What Color Is Your Parachute 2018 by Richard N. Bolles copy

Conversation Tip #4
An interview for a job is a lot like dating. I remind you of what I said in
the previous chapter: The other human activity job-hunting most resembles
is dating, not marketing a used car. This conversation is two people
attempting to decide if you both want to “try going steady.” (Or maybe it’s
you plus six or nine others, depending on how many from the employer’s
team are sitting in, on the interview.) It’s got to be a two-way decision.
What the employer decides is critical, of course; but so is what you decide.
This interview is a data-collecting process for the employer. Whether
one person or a team is interviewing you, they are using the interview to
find out “Do we like you? Do we want you to work here? Do you have the
skills, knowledge, or experience that we really need? Do you have the
work-ethic that we are looking for? And, how will you fit in with our other
employees?”
All well and good. But, this interview is part of your data-collecting
process, too—the one you have been engaged in, or should have been
engaged in, throughout your whole job-hunt. You are sitting there, now,
with the employer or their team, and the question you are trying to find an
answer to, is: “Do I like you all? Do I want to work here, or not?”
You don’t begin an interview—as some so-called experts would have it
—by “marketing yourself.” Not now. Not in the beginning. Not until you
have gathered all the information you need to know about the place, and
are weighing the question “Do I want to work here?” and have concluded
“Yes,” or “I think so,” do you then turn your energy toward marketing
yourself.
Let me emphasize this: your side of the conversation (or conversations)
has two steps to it. First, gentle questioning about the place, then quiet
self-confident marketing of yourself, if—but only if—you’ve decided this
is the place for you. Because there are two steps, you’ll save yourself a lot
of grief if you realize the first interview, there, has only one main purpose:
to be invited back for a second interview.