Mistake No. 3: It’s all about you

Is it all about your accomplishments? Your hard work? Your stellar productivity? Yourunparalleled subject matter expertise, etc. etc., blah blah blah?

If so, you’re not impressing anybody. You’re making your interviewer’s brain bleed, Superman. What you’re really telling them is that you’ve never worked as part of a team to get something done.

“If a candidate is only using singular personal pronouns (I, me, mine) and never using plural personal pronouns (we, us, ours), I’m likely going to give the candidate a thumbs-down,” said Jenson Crawford,

Arrogance is another, related, problem. Crawford’s been hiring IT people for a long time and has worked with some “absolutely brilliant men and women,” he said. 

But, well, it’s “very unlikely” that a given candidate is the best IT person he’s ever met. “It’s even less likely that a candidate is going to convince me of that in an interview,” he said. We’re not talking about self-confidence here. Rather, it’s that a candidate’s confidence is best displayed by an ability to explain why he or she is the best thing since sliced bread, by describing such things as unit testing, code reviews, etc.

“I know that I can count on a self-confident developer to deliver quality work,” Crawford said. “But I’ve had an arrogant developer who assumed that it was impossible for him to make a mistake in something he’d written on the white board during an interview. Thumbs-down.”

Tip: Talk about the people you’ve worked with, not just yourself. Use plenty of “we” and “us” constructions.

Mistake No. 4: Dissing your peeps

Talking about the people you’ve worked with should not include calling them idiots.

Lyden is big into behavioral interviewing nowadays. Most interviewers are. That’s when they ask you questions that typically start with, "Tell me about a time when...."  

The reason they ask you this type of question is because companies believe that attitude, above all else, is the most important attribute, Lyden said.  

“An employee who’s brilliant in IT but has a poor attitude is poison to the morale of the team,” he said. “ It creates an unproductive environment where most people don't want to work. There’s an old saying that’s very relevant when hiring IT people: ‛Hire for attitude and train for skill.’ So what interviewers might now ask that they haven't asked before are questions prompting responses that would show an example of a candidate having a bad attitude.”

For example: One IT candidate had great skills. When talking about a member on his team, he referred to him as being "completely incompetent." He described all the things his teammate did wrong and groused about how it created more work for him.

Life, he said, was just unfair working with this utter boob.

Lyden’s takeaway: Oh, wah, wah.

Lyden ended up going for a candidate who conveyed the value of each member of the team, along with his own. “Clearly, you could see in his explanation that he was the anchor of the team, yet he was humble about it,” he said.

Tip: Say good things about the people you’ve worked with. Otherwise, you come off sounding like a crybaby. If an interviewer asks you to describe the type of person you don’t enjoy working with, the list shouldn’t immediately tumble out of your mouth. If necessary, pretend to mull it over. Then say something positive; for example, describe how you’ve learned to appreciate diverse personalities and their approaches to problem solving.

Source: http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/How-to-Avoid-Blowing-Your-IT-Job-Interview-Stop-Spewing-Acronyms/ba-p/296

State the following sentences as true or false:

1. At your IT job interview you shouldn’t be curious about the employer’s career experience.

2. High professionals know how to talk to non-IT people.

3. Bad team-worker creates an unproductive environment.