important question for you to always ask yourself after you know those situations is it the right industry right the right organization then i also want you to practice interviewing because interviewing is a skill ⁓ some people are naturally better at it than others but like any skill it improves with repetition it improves the more you do it
And I want you to keep moving forward. Don’t let one bad interview stall your whole search. I remember once a consultation was booked and this woman spoke to me that she applied for her dream job. She didn’t get it. And then it had been two years. It just broke her heart and she didn’t look for anything for two years. And I felt that that was just such a waste of great time because she went through quite a rigorous
application process in first few interviews. And what that means when you apply for a job and you get shortlisted, sorry, long listed, and then from long list you get shortlisted and you go for an interview, you’ve already done better than like 90 % of the people who applied. In her case, it was such a competitive role, this specific role, it was better than 99%, right? So if she had
continued and applied for other roles within that organization, an organization that was so important for her career or other similar organizations. She had already achieved patterns of success that she didn’t realize. And then two years have gone by and she had to start from scratch again. So keep going, don’t stop. And…
I think that those stories that I’m telling you from myself, from job interviews that have gone wrong with clients of mine, I’m just trying to make you understand that these things do happen more often than not because for every one job there are dozens and dozens of job interviews that happen for that one job.
Yep. I’m not saying that all of the people that didn’t get the job had bad interviews. Sometimes as a recruiter or hiring manager like I used to be, it’s very hard to make a choice. When lots of people interview well, it’s heartbreaking really. And you don’t really know if you’re making the best choice. You’re making the best choice based on subjective and objective circumstances and to the best of your ability.
but sometimes it’s hard but chances are quite a few didn’t interview quite well.
So if your last interview or some other interview that you’ve done didn’t go well, I want you to know that it does not define you. It’s just one dot point. It’s not your destiny. It doesn’t mean things. doesn’t mean, no, it was meant to be. No, it wasn’t meant to be. It was just what happened that day. I want you to use that information, learn from it. I want you to adjust your future.
presentations and interviews and keep going, keep pursuing that goal. If you found this episode helpful, there are many other episodes for you to watch and listen. I want you to also consider sharing this podcast with other people in your network because it helps us so much to reach out to other professionals just like you who might need to hear what I had to say today. And if you haven’t already,
why haven’t you subscribed to the newsletter? The newsletter is fantastic. I was saying all the good things about it in the last episode and kind of embarrassed to say it all again, but it’s really where I share extra tips and support for professionals. I always save important things only for the newsletter subscribers because I’m just so happy that I have this amazing group of professionals and recruiters as well who subscribe and
Never unsubscribe, so thank you. It’s very rare that people will unsubscribe from my newsletter and the open rate is so good. here I am saying things again. Anyhow, just try it. Give it a go. Subscribe. See what you think. And you will find a link to it in the episode show notes or you can go to my website renatabernardi.com. R E N A T A B E R N A R T E dot com.
Okay, I’ll see you next time. Take care, stay steady, and your next opportunity is closer than you think. Bye.
