Women, here’s why you fail job interviews

Joyce Ngumba, a director at Akili Dada, a women’s leadership and mentorship organisation, was recently surprised at the lack of finesse in young women’s job seeking behaviours.

In July this year, she interviewed more than 70 women seeking to secure three positions in her organisation, and she made the observation that to her explained why women’s presence in higher echelons in workplaces was lacking.

“The layout of the CVs were less than appealing. There were spelling mistakes,” she says, adding: “Even the body language of candidates with the stellar grades showed fear and tension.

Ms Ngumba was particularly surprised that one of them came 45 minutes late, with neither apology nor explanation.

Later in the waiting rooms after the interviews were over, she says, the young women would come to talk to her more openly, hoping to add to the information that they had not given while sitting before the panel.

About job preparedness

Her experience with the young job seekers led to her to initiate a training forum where young women would be taught about job preparedness.

Attending one of her trainings on Wednesday, held in Nairobi was Miriam Macharia. Miriam confesses that her first job interview scared her stiff, that when she was asked a simple question and her mind “went blank”. “I just mumbled inaudibly,” she remembers.

This does not surprise recruitment consultant Perminus Wainaina of Corporate Staffing Services (CSS). Through years of interaction with job seekers, Mr Wainaina has come to observe that women are generally less confident in their presentation during job interviews compared to men. This situation contributes to potential employers ignoring them.

Wainaina explained at the Wednesday training by Akili Dada that while women were willing to furnish their potential employers with more information than men, they lacked the soft skills that influenced employment decisions during interviews.

Men, on the other hand, give very little information in their CVs, but are more confident in oral interviews.

International studies

Mr Wainaina’s and Ms Ngumba’s observations find backing in some international studies that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. They indicate that, coupled with cultural bias, women’s acute lack of confidence is the reason for their underwhelming performance in the job market.

Two American Journalists, Claire Shipman, a reporter for ABC News, and Katty Kay, an anchor of BBC World News America, published a book titled Womenomics, which was a two-years collection of their observation on the women they had interviewed.

The two discovered that even the most influential women in the nation suffered self-doubt.

Despite visible economic success, one of their interviewees had said: “There are still days I wake up feeling like a fraud, not sure I should be where I am”.

In her now popular book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, writes that the reason women are not as successful as men is because they bring with them the “girl scout attitude” to work.

Women, Sheryl states in the book, perceive work as they would look at their families, as a God given duty and not something where their achievements can be rewarded.

This maternal attitude, it would appear, leaks to their CV writing. Mr Wainaina, whose organisation has a database of more then 30,000 CVs, gives the example of female job seekers who give their mother’s number as the alternative on which they can be reached.

The problem with that, he says, is best explained through instances where the prospective employer dials the number and is met with statements like, “What intentions do you have with my daughter?”

Further, Wainaina says, many women consider volunteer and community jobs as unworthy of being announced on their CVs, yet those often turn out to be impressive demonstrations of leadership and of being a team player.