As my friends and family know, I am still unemployed, but doing fine. I won’t mention the company yet, but I had an interview today. And I was surprised.

You need to be prepared for an interview. Research the company, look on LinkedIn for the people who will be doing the interviewing, research salary ranges for the position, decide what an unacceptable low salary is for you and as bad as we hate it, go through the list of classic interview questions and make sure you have a clear answer. We all have answers to the questions but it often takes some thinking about your past career to match your experience to the questions. Sitting at home in your robe and fuzzy slippers is the time to be doing that pondering, not while staring at the interviewer. Another thing that helped me was looking back over my career and picking 10-15 situations where I had a great success or had to deal with a difficult technical issue or even a people issue. Make notes on what the challenge was, what actions you took to resolve the problem or produce what was expected of you and then what the final result was. You were successful, you resolved the issue, you saved the company money, etc.

I spent three days getting ready for this interview.

Now for the surprise. I expected to get grilled during the interview. I expected to get hammered with a bunch of classic interview questions. I expected that if I did not give a perfect, concise classic answer to each interview question I was toast. But the first person spent twenty of the allotted thirty minutes of the interview talking about the company in a very casual way. He put me at ease immediately. And the other manager, two developers, a VP and the HR rep all did the same thing. So it must be a company culture thing.

I am not the kind of person who is going to be able to give you a five minute response to a question with good grammar, perfectly spoken words, an intro, three main points and a conclusion sentence. Ain’t going to happen. These people created an environment where I could be my bumbling, fumbling self. They saw the real me, not someone trying to give a perfect scripted answer to a question. Regardless of whether I get a job offer, I feel good. I think I will be among the top candidates. The interviews were actually enjoyable, it seems like a great company and they saw the real me.

Maybe that was their plan.

So my pondering is……if the job interview is a grilling session and the expectation is that you have to give the perfect scripted classic answer to the standard interview questions and that is not you, maybe that company is not a good fit for you. You have to be prepared but maybe just being yourself is a good strategy also.