Should you or shouldn’t you? And if you should, how do you do it? A lot of job applicants’ way of small talk with the interviewer is by dropping names. For instance, if they found out that the interviewer used to work in a company where he or she knows somebody, the namedropping may go something like “Oh, you worked at [company name]? Maybe you know [friend’s name]?”
While it is nice and may make you more comfortable during an interview, name dropping actually has some disadvantages, and it may not work for you to get the job. Here are some reasons why.
- The interviewer might actually not know the person you know. That will be too awkward and tough to recover from. And among all the people in the universe, it is your interviewer that you do not want to place in an awkward position. After all, he will decide whether or not you pass the interview.
- The person you know may not really know you. If your interviewer says that he, in fact, knows the person you’re talking about, he might go and ask that person. Now if the person you mentioned is a senior and you know him by name and not on a more personal basis, then you will just place yourself in another awkward position.
- The interviewer might know the person, but not in a very good way. So if you speak highly of the person, you might be dismissed as somebody who is unable to judge a person’s character correctly.
- The person might be working in the company, and he might have a not-so-good performance and reputation. It is much better to speak about a person who’s doing well with his job, instead of having to go through an awkward minute of hearing statements like “Yeah, well she got fired last month.”
No comments:
Post a Comment