All too often I've seen candidates who have the best skills on paper, but don’t “interview well enough” to land the role. Time and time again I’ve seen people fall through the cracks just by virtue of shooting themselves in the foot in the interview, and in the lead up to the interview.

As a recruiter, it’s pretty frustrating to see this happen. We put in considerable time and effort to ensure that our candidates are top notch, and most of the time them not getting the role can be entirely preventable. To try and build awareness as to how to best prevent this, I’ve put together a list of positive candidate behaviours to help guide you on the way to landing your next role.

So you’ve been offered the interview, you’ve found out about the company a bit from the recruiter, and now you’re super excited to be able to finally interact with someone from the company to get a feel for their culture and what they’re about. I’ve seen this happen time and again with promising candidates, who naively think that by messaging the client directly they’ll demonstrate how keen they are to get started.

As the recruiter has put in the hard yards, it’s generally accepted that the recruiter is the first point of contact for all things candidate related. For a candidate to bypass that, it shows that the candidate is not in privy to process, and it reflects poorly on the amount of maturity, discipline and patience a candidate has. Please do not do this.

This has been a point of contention recently, with candidates seeing the salary (and commission structure) as the only part of the job. We get it. Living in Sydney and Melbourne is expensive. The cost of living isn’t going anywhere, but it’s important to acknowledge that there are other parts to the job apart from the pay. I recently had a very talented client leave their role with a very attractive salary after only three months as he couldn’t handle the workload. Try to imagine yourself in the role before you consider it.

There is nothing worse than seeing a candidate visit a client, and the client's reply is that they “weren’t a great fit culturally”. Culture can make or break companies. I had a candidate recently turn up to a sales role and immediately go through the list of their achievements prior. The candidate was also the first to speak in the interview without being prompted to, which was something the employer did not value. The way you conduct yourself in an interview speaks volumes, so try and mirror what the interviewer is like in terms of tone and poise. Ultimately an interview is about seeing if you’ll be the right fit, so it's important that you recognise what fitting really means.

It takes time to perfect your interview and post-interview etiquette. As hard as it can be, by at least acknowledging what is required to land a role, you can work towards correcting the behaviours that are necessary to get there. To all of you candidates out there, good luck and enjoy the ride!