Students’ Speak: Confidence helps you convey your message easily

By: Shikhar Singh

Shikhar shares his personal experience of PI along with few tips for those who would be attending selection and placement interviews.

Parameters taken into account for assessment during PI

Personal Interview: It is the final step to assess a candidate followed by a written or coding test. Generally, it is a face-to-face interaction between the candidate and the panel of judges. Sometimes, the interviewer prefers interaction over the phone when face-to-face interaction is not possible.

Skills required for PI:

Skills required for a Personal Interview can be categorized as:

1. Hard Skills

Hard skills can be defined as the technical or core skills of a candidate. If the candidate belongs to the engineering field, his/her branch-specific knowledge, whether conceptual or practical, is considered as his/her hard skills.

2. Soft Skills

These are the soft skills required during a Personal Interview:

a) Emotional Intelligence - This is something which was not well known in the past time, but today a person having a high emotional quotient is preferred over others. A person having high emotional intelligence can be a good team player in comparison with others because emotional intelligence is:

1) Ability to understand your own emotions

2) Self-expression of emotions

3)Ability to understand the emotions of others.

3. Communications Skills

How can we say that a person has good communication skills? The answer to this question is that if the candidate is able to communicate his/her thoughts efficiently by writing or verbally, then he/she is having good communication skills. In other words, we can define good communication skills as good command over a language, which means a candidate can communicate his/her thoughts by writing it verbally clearly.

4. Body Language

Body language skills are one of the most important skills interviews look for in a candidate. Your way of a handshake, eye contact and how you greet the interviewers are important nonverbal skills.

Lazy body posture, negative facial expressions, unnecessary movements of your hands and head and excessive fidgeting are not appreciated during an interview. So, a candidate must take care of his/her body language.

5. Problem-solving approach

We can define problem-solving approach as a manner to find a solution to a problem. This is an important skill for judging a candidate during an interview. Generally, the candidate is given a special problem or puzzles during the interview, and they are judged on the basis of how they approach to solve that problem.

6. Time Management

Since companies want their employees to be very punctual, time management is one of the important skills interviewers look for in a candidate. You can reach the venue for the interview early to show that you have good time management skills instead of reaching there at the last minute.

My overall performance during the personal interview was judged on the following basis:

1. Confidence: My confidence was one of the important parameters for judgment during the interview. I confidently answered each and every question asked by the interviewer. Confidence helps you to convey your message easily.

2. Knowledge - Since companies hire candidates to perform specific tasks and work in particular fields, I was judged mainly on the basis of my knowledge in the respective field. Since I applied for the role of Digital Marketing Executive in a company, most of the questions asked in the interview were related to Digital Marketing especially Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and so on.

Panelists involved in Personal Interview round:

During my interview, the panel consisted of two persons-  one was the Manager in the company and the other was the Digital Marketing Manager. Their questions were mainly based on digital marketing and evaluated me on the basis of my confidence and my knowledge of my field.

About the Author:

Shikhar Singh is in the fourth year of mechanical engineering from AKGEC, Ghaziabad. He likes to guide students about engineering entrances and careers. His fields of interest are natural science, Sanskrit, flute music, sketching and writing. By profession, he is a digital marketer and a content creator.