I was listening to a colleague talk today about a panel discussion he listened to where the topic of discussion was about how you get prospective employers to want to hire you. The main topic they kept circling back to was that for someone who is trying to land a job, it is more important that you look interested, rather than interesting. What they meant by that was that as someone who is interested, you are asking lots of questions and wanting to learn all you can about the job, the people, the company, etc. Someone who is interesting is simply someone who stands out. This might be because they have interesting hair or because they like cliff diving or some other weird thing. This by itself won’t necessarily land you the job.

As I thought about this statement, I would argue that you really need both. You need to be interesting so you stand out in your prospective employers mind AND you need to be interested, so they know you can think and want to learn about the job at hand.

Thoughts?

–Pete

Tags: jobs