7 Tips for Curing Anxiety at the Job Interview
Employers are looking for confidence. While your history and your abilities matter, hiring managers want to know that you have a personality that indicates leadership and the willingness to learn. Confidence in yourself is important, and the only way for an employer to know that you are confident in your abilities is for them to see you confident at the interview.
For many, that’s easier said than done. Job interview anxiety is incredibly common, both in those living with daily anxiety and those without it. That’s why it’s so important for you to be able to reduce your anxiety before the interview. Follow these strategies to improve your ability to cope with interview anxiety.
Job Interview Anxiety Strategies
It should be noted that a little bit of anxiety is okay. Employers expect it. You simply need to reduce how severe that anxiety is, so that it doesn’t impact your overall interview. Try the following:
• Practice Until it Hurts
Make sure that you’re practicing for your interview for so long that you’re starting to get annoyed, and then practice it a bit longer. The more you have prepared for every type of question imaginable, the more the interview is going to seem like it isn’t as intimidating. You may not be ready for every question, but the more you practice the easier a time you’ll have on the questions you do know the answer to, and the less worried you’ll be about the outcome.
• Mock Interview
Mock interviews are a style of interview practice, but a really good one for those that find interviews nervous. Have someone you trust hold a mock interview for you. Have them ask you questions they come up with off the top of their head, and have them rate you on how well you did and where you can improve. Try to hold several mock interviews, and have the questions change for each one. Mock interviews are also useful because they get you used to the way you’ll feel at the actual interview, which can have a calming quality.
• Exercise Before the Interview
While you can’t always control the nervousness, you can sometimes control the symptoms. A great way to avoid feeling too anxious at an interview is to tire your body out beforehand. About 2 hours or so before the interview, try to get as much exercise as possible so that by the time you go to the interview your muscles are completely drained of energy and unable to provide you with very severe anxiety symptoms or tension.
• Fake Your Confidence
Not feeling confident going into your job interview? Maybe you’re feeling confident enough to fake it. Pretending to act like a confident person can actually make you feel more confident, and when you go into an interview starting strong, you have the potential to do a much better job completing the interview with the same amount of energy.
• Create an Anxiety Reduction Trigger
A strategy that can be very helpful is creating your own anxiety reduction trigger. This takes weeks of practice, but it can be valuable at the interview. Any time you’re feeling anxious, find something that relaxes you and do some sort of small movement, like tapping your index finger against your pocket. Over time, you will start to associate that tapping movement as its own calming trigger through the power of conditioning. Consider trying something like this to calm you down in times of severe stress.
• Healthy Living
Before the interview, also make sure that you’re treating your body as healthy as possible. Poor living habits make anxiety much worse. Make sure that you have gotten a good night’s sleep. Make sure you’re eating healthy and drinking plenty of water (dehydration is very common in those that are nervous). Healthy living is a powerful tool for reducing the severity of anxiety.
• Practice for the Next Interview
You also need to learn not to associate a failed interview with failure. Remember, even if you completely aced the interview in every way, it’s possible that some other candidate simply had slightly better qualifications or a connection inside of the company. You won’t know why you didn’t get a job, and you can’t let its outcome be anything more than a learning experience. Once your interview is over, before you even know how it went, practice your interview again with a friend to mock interview you. Have them ask the same questions and see if you can come up with better answers, so that you’re prepared for the next one and never putting too much pressure on any one interview.
Overcoming Interview Anxiety
Anxiety at job interviews is and always will be common. You actually should be a little nervous because you’re doing something important for your life. Anything with importance should cause some anxiety. But that anxiety can’t control your interview, so use the above tips to get help for that anxiety and be at your best, so that you can nail either this interview or the next one.
About Author: Ryan Rivera’s stress and anxiety often caused him problems during his job searches. Now that he is free from this mental issues, he now writes about it at calm clinic.
