Top 10 Tips for Acing Your Next Job Interview

Finding a job is tough enough as it is without having to go through harrowing interviews. Here's everything you need to know about nailing your interview so you can get through it stress-free.

10. First, Get the Interview

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Before you can ace your interview, you have to actually get the interview. That means making an awesome resumé and making sure it gets through. Check out our top 10 ways to rock your resumé, and make sure toavoid the items that can kill your chances at getting the job (like a long history of unemployment). Once you're done, don't just send it in with the rest. Use your connections and a bit of ingenuity to beat that computerized system and get your resumé into the right hands. If you don't get the interview, find out why and use that to help you the next time around. Photo by Lisa F. Young (Shutterstock).

9. Prepare Ahead of Time

So you've got the interview, but you still have a lot of work to do before you walk into that building. Writer Alan Skorkin says the main reason most people suck at interviews is a lack of preparation. So, find out as much as you can about the company, research the job, and formulate a strategy to stand out in that interview among all the other candidates. Getting a cheat sheet togetherand studying it can help you out, too. Photo by iQoncept (Shutterstock).

8. Make a Good First Impression

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Your job interview starts the second you walk in the door, so be ready. Practice walking into a room if you have to. But more than anything, learn how first impressions work and

Art Of Clearing Interviews

Assess your strengths:
Assess your skills, and you will be able to identify your strengths. Make a list of your skills, dividing them into three categories as follows:

Knowledge-based skills, acquired from education and experience, for example, computer proficiency, languages, degrees, training and technical ability.

Transferable skills or your portable expertise that you gain from one job to another. These include, for instance, communication and people skills, analytical, problem-solving and planning skills.

Personal traits - your unique qualities like being dependable, flexible, friendly, hard working, expressive, punctual and a team player.

Once you have listed all your abilities, choose three to five of those strengths that match what the employer is seeking for the job in question. Make sure that you can cite specific examples, if probed further, to demonstrate why you claim a particular thing as your strength.

Identify your weaknesses:
Everyone has weaknesses, but who wants to admit them, especially in an interview? The best way to handle this question is to play down the characteristic and emphasize its positive aspect. Select a trait and come up with a solution to overcome your weakness. Avoid talking about your personal habits and concentrate more on the professional qualities you have. For example, you can say, "I pride myself on being a 'big picture' guy. I admit that I sometimes miss small details, but I always make sure that there's someone who is detail-oriented in my team."

Script your answers:
Write a positive statement, which you can pronounce

The oddest Job Interview Questions asked  at Tech Companies in 2011

When sitting down for a job interview at a top U.S. tech company, you’d typically expect the interviewer to hammer you with questions testing your abilities, past history and knowledge of the company. You wouldn’t think it was the time or the place to start exploring solutions to world hunger, but that’s exactly what happened to one candidate looking to be a software developer at Amazon.

In Glassdoor‘s annual review of the top 25 oddball questions asked in job interviews in 2011, tech companies feature highly. Although there’s just one question from Google on the list, the Wall Street Journal recently profiled the search giant’s interview process, highlighting the trademark strangeness of some of the questions.

Google’s odd questions range from relatively straightforward mathematical brain teasers like, “Using only a four-minute hourglass and a seven-minute hourglass, measure exactly nine minutes–without the process taking longer than nine minutes,”