How to interview

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How to interview

        Interviewing is an art form of intricate discipline that combines preparation and

spontaneity in a potent mix. Like any art form, it's practiced so many different levels,

depending on the innate talent, hard work, and creativity of its performers. At its best,

what really takes place is an "inter-view"- a mutual process of looking inward( inter

means " between" ). The success depends on first understanding your own internal views.

The more self-awareness you cultivate, the greater the ease and skill you'll bring to the

interview process. The word interview is derived from the French entrevue/entrevoir,

meaning " to see one another". The tremendous opportunity available to find out about

yourself through discovering other people, their ideas , and your responses to them can

come from interviewing. Successful interviewing requires a basic foundation, advanced

research, negotiating a interview, preparation, and recording.

        The basic foundation for any interviewer is to be able to communicate and listen.

Communication is a learned process that never really stops once we initiate it.

Communication is also a complex process among differently programmed individuals

using an infinite variety of symbols-language being only one kind of symbol. To

communicate successfully in the interview setting, both parties must be in a state of

readiness, able to share a symbolic system, willing to establish a relationship and

atmosphere that facilitates interaction, capable and willing to listen and to engage in

appropriate feedback behavior, and flexible enough to respond sensitively and with good

judgment to a wide range of inputs (Beach, 1982). Memorizing lists of principals and

reciting them upon demand will not make you a good interviewer. According to Barone

(1995), you must understand them, practice them, be able to adapt them to differing

interviews and interviewees, and refine them to suit your personality, background, and

needs.

        Listening plays a very big role in building your foundation before interviewing

too. In my opinion, the key to being a good listener is to want to listen, which can require

willpower and discipline. In most cases few people are unwilling to make that effort.

Basically, listening for most of us is waiting for a chance to start talking again. According

to McLaughlin (1950), we all desperately want to be listened to, but what we do is just

primarily talk. In my view, when you listen deeply , your response assists and inspires the

person to speak with more clarity and poise. The simple but demanding act of listening

with total concentration, which includes hearing more than just the person's words,

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enables the speaker to concentrate and to reach more deeply for ideas and ways to

express them. One authors believes that people rarely experience the pleasure and

empowerment of being listened to intently, they feel it immediately when it exists, and it

generates excitement and makes them want to connect with the person who is the source

of that employment. The ultimate reward for active listening seems only just: people

reciprocate and listen to you (Richardson, 1965). According to Samovar (1982), if you

find in interviews that you're not taken seriously, improving your ...

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