Over the next few days, we’ll look at a few types of popular interview types.
The stress interview is one type of job interview that you might face during your job searches that can throw you for a loop and surprise you if you weren’t expecting it.
The stress interview can take different forms but essentially the goal of it is to see how you handle pressure or how you handle a situation that you’re not expecting.
One sort of stress interview I faced earlier in my career was for a sales job where the interviewer (the sales manager) walked into the office I was waiting in, sat down in the chair and simply said to me “so, what do you want to know?”
So instead of a typical interview where he asked the questions and I answered them, he decided to reverse the situation and have me interview him, essentially.
In hindsight, I think this interview was less an interview that the interviewer tried to turn into a stress interview and more a case of him being a Type A person who had a busy job and preferred to cut to the chase and skip the formalities.
Either way, it did throw me for a loop but I recovered quickly and began asking him the questions I planned on asking him anyways.
Stress interviews can also take the form of a panel interview where a number of people interview you at once and fire off questions at you one after the other. I’ve experienced this type of interview, too. You deal with this by answering the questions as they’re asked and giving eye contact to each person in the room paying particular attention to the person asking the question.
Stress interviews might involve the interviewer cutting you off before you have answered the question completely or acting like you’re not answering the questions correctly. In this instance, keep your answers brief and maintain eye contact with the interviewer to try to gauge when they’re about to interrupt you. Don’t assume that you aren’t doing well in the interview because of the interviewer’s expression because that might be part of the act.
A stress interview might also involve being asked silly questions or trick questions, answering riddles and stuff like that. Whether or not you want to work for a company or manager who utilizes these sorts of tactics is another story…
Part of the issue with stress interviews is finding out about them ahead of time, whenever possible. If you already knew that you were being interviewed by a panel of people, knew their names or at least knew their job titles, you’d be better prepared than had you walked into the interview and then suddenly realized that it was a panel interview. Knowledge is power so asking the right questions before the interview is paramount.
In many cases with the stress interview, the goal can be to put you under stress to see if you crack under pressure.
Don’t give them what they want.
As they used to say in a deodorant commercial from a number of years ago, “never let them see you sweat.”
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