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"It has happened enough that I do think there's a correlation between keeping composure and what type of employee you'll be, " said staffing manager Melissa Jamison. "It may sound harsh, but we are not your friends – we are your potential employers, and we shouldn't be the ones you tell your secrets to. Please be honest with me, but keep it at a need-to-know level. " So what happens if you crack? The experts say you can still mitigate the damage. Take a deep breath. You should take a few seconds to think of your response to a question, anyway. So if something the interviewer says strikes an emotional chord, or you feel the tears pricking from the pressure, take a deep breath to compose yourself. Count to 10. Run through how much you rehearsed this interview. And start over. Own up to it. If you can't stem the tide of tears, just lean into them. Explain - briefly - why you got emotional, the way Cotter did. But do not dig yourself into a hole by sharing your whole life story. Reframe your passion as a positive.
While interviewing for a job at ESPN last year - which took months of phone interviews and background checks just to get a face-to-face - he was hit with a curveball question: What is the most important thing in your life? "I saw my kids, and my wife and the whole year behind me … and it just bubbled out of me, " he said. "I told him that my kids were my life, and I needed to be a working man to provide for them. And he hands me a box of tissues, and says thanks, and kinda ushers me out … and I'm thinking, 'Welp! There it goes. '" But Caviness got the gig as a manager in the research department. And he learned from his boss a few months later that the crying was the clincher. "He tells me, 'Theo, you were the only person I've seen in 15 years who cried and emoted like that. I told everyone you were our guy as soon as you left, '" recalled Caviness, who is loving his ESPN gig. See also: What to do if you cry at work like this tennis star Jack Healey, CEO of the Bear Hill Advisory Group, will also never forget the time he accidentally made a potential hire cry during a job interview at a previous company.
Of course, we all know that she kept going with the encouragement of the interviewer and eventually got the job. It's reasonable to think that the interviewer didn't expect candidates to cry, but it's not unreasonable to think that the interviewer felt the exercise would be difficult for Pamela and most similarly qualified professionals. How a candidate reacts to stress, surprise, and failure are all potential markers for success in the job. If I were hiring a pilot, I'd ideally like to put him or her in a flight simulator and observe a crash landing or engine failure scenario. Luckily, the interviewer was understanding and the author worked through the discomfort to come up with a satisfactory solution. Pressing "hang up" would have served no positive for either side in this case. **Fourth takeaway: Don't give up just because you think you are failing. There is nothing to gain by quitting, and you may learn some things about the process and about yourself by sticking it out. Change your mindset on interviews and keep the tissues in your pocket.
Crying at work is one of my biggest fears, not necessarily because of the acute mortification of doing so. There's nothing wrong with crying per se. I don't find it objectively embarrassing, but I do find allowing the warm, salty waters of my emotion to leak through the cracks in my façade (especially my professional façade) to be kind of humiliating. Plus, I never want to make anyone feel like I'm trying to manipulate them — something that cryers, especially women who portray emotion, are often accused of doing. The difficulty is that there are often differences to how people's tears are greeted at work. Sure, there was some jovial ribbing of former Speaker of the House John Boehner, whose emotional bouts were well-chronicled. But women are often seen as turning on the waterworks just to get what they want, making crying a potentially job-derailing faux pas. Whether it's a matter of feeling embarrassed or feeling judged, crying at work is a reasonable thing to fear. Luckily for Boon Cotter, a lighting artist based in California, crying during his job interview actually paid off.
Healey paused the interview to confess his head wasn't in it, because his mother had recently passed away. The candidate burst into tears. "That gave me real perspective into who she was as a person, " he told Moneyish. "We were building a company from the ground up, and I needed a right-hand person … and this showed me she had empathy for other folks. " They ended up working together for the next 14 years. "It became a running joke with us whenever we were hiring someone, " he added. "We'd ask, 'How did the interview go? ' and answer, "Fine, but I didn't make them cry. '" Crying during a job interview isn't always a deal-breaker. (grinvalds/iStock) While getting emotional during an interview can showcase your authenticity, like in these specific examples, you shouldn't expect to weep your way to the top. Just as many employers told Moneyish that tears are a major turn-off. Marc Prosser, the co-founder of, remembers when what should have been a routine interview with an internal candidate went off the rails.
Shortly after the phone interview debacle, the author had some pretty low points. "And then the sobbing REALLY began. I had just finished the first step of the interview process with the company I desperately wanted to work for, and I'd bombed it. I'd frozen, I'd cried, I'd stumbled through my somewhat shoddy solution. Did I really deserve to even be an engineer, if I couldn't even make it through a phone screen? What gives me the rights to give talks at conferences, if I can't make it through standard interview processes? I was pretty damn frustrated with myself. " All of these thoughts and feelings that led to questions about even being fit for the industry, which were the result of what would subsequently be deemed a successful phone interview. How did she get there? Remember earlier when I mentioned school? Suppose I were to give you a test, and I provide the results in real-time with a "right" or " wrong" signal after every response. Ten questions into the test, you manage to get half correct.
We can debate whether taking an interview when you are not on an active job search is a noble pursuit, but if you have gone several years without interviewing I assure you that today's technical interview may be unrecognizable. If you don't care to interview when you have no intent of taking a job, perhaps sit in on an interview at your company. The observation gives you risk-free access to the process, and you can see how others handle situations that are potentially stressful. ** First takeaway: Interview, whether giving or receiving, more often than you job search. The author wrote about her preparation process. "I wasn't sure how to prepare for it, what sort of questions I'd be asked. I figured I'm known for more front-end work these days and folks may be under the misguided illusion that I'm a JS expert, so I read through parts of the ECMAscript spec, reviewed the craziness of prototypical inheritance in JS, and read through all the front-end posts on that engineer's blog. Part of me thought I should study more, study enough that I'd feel confident that I could handle *anything* they threw of me, but that would have taken me months, if that.
These are tears of employ. An Australian developer's tweet recently went viral with a sob story about how crying during his job interview landed his dream gig. Twitter user Boon Cotter shared a 14-post thread on Tuesday about flying to California for an interview with Naughty Dog, a video game company behind titles like "The Last of Us" and "Uncharted. " When the potential employers asked Cotter why he wanted to work there, he got emotional while describing how much it meant to him as a gay man to have "The Last of Us" include a gay character who broke stereotypes. "And telling them that made me start crying, " he admitted. Neither Cotter nor Naughty Dog responded to Moneyish's requests for comment, but Cotter reportedly still got the job. "Moral to the story: Don't underestimate authenticity. Be raw, be vulnerable, be real, " he concluded. Theo Caviness, formerly a graphic designer at the New York Post and the New York Daily News, told Moneyish he had a similar experience after going through the ringer during his 2016 job search.
More likely, I'd never feel 100 percent confident. " This is how most tech pros prepare for interviews, which is why books that list answers to commonly asked questions sell bundles. She read through tons of technical information that she anticipated would be covered during her screen, and even felt she should keep studying so she'd be more confident. But what didn't she prepare for? It seems as though the author didn't prepare for the high probability that she would be asked a question that she couldn't answer right away. She never prepared to fail, and because of that oversight she froze, panicked, and began to cry. Had she anticipated that being stumped was a likely scenario, and had she known that there are many technical interviewers who will continue to ask questions until you get one wrong, she would have been much more comfortable when it happened. This is why schools have fire drills. **Second takeaway: Realize that you will not be able to answer every question, and prepare an answer for when you get stumped.