What do you do during an interview? How do you talk and act? Do you prefer to talk to other interviewees, or would you rather stay alone with your own thoughts?

Or would you rather just decide to play it cool and chat up your interviewer?

This last one might not be the best approach after all.

Only recently, a young woman came on Twitter to share her experience with a male interviewee who had told her she ‘smelled nice.’ In her story, she lashed out at him, calling him ‘rude.’ She then wrapped up her story with the following phrase “A lot of men don’t have manners.”


Taiwo Yinusa
@taiwo__y

I interviewed a guy for a job yesterday and when he was leaving he said to me ‘you smell nice’ and I told him that’s very rude of him,he left looking stupid.
A lot of men don’t have manners!!!

But was she right? Was the interviewee rude?

WikiHow gives a succinct explanation of the purpose of an interview.

For the company, “it is a chance…to evaluate whether you would be a strong employee” while for the interviewee, it is an opportunity “to evaluate the company and decide whether you want to work for them.”

In addition, WikiHow says that landing a good job requires that you ”make a good first impression” by

– Presenting yourself well
-Communicating effectively
-showing the interviewer politeness and respect

Obviously, the candidate failed number 2. It is not wrong to dish out compliments to your interviewer, but the way it is communicated makes a world of difference. Instead of “you smell nice”, a better compliment, not just to an interviewer, but to virtually any stranger would be, “Please excuse me, I am sorry to be a bother, but I would like to compliment you on your perfume. It smells really nice.”

The interviewee may have been slightly off target, but HR Taiwo overreacted

While it is true that Nigerian men; and I am narrowing my target because I have not met and interacted with a lot of non-Nigerian men; tend to dish out suggestive compliments to absolute strangers, calling a person ‘rude’ for a compliment that was not properly expressed is an exaggeration.

Saying a lot of men do not have manners because of one man’s faux pas is false. And it is an indication that HR Taiwo might be a rather bad human resource personnel as she appears to have a bias problem.

But away from HR Taiwo and her interviewee’s faux pas

What can you say during an interview besides talking about the job?
Click to read full article: https://qwenu.com/2019/03/15/how-to-talk-at-a-job-interview/