I made one stupid, massive mistake that lost me a job offer in the last hour of a multi-round job interview. With 5 minutes of extra work, I could have easily avoided the mistake during the job interview and wrapped up an easy raise, here's the story.
Story: A 3rd party recruiter reached out to me about an opportunity to work at a pretty interesting 40-person startup software company in NYC looking to hire their first legit sales rep. I was employed and actively on the job market, but I knew I was underpaid in my current role, so I said, what the hell, I'll interview and see if they offer compelling compensation.
So I go through the interview process, ace a few phone interviews and I'm invited for an on-site interview at the company's HQ office. Admittedly, I didn't do much preparation since it wasn't a job that I had sought out and I really didn't care too much about it. I end up sitting down with the two co-founders and a VP and the interview is going very well.
Then it happens. In my 1-on-1 interview with the CEO/Founder, he asks me if I had signed up for a trial of the company's software and played around with it..... My answer? "Ummmmm, no, I didn't get a chance." From that point on, I could tell the conversation turned for the worse. He was almost bitter about it and I felt like I lost him on the spot.
A week goes by and I don't hear anything from the company or the recruiting agency. They finally call me and say, sorry, they aren't going to make you an offer but the company didn't specify why. I knew exactly why.
Moral of the story: Always do your research prior to interviewing. If they company sells a product, develops a software or anything else you can publicly access, get your hands on it. In this case, I could have easily signed up for the company's free-trial software and played around with it for 5-10 minutes and aced the question.
I honestly have no doubt that if my answer was different to the CEO's question, I would have gotten the job offer. I don't know if I would have accepted it, but I literally get embarrassed about the fact that I screwed up an interview that badly.
Always do your in-depth research. All it takes is one moment to lose a job offer.
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Read the blog post: http://careerdreaming.com/a-software-sales-interview-story-dont-do-this/
