GUEST COMMENT: How to convince an interviewer that they love you

Success in interviews is simple. In the 30 or 45 (if you are lucky) minutes you have in that interview room, you must leave with your interviewer not only believing that they want to hire you, but they want to adopt you and bring you home.

I've been to a lot of investment banking interviews in my time. I've also spent a lot of time interviewing in investment banks. I can therefore say with confidence that I know what's required to convince the average interviewer that you are abnormally charismatic. This knowledge, I have distilled into...

....The ABC of interviewing.

Be Awesome, be Brave and be Committed!

Let's start in reverse...

COMMITMENT:

In the ABC of interviewing, the 'C' is probably the most important.

Being committed means being prepared. It means knowing the answers to the standard questions (Why this role? Why this firm? Why are you leaving?). Most importantly, it means amassing advance intelligence about your interviewer.

Always ask for your interviewers' name before the interview. Then Google them aggressively.

Try to build a profile of who they are, what they have done and where your experiences overlap. Often seeing their physical appearance on Facebook or looking at their work profile on LinkedIn will help. Seeing their face eliminates one more surprise; the less surprises you have, the more comfortable you are and the better you will do.

Knowing their profile in detail will help you think of targeted questions. For example, if you find out that they moved from exotics to flow derivatives, you might ask them whether their decision to move down the risk scale was based on clients' becoming more vanillarised?

Interest in the interviewer is the most important point here. It has been said a billion times, nay one billion and one now, but people love talking about themselves - this is fact.

BRAVENESS

If you are feeling brave, dig further into your interviewer's world: find out their nationality for instance (and really find out, do not attempt to guess even if they are called Angus McScotland, he may still be Danish!).

Every detail counts.

I once had an interview near St Patrick's Day and I knew my interviewer was Irish, so I wore a green tie. This allowed me to then tell him that my grandmother was Irish and suddenly he cared about what I had to say.

Next on the 'bravery' list - smiling. I generally hate fake smiling and all actions of that ilk (maybe it is because even my own fake laugh makes me cringe) but smiling helps if you're convincing. I recommend a red bull 15 minutes prior to blast off; not only does it help with your focus, but if you can avoid the twitching, the nervous smile should help.

AWESOMENESS:

Being awesome is the tough one.

Awesomeness means different things at different firms. Be arrogant at Morgan Stanley and you'll never fit in. Be insufficiently arrogant at Goldman Sachs and you might be branded a weirdo!

It is such a hard line to tread, but being awesome is a state of mind as much as anything else - you must wholly believe in your qualities and continually bring the interviewers attention to them in the subtlest of ways (this is where rehearsing helps).

It is also about being awesome in tough situations. Jim O'Neill recently joked 'never let a good crisis go to waste' and while he was referring to the Euro zone solvency crisis, the logic stands. Embrace your mistakes if necessary and make light of them.

There is often a lot at stake in interviews, but you can only demonstrate your unique brand of awesomeness if you are relaxed. This is not always easy and visualisation techniques like thinking about your interviewer in their underwear are just plain weird and unhelpful.

To maximise awesomeness, I therefore suggest this approach: tell yourself that you are interviewing for a job because they (theoretically) believe on paper at least that you are good enough to do the job; commit to preparation; be brave in your approach and ooze awesomeness through a state of red bull-induced focus.

These suggestions are not revolutionary. Nor are they necessarily going to be particularly helpful for everyone, but if they do help one of you mitigate the pain of interviewing, then this article has served its purpose.