My misfortune has led me to give over 100+ interview rounds across various organizations both big and small over a span of 5+ years. And I thought it is about time to share the pyshologic learnings during those years. I would like to focus on how to tell if you're interviewer is inclining towards accepting or rejecting you. Yes, you can tell - most of the time. So here goes.
There are fundamentally two main factors that you will need to keep in mind.
First, you'll have to realize that psychology of interviewers varies across companies. Secondly, within an organization the pyschology remains surprisingly consistent. And hence, this trick of predicting your fate based off the interviewer's behavior will work.
I believe an interview is very similar to a poker table. There are gambles being made, lies being told - the interviewer desperately looking for ways to reject you; the candidate desperately looking for ways to impress you. As much as there is a physical (or technical) battle there is a mental battle happening as well.
For the most part, half the decision will be made based off your resume and your profile. I don't intend to comment on the right ways of hiring candidates, as such a discussion will be outside the scope of the article.
As highlighted earlier, the first factor that will determine the result is the reputation of the organization. In other words, how desirable is the organization by the candidates. A company like Google, that offers good job security, pay, and amenities, is highly desired. On the other hand a street-side start-up that pays less, makes you work more and hardly have any workplace amenities is least desirable. Of course these things are purely subjective and can vary from person to person but for the most part (especially for younger engineers) it is true.
Likewise, the desire of a candidate to join a company for the most part is well known to the interviewer. For instance, a Google interviewer will not walk into your interview room expecting he/she to sell their company to you. Rather, you'll be expected to sweat it out to them and sell yourself. That is the ugly truth.
So let's take Google as an example for the current discourse. Here's my way of predicting the outcome.
During the course of the interview, if you're interviewer
- looks super confident in himself
- maybe smiling most of the time
- showing you pity every now and then
- hardly shows concern
- occasionally engages in responding to your queries; and sometimes rudely doing work on their laptop
Then, you can probably walk out of the room because you're fate is sealed - Reject. The interviewer made up his mind even before the interview started and you just proved him right. It doesn't matter what is right or wrong - whether he was supposed to give you hints; whether he was supposed to make sure you're not feeling intimidated; All these idealistic notions are just impractical for them. Such companies and interviewers sadly look for reasons to reject you instead of reasons to hire you.
If you would like me to go further deeper into why they do what they do, then here is my take on it. A Google interviewer is supposed to reject all the time (~90%). It doesn't matter if you're desperate to join and confident that you can rock from the start. So that boils down to the interviewer rejecting most of their interviews. So why would they work hard to determine whether a candidate is good for the company? They won't. Simply reject most of the time, and on the rare occassion where the candidate does manage to nail every single technical question, then and only then will the interviewer change his behavior.
So how does an interviewer usually behave when he/she will recommend (i.e. accept) you. If the interviewer:
- looks concerned
- seems confused
- has a serious (sometimes angry) face
- is constantly blinking
- has an air of nervousness
then, it is you who can smile internally. The interviewer will accept you. Why do you ask? It's time for psychology.
If you don't give your interviewer any reason to reject you you have nailed every question that was posed. Then your interviewer has failed to find the reasons to reject you. Panic will slowly kick in as he/she will now be forced to write a recommendation to hire you. That is a scary thing because they will need to spend more time answering and justify ALL minor details on why they will need to hire you. The interviewer will need to come up with this write-up that will be circulated across various internal employees (over 15+), and maybe a higher senior committee (in Google's case the Hiring Committee and VP committees). The interviewer will be judged and be held responsible during the subsequent de-briefing meetings to justify to all the other members on why the candidate must be hired. That requires a lot of mental effort and constant emails and write-ups. Hence, the interviewer tend to demonstrate such expressions.
Next time you're going for an interview try and observe the above mentioned behavioural aspects of the interviewer and see if you can predict you're outcome. Do share your thoughts in the comments below subsequently.
EDIT: seeing comments from USA or the western world users. I had actually meant it specifically for India. If you don't interview here, please pass right ahead instead of making irrelevant comments.