Group interviews can be daunting. iStockPhoto

By JOE GRIMM

The gang interview can be a job candidate’s biggest fear.

A friend who was scheduled for a group interview recently asked how she could prepare for a situation that was, frankly, intimidating, I gave her some advice and, a week or so later, read something in a book that I wished I had known in advance of her interview.

I told her to expect a longer than usual interview and to try to identify the lead interviewer. It is natural to expect there will be a lead questioner but that others at the table will have their questions, too. In a group interview, it is fine to ask the questioner or the group whether the answer has been sufficient before moving onto the next one.

The dynamic is less overpowering if you can focus on one questioner at a time. This puts you, the candidate, at greater ease.

“The Power of Small” has a little secret

But then, I read something in a new book, “The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference” that could really help in group interview situations.

Authors Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval have done a good job pulling together some anecdotes that illustrate their philosophy that sweating the small stuff can lead to big benefits.

Thaler had been working on former President Bill Clinton’s advertising campaign in 1992 when she experienced the attentive listening he was known for.

In the book, she says, “I was with a group of 15 people. I was sure that he was talking directly with me through the entire hour and a half that we were with him. I was just so sure that it was me. Then I went over to someone else and that person said, ‘He was talking to me the whole time.’ ”

She concluded, “If you watch Bill Clinton closely, though, the one thing you’ll notice he does is to wait until he has come to the end of a sentence to shift hos attention to another person. The result … is that you absolutely believe that that entire sentence was meant for you.”

The take-away for job candidates who must face group interviews is that when they answer questions, they direct some focused attention on each interrogator, according to where the questions came from, but that the transitions occur between sentences. This will, be necessity, put some slightly longer pauses in the conversation, but that is not at all a bad thing.