Don’t Mention These Things During a Promotional Job Interview
If you have worked for your organisation for a long time, you may feel that in a promotional job interview you can relax and communicate as if you were talking to a friend.
It doesn’t matter what type of relationship you have with your manager, in a job interview, even an internal promotional job interview, you need to act professionally
In the job interview, people communicate off the cuff, reacting to the question they were asked. This is where your guard is down and where poor communication slips out.
Remember, even if you are on good terms with your manager, you need to remember that often you are interviewed by two people – one often being an HR representative. Also, all interviewers have to follow an interview scoring process – this means you may have a friendly interview, but if you don’t answer the questions meeting the criteria of the interview scorecard you won’t be offered the position.
Never Get Defensive
When asked about previous mistakes never ever say that it wasn’t your job, task, responsibility, as X should have done it. Instead, explain how you have learned from the mistake and what you would do differently in a similar situation.
The interview question may have been generalized (the manager doesn’t blame you, rather they worded the interview question wrongly) or if the manager does wrongly blame you the interview isn’t the place to get defensive
You Know Me….
In a promotional job interview, it is easy to get flustered. You are asked a competency interview question and you way up how far to stretch the truth. In external job interviews, the white lies go unnoticed, but your internal job interviewer knows you, they have known you for 10 years (or however long you have worked for the organisation)
When feeling stuck, the internal job applicant often refers to a blotchy response “you know me, I’m a hard worker, so i will do what i have to do…” The problem here, even when your employer knows that the hard worker statement is the truth, you still aren’t giving the required details to score high on the interview scorecards.
These days its the detailed answers that will get you the job offer
Also bare in mind, that your boss might not know all the in’s and out’s of what you did on previous projects. The interview is the place to state the situation, what you did to achieve X and the positive outcome to your hard work – even if they already know everything you are about to tell them
Bad Mouth Others
This is a big know -know
Never, ever, ever bad mouth your colleagues, even the one’s everyone knows are lazy, during a job interview….especially when an HR representative is part of the job interview process
If asked about other colleagues, simply say that everyone works to their best ability – this is a great ambiguous line to keep you out of trouble
