As a part of my practice I often coach clients on improving their interviewing skills. Sometimes clients on the throes of a job interview call me asking to help them practice their interviewing skills. The other need clients have is when they come to me after several of their interviews do not result in a job offer. Their complaint is, often, that despite answering all the questions that were posed to them throughout the many encounters they had with different interviewers that they did not get to the next step or get the offer they thought that they were sure to get.

Why does this happen so often? The part that further frustrates many applicants is that they do not get any meaningful feedback from people in the know to help them improve their chances in the future. For legal and other reasons companies, as a policy, do not provide any interview feedback as a routine course.

There are three factors that come into play during job interviews: Chemistry (Ethos), Compatibility (Pathos), and Competency (Logos). In the interview vernacular they have come to be known as the three Cs.

Of these, Chemistry is something people decide on quickly and during the initial interview exchanges. Ethos is a Greek word that means I’m like you; the character of an individual as represented by their values, beliefs, and attitudes.

Compatibility refers to the interviewer’s assessment of the candidate’s ability to fit into the culture of the team and to perform syncratically, despite the differences that exist individually. The Greek word for this is Pathos, which means I understand your pain (pathology) and I am here to alleviate it.

Competency is the final and the third leg of this stool, which has to do with your skills that will allow you to add value to the team. The Greek word is Logos, which speaks to your creative spirit, ideas, and rationality.

Although each of the three Cs is important and provides its own component to the successful outcome of an interview it is sometimes difficult to analyze what “other” factors come into play that elude many candidates that do not clear their job interviews.

The purpose of this blog is to bring into sharper focus just one aspect of a candidate’s behavior that can scuttle an interview. In this blog I would like to focus on how you may come across to the interviewer and defeat yourself, without having a clue why that happened:

One of the most obvious reasons you may “offend” an interviewer is by your “scent.” By this I mean what you deliberately wear to smell “good” using a perfume or a fragrance you choose to wear. The problem with using a synthetic fragrance is that you cannot smell it yourself. Many people are allergic to certain fragrances, besides their personal like or dislike to them. So, the best approach is to avoid wearing any perfume or fragrances to an interview.

If you have a smell that you are trying to mask, find the source and figure out how to deal with it. For example, if you suffer from bad breath, put a Tick Tack in your mouth before entering the interview room. If you fear your body odor will get in the way, learn how to deal with it without wearing a strong perfume to mask that odor. If you are not sure you have this problem, ask your roommate, spouse, or a partner to “sniff you out.”

Some people wear such strong perfumes that their smell enters a room before they do. Recently, I had a client, who came to do interview practice. I realized that the client had arrived as they entered the waiting area outside my office, just by the strong fragrance that permeated the entire space. Despite the difficult task of telling how this was coming across I was able to tell the client to deal with this before they went off on their next interview.

Wearing a perfume or a fragrance, both for men and women, is like going to a job interview wearing a campaign button. You do not know the interviewer’s views on the candidate, whose campaign button you may be wearing. So, the best approach is to not wear something that can get in the way of your success.

Good luck!