Interview Techniques

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Hello All.

Thought I'd ask about how people succeed with Autism at Interviews, I just had one today - hoping I'll get the job, the panel was really nice.

General comments welcome,

The question I wanted to ask is how do you answer the questions such as your strengths and your weaknesses - I think I did ok, mentioning my weakness being lack of awareness of subtle body language and other non-verbal communication. I was pleased when they said that they didn't recognise anything that was unusual about my body language. I have also been working on this over the last many months and I think this would have sounded good.

Does anyone here on the autistic spectrum have a job that they like?

Thanks

Ben

Not yet, but I'm hoping my SAT tutoring business really takes off.

Okay, about interviews. I used to think of interviewers as kind of my friend. Whereas actually, I'm not likely to see the interviewer much if and when I do get the job, they're not likely to remember me because they interview a lot of people, etc. They're alright people, they're just kind of doing their job.

Okay, I would generally recommend, 'I can sometimes be too much of a perfectionist. In the balance between speed and accuracy, I can sometimes take too much time' this is the beginning stages of self-disclosure, and it almost reflects positively on you!

Now, you disclosed a little more, and that's okay. That's how you're playing the hand so to speak. I would recommend just keeping there, being matter-of-fact positive about it, yeah, a little trouble with body language, a lot of people do.

Now, once you meet people the actual workgroup, you can choose to disclose more, or not, medium stages, in terms of your own choosing. And really, they generally won't even know what you said to the interviewers and/or it will shift down in importance to the immediate feel and texture of what's happening in the immediate social and work situation.

You've had a positive interview. You have done what you can. Please remember that it is a numbers games. If you can respectfully get other irons in the fire at the same time, that might be a good thing, too.

Like they've never heard that one before.

That's okay. That's what you're trying to do. You want to give bland predictable answers. Think of the interview kind of like an obstacle course you stroll through at an easy pace.

i can do just fine in interwiews its more problem of keeping job either i quit after while because i cant handle people too well
or u get fired for same reason what happened at last job

I really encourage you to look at it like poker hands. You can lose three in a row even if you play well. And you can win three in a row even if you don't play particularly well. (I recommend poker for social skills, emphatically don't recommend it as an attempt to make money)

And then there's the whole thing that a job like working retail in a dept store (largely because of co-workers and managers) is as hard or harder in absolute terms than being a medical intern! If you read medical school biographies being an intern is a very hard job because senior residents and attendings expect you to get things done and lab technicians, nurses and other people in the hospital rather resent you as a newly minted officer as it were. But at least there's an upside to it! Many jobs in retail, restaurants, etc, don't have near the same amount of upside.

I like my job. To answer the strengths I just answer honestly. As for weaknesses, I've always hated that question because in the past I've not seen any weaknesses in myself. To be fair I'll admit that I'm probably wrong, but that's my perspective regardless. A thing that I believe can spin that question around is to change it to "here's what I'm working on."

So for example if you're a programmer and you consider yourself awesome at explaining technical things to coworkers, perhaps you tend to go over the heads of non-technical people. This is a very common problem with programmers! There's a reason why our business clients sometimes hate us. They ask a question like, "How does this impact the customer?" And we programmers answer with a discussion about how the database connection key is using the wrong security settings and how to fix it without ever mentioning what happens to the customer.

If you think that's an important skill then you really should take measures to improve it even before an interview. Then you could say, "Although I do very well explaining technical issues to other programmers, I am currently studying how to explain technical things to a non-technical audience."

One other thing that many interviewers like is how you answer the question. One method that I like is called STAR: Situation / Task, Action, Result. Describe a specific situation or task, describe specifically what you did, and specifically what was the result. Specific is the key word here.

Do not answer a question with a "yes" or "no" alone. Do not answer questions with generalities, like "I would often do early discussions with external teams to determine what impact my software upgrades would have, and the results were always that things worked out well."

This is better. Note the specificity. "(Situation / Task) I was asked to upgrade the corporate database from SQL Server 2005 to version 2008. (Action) Early in the project I tracked down all external computer systems that interacted with the corporate database and scheduled individual meetings with representatives of those systems to discuss the upgrade. I did not just tell them about the upgrade but asked them to explain their system to me so that I could also understand their interactions with the corporate database. (Result) These external teams did identify many potential software conflicts, but as a result of me asking them to help me understand their systems, I was able to discover 4 additional software conflicts that they overlooked. 2 of these conficts were in mission critical applications that would have had a severe impact on our customers had I not identified them. This allowed us to analyze, fix, and test these conflicts before upgrading to SQL Servier 2008, and the upgrade went smoothly with no customer impact, no server outages."

Hopefully my advice works. I actually have an abyssmal track record of interviewing. I've only had to search for jobs twice. Despite having a 3.9 GPA and tons of honors in college, I bombed one interview after the next my senior year and then again a few years later after a layoff. I think things would be different now. Now I know about Asperger's. Maybe I wasn't making any eye contact in the interview and gave people the creeps, so now I'll just look them in the nose and fool them. I've also studied the literature that they give to interviewers so know what they are looking for, like the STAR thing. Wish I knew about that years ago! And I've worked a lot on my communication skills since then.

I've been to an interview training session with a psychologist who exactly said that too.
Just refer to skills you want to improve. Turn it over to a positively sounding message.

Another thing this psychologist recommended:
If you can, write down for yourself your knowledge, your achievements, things other people are proud of you etc. Have a look at it again before you go to the interview.


*signed*