Dealing Effectively with the Stress Interview

By MedZilla Staff Writer

Marysville, WA - February 6, 2004--There’s an increasingly common practice in pharmaceutical interviewing in which the interviewer asks the candidate questions which are designed to induce stress. For example, a candidate who might have multiple academic degrees could be asked to go to the board and draw a simple cell. In engineering, a degreed and qualified candidate might be asked to draw a simple circuit.

After watching the candidate complete the task, interviewers have been known to laugh and say, “You call that a cell?” or “Are you done?”

Demeaning? Maybe. But the thought behind the task is not to see if the candidate can draw the cell or circuit; but rather how he or she reacts to the situation.

Marky Stein, career coach and author of Fearless Interviewing: How to Win the Job by Communicating with Confidence, says there are wrong and right ways to respond to the demand and response.

She says that if the interviewee reacts by saying, “How dare you ask me something like that; I have two PhDs!” that’s a bad reaction. It’s also bad if the candidate appears confused and tries to change the drawing. The good answer, she says, is to simply to stand back from the drawing and calmly say, “This is a human cell to the best of my understanding.”

Stress-based questions are common in interviews in all industries. According to Stein, the question might be as simple as “What is your favorite color?” If you stress out, act confused or stop to think about the most political answer, you’ve ruined the opportunity to show your calm, calculated ability to handle potentially stressful situations.

“People who have not interviewed for many years are often surprised at the level of strategy in today’s interviews,” says Frank Heasley, PhD, President and CEO of MedZilla.com, a leading Internet recruitment and professional community that targets jobseekers and HR professionals in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and science. “Unless you understand the motives behind the lines of questioning, job candidates might feel dejected and insulted, which could very well lead to their blowing the interview.”

Other tricky questions

“What would you do if you caught a fellow employee stealing?” might not be what you expect if you’re being interviewed for a job as manager of radiologic technologists at a hospital. According to Stein, again, it’s not important that the candidate respond with a flawless protocol straight out of the company’s employee handbook. Rather, the candidate might say she would first talk with the coworker and then go to a manager if the problem persisted. The key to the answer, Stein says, is that you wouldn’t necessarily go straight to the manager unless the problem was something having to do with sexual harassment or violent behavior. “Apparently in corporate America that is preferred behavior to try to handle it with a peer first,” she says.

If you don’t know the answer to a stress-inducing question, Stein says, you might smile and say, “Wow! That’s a good question. That’s something that I’d like to think about.” “Then you diffuse the whole issue,” she says. “The content of the question doesn’t matter at all. [Interviewers] want to put you under the microscope and see how you behave under stress.”

Stein also writes in her book about the “question behind the question.” This type of question sounds like a perfectly innocent: “What would you like to be doing five years from now?” The interviewer, Stein says, is trying to assess if you’re over or under ambitious. If you’re over ambitious, you might say, “I’d like to be the director of this department in a year.” If you were under-ambitious, you’d say: “I’m just trying to make enough money for my next vacation to Hawaii.” A good answer is: “I would just like to continue learning and growing in my field so I can make a greater contribution.”

Arm yourself with anecdotes

According to Stein, candidates should pick six skills that they have and want to pursue in their jobs, such as management, analysis, assembling, building, creating, directing. Then, write these “action verbs” each on an index card. On the other side of each card, write a few reminders of anecdotes about how you performed these skills successfully with bottom line implications to the job. “Hopefully, you have three anecdotes for each verb. When you go into the interview, you’re literally armed with an arsenal of 18 different little stories you can tell about doing those things,” she says.

Tory Johnson, CEO of Women for Hire and co-author of Women for Hire: The Ultimate Guide to Getting a Job, says that in anticipation of any interview, not only is it key to confidently convey your strengths and successes in positive terms, but it’s equally important to know how to reflect negative situations with positive, flattering results. Its a challenge to do this on your feet, which means advance preparation is important.” If, however, you find yourself unprepared for such questions, ask for a moment to consider the response. Take a few seconds of silence to think before you speak,” she says.

Some things are just plain wrong (legally)

It’s one thing to ask uncomfortable questions, it’s another to ask illegal questions during an interview. Employment attorney Michael Smith, with Bechert LLP of Washington, DC, says examples of inappropriate questions include asking a married woman how she intends to handle childcare responsibilities in light of her job responsibilities. Another is asking an older candidate whether he can handle the physical demands of the job—if that question wouldn’t be appropriate to any other age candidate. Questions about religious preference, disabilities or health also fall into the inappropriate realm.

What an interviewer should be doing is asking questions on a neutral basis, key to whether people can perform jobs regardless of who they are or what they are, Smith says.

When the interviewer strays into the zone of inappropriate, an interviewee has a few options, Smith says. Ideally, the interviewee should tactfully point out that the interview ought be about the requirements of the job and diplomatically steer the interviewer back to that issue. A calm, tactful approach is much more effective than a threat that what the interviewer asked is unlawful or discriminatory.

If an interviewer makes sexual advances or does or says something else that is intolerable to the interviewee, the candidate might want to lodge a complaint, internally, with the company or organization. A company with a hiring policy in place might re-interview the candidate using another interviewer. The candidate can also take his complaint to an outside organization, such as the Equal Opportunity Commission, and could be financially compensated.

Turning ugly situations into job offers

According to Heasley, job candidates who understand the reasons for stress interviews can turn these potentially negative situations around and make them positive. “Many people just don’t know how to react to some of these bizarre interview situations. It’s not necessarily what you say, but rather the perception you create and how you react that will result in that job offer.”

Of course, don’t forget about the basics, Stein says. “The first 15 seconds of the interview, countless studies show are the most important. It’s not so much how you answer the questions, it’s making a first good impression with your manner of dress, your posture, your handshake and a smile on your face and that has been proven time and time again.”

About MedZilla.com
Established in mid 1994, MedZilla is the original web site to serve career and hiring needs for professionals and employers in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medicine, science and healthcare. MedZilla databases contain about 10,000 open positions, 13,000 resumes from candidates actively seeking new positions and 71,000 archived resumes.