There are many misconceptions about the fine art of interviewing. This blog aims to get to the bottom of it all.
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The Black Art of Interviewing is your one-stop-shop for everything related to interviewing: where to find jobs, how to prepare, types of questions and more!
The Black Art of Interviewing is a blog about interviewing, written by Jeff Haden.
The Black Art of Interviewing is for interviewers, interviewees and anyone else who wants to improve their interviewing skills. It is a place where you can find out everything from the basics of how to conduct an interview, to what to do when things don’t go as planned.
The Black Art of Interviewing is a place where you’ll learn how to be prepared, how to conduct the interview with style and confidence, how to ask great questions and listen more than talk, how to get the most out of your interviews — and much more.
Tone: friendly
I am not a big fan of the term ‘Black Art’. I prefer to think of the skill as difficult and complex rather than mysterious. But I accept that, in some sense, it is a way of asking questions that produces better results than one could achieve by asking different questions.
It’s a bit like walking. When you are born, you are able to walk. But only if you put one foot in front of the other in the right order. That’s why people have to learn to walk; they need to be shown how to do it and then practice sufficiently for it to become instinctive.
But once you can walk, no one needs to show you how. You know how. And there must be an equivalent process for being able to interview well. My hope is that this blog will be part of a process of demystification, so that people will see that good interviewing is not a matter of having an intuitive feel for questions but an ability to understand and apply certain principles.
Black art, dark art, any art that’s hard to do.
Interviewing is one of those black arts. It’s hard to do, even when you know what you’re doing. It takes a lot of practice to get good at it. And here is my key point: every time you do it, you learn something. The only way you can learn how to do it better is by doing it and getting feedback on how you did.
If you want to get better at interviewing, there’s no shortcut. You have to interview people who are hiring. That way you can see what real interviewers ask and how they react when candidates answer the questions your way vs the way they would have answered them (or the way they did answer them).
You have to do this with a wide variety of different kinds of companies, and for different kinds of positions. Sales jobs are very different from software development jobs, which are different from IT help desk jobs, which are different from manufacturing jobs, which are different from finance jobs. A sales job will test a completely different set of skills than an IT job will test. And in each case there will be things that make sense for the company (and things that don’t) that you never thought about before because you
Interviewing is a key skill for anyone in business. It’s also an “art” — which means that it’s not just a matter of learning some techniques or principles, but of practicing so that the skills become instinctive.
The “black art” description will probably make some people uncomfortable. The idea that something as important as interviewing is a mysterious talent, rather than something you can study and practice and get better at, makes us uneasy.
But there’s no doubt that interviewing is an art. And calling it one doesn’t imply that there are no principles involved. Calling it an art doesn’t make it less teachable or learnable (though it may make it more fun).
In fact, we think one reason that interviewing seems to be such a difficult skill to master has to do with the fact that most books and courses on the subject have focused on techniques — how to ask questions, what kinds of questions to ask, what kinds of answers you’re looking for, etc. But these techniques aren’t the whole story; they’re just the tools in the artist’s kit.
What makes interviewing an art is the way you combine those tools — how you listen and observe and pay attention to your own reactions, how you probe gently and persistently for more
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think they can do anything if they just try hard enough, and those who think that success comes from a mysterious force called luck.
I have spent many decades interviewing candidates for jobs ranging from busboys to COOs, and I know that the people who succeed are not luckier than the ones who don’t. What does determine success or failure is how you manage your own mind. Interviewing is a kind of black art, but it’s one everyone can learn with practice.
I’ll show you how to tame your own mind and do better in interviews by learning a new tool for self-expression: the question you ask about yourself. This tool will help you understand where you’re weak and where you’re strong so you can prepare your answers accordingly. You’ll be able to interview on your terms instead of having the interviewer set the terms of the interview.
When it comes to interviewing, the key is to be an active listener. This means that you listen more than you talk and hear what the candidate says rather than what you want to hear. I call this “listening from the third ear.” You are listening for how the person thinks and communicates rather than what they say.
TALK TO THE PERSON:
