Madden Mischief

You better come into these arenas prepared for an adroit battle and looking your best as an astute gentleman wearing a perfectly pressed suit with matching handkerchief and tie or if you’re a woman, cheekily dressed business casual in blazer with tailored trousers or pencil skirt with a collared shirt, or maybe a refined knit top.

Yet, much more important than the apparel you wear and colors you choose are the weapons you carry, the words you load into your vocabulary, as your job interview today likely will take place in that modern colosseum, the plush executive office of the director of employment or maybe of the sultan himself, the CEO. 

Today, the main attraction is not just how smartly you dress, but the words you neatly pack into the complete sentences you speak that’s going make the right impression, ending in whether you’re welcomed aboard or figuratively carried out on a stretcher.

The main problem today is too many Americans speak a form of English that’s become a bit too phonetically relaxed than from what you would most likely hear from someone with an upscale background or a graduate from an Ivy league university, now skillfully competing for a job.  I went to Penn, btw.  Master’s degree!

Dat’s a right, for some English keeps a gettin’ kinda tired and lazy.  So, exercise it.  Give it workouts.  Lots of drills and practice!

These days around my condo in Florida you hear conversations taking shortcuts like “Yo Ted, ain’t seenya round. Whereubin? Ubinaway? Idonno. Uza reeel snowbird!  Instead of “I haven’t seen you around lately.  Where have you been?  On vacation?” 

You would more likely hear today a casual abbreviated version of modern-day American English such as this: “How ya been?  Where ya goin?  Whatsha been up to?   Instead of . . . “How have you been?  Where are you going?  What have you been doing lately?

Call it more relaxed and informal speech, maybe even friendlier sounding lingo than the full grammatical layout of words in proper order, in whole or complete sentences, but it does tend to also grade the speaker on his or her background, education and some would say, even reflect upon how far left or right they’re leaning politically. 

Best to keep that in mind when you’re out on that frontline, a job interview, unless it’s for digging ditches or laying pipelines, it’s best that you not just look but sound the part, educated to the hilt, and this you can show by choosing the right phrases, correct pronunciation and speaking in complete, grammatically correct sentences. 

That will help to set the tone, steer the right course for the position for which you’re aiming during that illuminating litmus test, the job interview.

Keep in mind also that the interview is an Xray of not just the highest grade you reached in school, but how skillfully you express yourself which in turn shows how well you’ll communicate with others at the workplace. 

Know that in most businesses there are few things as important as how well and effectively executives communicate.  So, good luck presenting yourself! 

Tom Madden is an interview champion who has been screened, interviewed and hired numerous times in his eclectic business career, starting out as a journalist, then a publicist, next a network television executive, now anauthor and owner of his own PR firm TransMedia Group, which he runs together with his daughter Adrinne Mazzone, its president.  Just before that, he was vice president, assistant to the president, at NBC and before that, he was the head of PR planning at ABC.  Before ascending to those high offices, he was out working on busy city streets as a newspaper reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer.