Although you will rely on your ingenuity to adapt to challenging interactions, we offer you some general principles for job interviews.

These principles should help you stay on track:

• Explore their needs first: Remember that all successful selling starts when the needs of the buyer are identified.  Therefore before you launch into your story, try to get your interviewer to talk a bit about the position – especially what problems are facing the company.  This will give you something to relate to when it’s your turn.
• Show acceptance: Remember also that your interviewer has non-business needs, such as being liked and appreciated in his/her career.  A future boss is weighing, consciously or otherwise, what it would be like to be around you for a few years.
• Balance the initiative: The ideal interview is a balance of inputs from the two parties, neither one dominating the “air-time”.  Develop graceful ways to re-channel the conversation to your concerns and your needs if you encounter an enthusiastic talker, he/she will appreciate it.
• Be inquisitive:  You are there to ask questions, as well as answer them.  If you are too passive a “responder”, you may fail in the interview for lack of initiative.  And you need to find out enough about the job, company, boss and environment to determine if you wish to pursue this opportunity further.
• Wrap up:  When you sense your time is running short, try to get closure – a reading on how you both feel about your candidacy, what should happen next and how you are leaving things.  A good interviewer provides this sort of wrap-up, but you can’t count on all of them to do so, sometimes you must take the initiative.  Try to leave some reason for further contact.