Signs the Interview Went Well & How to Recover From a Bad Interview

Have you ever had an interview for your ideal role, and after the interview, you had no idea how it went?

Or even worse after the interview, you’re reflecting on it, and you think you might have completely botched it and just ruined your chances of making it to the next phase of the interview stage. 

I know how nerve-wracking interviews can be. And in today’s video, I’m going to talk about the signs to look for in an interview to see how you did, if the interview went well, and actually what to do to recover if you think that it didn’t go so well. 

Knowing this can help keep you in the running as the ideal candidate for your dream role. And I want you to stay tuned, because a little bit later in the video, I share a really bold and juicy tip that you can use in your next job interview. 

And if you haven’t subscribed to my channel yet, hit the subscribe button and the bell to be notified when I publish new videos, all about how to get hired for your dream role in your 40s and beyond. 

I’m Danielle Bradley here of Coach with Danielle and I’m a career coach and mentor for experienced professionals who are looking for their next role, their dream role. And I have been on both sides of the interview desk as a hiring manager and as a candidate. And I know just how stressful job interviews can really be. 

Here are the five signs to look out for to know if the interview went well. 

Number one, you want to look at the length of the interview. And I’m not talking about just the pure length of the interview, that doesn’t really mean much. Because nowadays, especially there’s a lot of virtual interviews, and people can be very efficient with their time, hiring managers are quite busy as we all are. 

And sometimes they will only book 30 minutes for an executive role interview. And so what you want to look at is how long the interview was booked for and how long your actual interview lasted. If it lasted the length of time, the entire length of time or a little bit over what was allocated for it, that is the sign that the interview went really well. 

For example, if you had an interview that was booked for 30 minutes, and you went 30 minutes or a little bit longer, chances are they’re very interested in you as the candidate for the role. Now, if you had an interview that was booked for 30 minutes, and it lasted 10 minutes, obviously, something has most likely gone wrong. Now that it’s your fault. 

But I want you to stay tuned because I have a really juicy tip, as I mentioned, to help you know exactly what to do next, if that ever happens. 

Sign number two is all about their body language. Now, if you are doing virtual interviews, of course, you’re going to have to pay really close attention to the body language, it’s going to be a little more challenging to see their body language in a virtual interview, but you’re still able to tell a whole lot and the sign that you’re wanting to look out for in this case is, are they smiling when they’re talking at you?

Are they making eye contact? Are they leaning in towards you? Are they showing an open disposition with their overall body or they’re sitting, you know, with their arms crossed, that would be a negative body language sign. 

You want to look for these things, to get a feel for how your interview is going. 

Sign number three is they’re selling you. You want to look for buy signals from the interviewer to see if they are interested in potentially making you an offer. And what tends to happen in that situation is they’ll start to praise how great the company is the culture, how great the role is, maybe even who they are and how they like to manage people. 

When they start to talk this way, it is a really clear sign that they are very interested in you as the number one candidate for the role. 

Sign number four is all about your gut. When you’re able to just clear your mind and go inwards and really go in and get in touch with your intuition, what does it tell you? 

There’s always something that we sense unconsciously when we’re in different situations and the job interview is no different. Reflect afterwards and go inwards into your intuition and listen to what your gut is telling you about how you did in the interview. 

And you will definitely get some clues from that as to how it went. 

Sign number five is going to be a sign that you’re going to find out. But you need to ask a question first. And it is a bold question. Not a lot of people ask that question. But it is a really great question to ask towards the end of an interview, especially if you’ve had a significantly long interview, if they have gone through almost all of the allocated time you want to ask them this? 

“What’s your take on me as a candidate for this role”? 

Super simple, but not a lot of people will ask this and most of the time, you will get an honest answer. And if there’s something that is still causing some doubt in the interviewer’s mind about you as a fit for that role, they may tell you what that is. And that gives you a great opportunity to address it right then and there before you leave the interview. 

If they bring up something that they’re not sure that maybe you didn’t have an opportunity to discuss in the interview, it gives you the chance to do that right then and there. 

So that really is a great question to ask. 

Okay, let’s talk about what to do if after the interview, you feel like it didn’t go well. What you want to do is you want to do an evaluation after every single job interview, and I talked about that in more detail. 

In the video that I will put a link right here to that video. And also below the video is all about virtual interviews, I talked about how to do an evaluation after interviews, but part of the evaluation is to determine what didn’t work, what didn’t go so well in the interview, especially if you were in an interview situation where things got cut short, you really want to spend some time thinking back to where things seem to have shifted. 

And that will give you some clues about what might have gone wrong. And you do have an opportunity to recover from that by sending a thank you email. 

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about a specific situation from a client who had an interview with a recruiter that lasted 10 minutes, there were 30 minutes planned for that particular interview. So obviously, something went wrong, something happened that cut the interview short. And really what it was, is there was a surprise question that was asked in that interview that caught her completely off guard, and she didn’t answer it to the best of her ability. 

And immediately the recruiter just cut the interview short, and it was done. And what we did afterwards is we went back to all of the questions that were asked, and the way she answered and identified a specific area where the question was trying to gauge her excitement for the role. 

Once she found out what type of industry it was, what kind of company it was, and she didn’t come across super excited about it, because she didn’t know very much about it. 

What we did is we crafted a very careful, thank you note that addressed that exact element that was the cause for the interview to ensure the excitement. So she did a bit of research now that she had more information and she was able to convey that very clearly in the thank you note. 

Lo and behold, she got a phone call from that recruiter and just a few minutes later, wanting to bring her forward into the next phase of the interview process and put her forward with a specific hiring manager for a follow up interview. 

Wanted to share that with you that there’s always an opportunity to recover from an interview when you have a situation like this where you weren’t able to address something that in hindsight, you know how to address and you can do that in a carefully crafted thank you note. 

There you have it, the signs that your job interview went well and how to recover from a bad interview. 

Now in next week’s video, I’m very excited to be talking about the great resignation that everyone is talking about. All the experts are talking about this, and I will share my thoughts about how you can use this to your advantage to accelerate your career. 

If you’re still struggling to secure job interviews for yourself, then I want you to check out my resume booster. I cover the reasons why your resume is failing you and four steps to quickly fix  it. Go to coachwithdanielle.com/boost to sign up for that and get the video and the PDF guide that will help you start getting interviews for your dream role. 

If you love this video, click the like button subscribe to my channel and I will see you next week