Ugh. Those dirty words: Layoff. Jobless. Unemployed—dirty words for any reason, season and situation.

How painful it must be when those who used to be the ones behind the desks doing the hiring now turn into the ones now scrambling to grab interviews. Desperate clients surprise me when they tell me, “I used to read resumes and interview people—and now I have no idea how to interview—now that I am out of work!”

Yikes. Imagine that. How could this be?

I found out it’s very easy to feel this way even after you’ve been used to being The One in Charge. It reveals something critical to me about the interview process and self esteem no matter what our former positions were in business, that I want to pass it on to everyone embroiled in the grueling—or shall I be positive and say—demanding process of job search. It tells me that no matter how secure and successful we see ourselves in a job, a position of advantage or even power over others, it dissipates immediately like the illusory mirage of an oasis in a desert, once we lose it for any reason. It is humiliating to feel as if we are stripped naked and lost like children wandering in the night. And it happens to almost all of us when tables turn in the employment arena. It’s one thing to slide into a new job while we are working, but apparently, once given the ax, we are dazed, fallen and petrified, and forget all we know ourselves to be, professionally—and sometimes even personally. It’s jarring psychically just as if we were injured in a major accident and now require medical attention and therapy. It just goes to show us that interviewing scares the best of us!

I am wondering if it’s not a bad idea to approach an interview as if we were the ones conducting and leading the interview. What would we ask of us? How would we perceive us? Once we find out our weak areas by this kind of self-assessment, perhaps we can then take the steps to go about fixing what ails us.

Perhaps it’s a new skill we need to present to the next employer. Then let’s do what we must to set about obtaining it. Sometimes it is our self esteem that has taken a beating. Then we need to dust ourselves off, stand up and try again—against all seeming odds—and no matter how we really feel—and recognize it for what it is: Anger at job loss.

It also helps to remember that the Interviewer is just another person like you and me with the same hang-ups and life problems as the rest of us. Don’t let a wooden or steel desk cloud that fact of business life! Let us not overlook this simple truth. I believe it is critical to success.

So why not approach the next interview as if we were the Interviewer? After researching the company, picking the brains of those in our networking contacts, and people in the industry, ferreting out articles online about industry trends and company specifics and anonymous company gossip from such places as Glassdoor.com, cleaning and pressing our interview-best suits, and bringing our arsenal of quantifiable, tangible relevant-to-the-prospective job accomplishments on the very tips of our tongues (the strongest antidote to lack of confidence on a job interview) we need to remember that circumstances are the only things that stand in our way to a new job. And what does the prefix, “circum” mean? To circle or go around. Certainly we can circle around or circumvent and jump over those circumstances once we understand what’s behind them—even if it takes a hundred tries. We need only remember the classic story of The Wizard of Oz, where the ominous-looking Wizard, looming bigger than life on the screen, turns out to be a mere image propelled by some old man behind a curtain in a booth. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” so the saying goes. That sentiment could represent intimidation of the Unknown, as much as it can stand for our own insecurities.

By The Job Enthusiast