Good afternoon, my fellow travelers. I have an interview tomorrow, so, like my blog on disappointment, I thought perhaps writing a blog about nerves would help me to calm down.
Let’s see how this goes.
There are a few reasons this interview is making me more anxious than other interviews I have done. 1) It is a Skype interview, the first I’ve ever done, so nightmares of slow wifi and even slower computers keep plaguing me. 2) It’s an international interview, where there is not only a time difference but a day difference as well. I’ve already messed up once, thinking I’d be spending my Wednesday night talking at my computer only to realize yesterday that I would be spending Tuesday night talking at my computer. Nice save, but now I’m just paranoid as to if I’ve really gotten it right this time. 3) It’s a small one, and of less consequence, but I’m afraid the accent and colloquialisms may trip me up some and I’ll find myself asking things like, “What?” and “I’m sorry?” way more often than I’d like.
So there you have it. My interview fears. Oh, and I guess there is also the small fact that I’m interviewing with the HR Advisor for Hobbiton and this is an interview for a job at Hobbiton. But that’s no big, right? I mean that’s only been my dream job for that past two years.
Okay, I’m back. I honestly try not to think about that ‘small fact’ too much. It freaks me out and I start getting my hopes up. Which is not a bad thing, really, but I’m trying to save myself from any possible disappointment (you know, since that’s been a bit of a theme lately).
And it would be a huge disappointment. Being so close to a job and a life you’ve dreamed about for years only to be told, “Sorry, we don’t want you.”
But let’s focus less on the potentially soul-crushing disappointment and more on dealing with the general stress and anxiety that comes along with job interviews.
I’ve had several interviews throughout my adult life, some for jobs I was more qualified for than others. What I am reminding myself of as this interview looms closer and closer (tomorrow, eek!) is that there are jobs that are skill-based and jobs that are training-based. If you are interviewing for a job as a doctor at a hospital, you can’t just have good people skills and know that the heart pumps blood. If you are interviewing for a job at the local shoe store, you don’t need to have gone to fashion school and have a passion for footwear.
I may have never given tours of a fictional town dug into the hillsides of farmland in New Zealand but damned if I wouldn’t rock at that job! I think a big cause of peoples’ stress when they’re staring down an interview is they get too caught up in imagining what the specifics of the job are going to be. They worry too much about how they won’t have any experience with the fine details and minutia of a given job and forget that nearly all of that stuff is learned on the job anyway.
It’s almost assured the interviewer knows this. What they are looking for is whether or not you have a good head on your shoulders, if you have a good attitude and a better work ethic. Even if your last job and the job you are interviewing for are drastically different, there are skills that can carry over. Customer service skills, working with others, managing inventory, working on a computer. Lots of jobs require these things, so if you’ve even had one job before, you’ve already got the foundation laid for the next.
If that doesn’t help, look at it this way. You got an interview. If the company didn’t think you could rise to the job, they wouldn’t waste time interviewing you in the first place.
I hope this has been helpful, dear travelers, and helped you go from this…
to this…
…I should watch Avatar soon…
Have a good evening, travelers. I hope it is a peaceful one.
~Ren
The Wandering Ren 
