Whether you are the hiring manager or the candidate being interviewed, hiring is personal, now more than ever. Candidate behavior has changed more in the past 5 years than at any time in the past 30 years, but few employers have updated their hiring practices. This creates some real challenges on both sides of the interview desk, and more than a few opportunities to gain a real competitive advantage.

Too many people forget the key to a great interview: what the interviewer remembers about you.

The vast majority of what happens in any given interview is pretty forgettable...for the interviewer. As the candidate, you have one experience of the interview question. When the interviewer asks about your greatest weakness and you cleverly reframe a strength by saying, "Gosh, Jim, you know sometimes I work too hard." You probably feel like you nailed it.

When you're looking for a new job, an interview offer is exciting. It's a chance to make your case for why someone should hire you. Sadly, most people are terrible at doing so.

Do you need to make the jump from a declining industry to a thriving one? Or have you decided that it’s time to make a significant career change, jumping into a field where you have very little experience?

Interviewing is fundamentally an exercise in risk management. As a job seeker, your goal is to reduce any appearance of risk in hiring you.

You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.

—Malcolm S. Forbes.

It is possible to tease out how toxic a potential manager will be from your brief interactions in an interview setting? It’s certainly not easy, especially since their toxicity is often odorless and hard to detect like carbon monoxide. Yet teasing out the truth of the manager’s behavioral tendencies is an important element of your interview strategy. Like with determining cultural fit, fully preparing for this aspect of the interview is vital, because you’ll come well-informed on the basics and can spend more time asking pointed, tough questions to tease out the truth.

So you landed the interview, did your company research, had great rapport with the hiring manager and breezed through the interview questions.  You gave a proper, firm handshake, and left the interview feeling pretty good about yourself. Then they didn't call you, or a month went by...and they turned you down. What gives?

A recent Glassdoor survey found what you probably already know...often the reality of a job differs from what you expected. If you've been burned before, here are a few ways that you can do a better job of knowing what you are getting into:

I have never been comfortable answering the standard interview question, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" because I never planned my career in that way. Many people feel the same way. It's not that we don't have goals, but our goals are not oriented toward picking a spot for ourselves on the organization chart. Perhaps 30 years ago people in stable organizations could plan careers that way,  "I see myself as Director of ____ in 3 years," or "I plan to be Vice President of ____ in 5 years." But those days are long gone.

One of the least understood aspects of job interviewing is this — most interviewers will not trust your opinion of yourself, they will only trust the conclusions they form about you on their own. Your job is to help them form the right conclusions by how you answer their questions.