How to Handle Stress Interviews

During the course of your career, you may be subjected to many interviews. The purpose of an interview is to get acquainted and to learn about one another. For employers, it’s a time for them to evaluate your qualifications for the job and you help them with this evaluation by being prepared to sell your skills and experience. Apart from common job interviews like the first round telephone interviews, behavioral interviews and technical interviews, stress interviews are gaining in popularity.

What is stress interview, you may wonder?

Basically, the whole purpose of a stress interview is where the interviewer will try to put you under pressure or make you uncomfortable and see how you react to it. It’s a test to see if you could still think logically under such stressful circumstances.

The interviewer may try to stress you in one of several ways, such as asking four or five questions in a row, acting rude or sarcastic, disagreeing with you, or simply keeping you waiting for a long period.
Many people find this type of interview the toughest and not many could fare or perform well. Many ended feeling frustrated, annoyed and humiliated.

Here are some useful tips on how to handle stress interviews:

• Always keep yourself cool and composed throughout these stressful interviews. Try to control your anger. Pause and take a few deep breaths while you think of an appropriate response.
• Do not try to make an issue of the questions (even though they may be irrelevant and discriminatory). Make your answers concise and non-specific.
• Clarify the question and the nature of the answer desired. This can buy you some time to think. What is the interviewer trying to get at? Don't be afraid to ask questions to get clarification; sometimes, this is exactly what's expected of you.
• Communicate what you're thinking and doing. State assumptions, and ask for unknown information.
• Just remember that the purpose of the questions is mainly to test your response. The answers are not really important. Hence just focus on the way in which you're solving the problem. Don’t keep looking for the "right" answer.
• Most importantly: Be yourself, be open, be honest and be direct.

For any job interview, the better prepared you are beforehand, the better your chances are of walking out of the interview with a confident smile on your face that says, “I think I got the job!”

Aerizo Group – HR Consultancy