INTERVIEW SPECIAL ....................... What To Bring To A Job Interview

INTERVIEW SPECIAL 

What To Bring To A Job 

Interview

The more prepared you are for a job interview, the better, of course — but how exactly should you prepare yourself? The preparation starts before you get the job interview, when you begin researching an organization in order to send your hiring manager a Pain Letter.

You can’t send a Pain Letter without doing some research, because you wouldn’t know what to say in that case. Naturally, the words in your Pain Letter (and your care in sending it to the right person) are the most important element!

What sort of research will you do? For starters, you’re going to figure outwho your hiring manager is — the person who heads up the function in the organization that you’d like to be part of. After that, you’re going to put yourself in your manager’s shoes. If you were that person, which issues would be high on your radar screen?

Let’s say you’re interested in HR jobs. You’ve already lobbed forty or fifty resumes into automated recruiting portals with no success. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you — it’s your approach that is faulty.

A job search today is a learning experience, and the first lesson is Break the Rules.

If you keep responding to job ads by doing what the job ad tells you to do — Submit a Resume to our Website — you may never get a job!

You have to take matters into your own hands and write to your hiring manager directly.

Read the organization’s website thoroughly and conduct Web and News searches on the organization’s name. Learn about its business, its competitors and what’s new in its industry segment.

In our example, you’re an HR person. You know that it’s hard to find and snag talented employees. Nearly every employer has difficulty in that realm, partly because of broken systems like Black Hole recruiting. You’re going to reach out to the CEO or VP of HR and say in your Pain Letter, “I think I have an idea of what you’re up against. I’ve dealt with the very same issues before.”

About twenty-five percent of the people you send Pain Letters to will respond positively, in my experience. One out of four Pain Letters will get you to the next level – a conversation or an interview. Now, you really have to dig in! You identified a general problem — the challenge of recruiting and retaining great people – in your Pain Letter.

Now that you’ve got a real interview coming up for a possible HR assignment, what’s your next step?

You need to develop a Pain Hypothesis to share with your interviewer. You need to be able to ask questions to determine how close your Pain Hypothesis is to the mark. Let’s say that your possible next employer is Acme Explosives. They’ve been running a lot of job ads recently for Production Supervisors. Why do they need so many new supervisors? Are they growing, or are people leaving left and right?

You can find out. Look on LinkedIn. Use the Advanced People Search to conduct a search on Acme Explosives as the company name, and “Past” as the employment status. That means that you’re searching for people who used to work at Acme and who don’t work there anymore.

If your search turns up tons of ex-Acme production supervisors, that tells you something. Why did so many people leave Acme between 2012 and today? Something is amiss. They’re still running ads.

They didn’t lay those people off, or if they did, they sure replaced them quickly. This is the kind of information that you can use to develop your Pain Hypothesis for your interview.

In your case, the Pain Hypothesis is that there’s a turnover problem in the Production Department. You can ask questions about that at your job interview.

The first thing you’ll bring to a job interview is, of course, yourself, spiffily dressed and happy to learn something new. Don’t show up to a job interview ready to grovel and beg for a job. That’s beneath you. If you got a job that way, you’d be miserable. Go to a job interview curious and breezy, instead. You have a tremendous amount to offer your next employer.

None of that will show if you’re timid and overly deferential.

The second thing you’ll bring to your interview is a Pain Hypothesis. Of course, you’re not going to say to your future boss “Looks like you guys don’t have a clue about how to keep employees!” Instead, you’re going to ask questions. “How do you keep people happy to be here? That’s a challenge for most employers.”

“Which departments have the biggest challenges here when it comes to morale and retention?”

The third thing you’ll bring to a job interview is fantastic questions to ask your next manager. Here are few to get you started:

“Three months from now when your new hire has 90 days under his or her belt, what set of issues that are bothering you now will be handled?” Most managers haven’t thought about that question, so expect a pause when you ask it, while the manager thinks about it.

“What do you expect to be the biggest learning curve for the new hire coming in?”

The fourth thing you’ll bring to your job interview is a pad neatly tucked into a leather or vegan leather padfolio, a portfolio with a notepad inside. You’ll write your excellent job interview questions on your notepad and you’ll also use it to jot notes during the interview. Bring a pen, too!

The fifth and last thing you’ll bring to a job interview is a set of stories we call Dragon-Slaying Stories. You’ve got to have stories prepared and ready to go, whether or not the interviewer asks you a story-type question like “Tell me about a time when…”

Here’s a list of stories to prepare now and have ready for your next interview:

1. A story about a time when you had to make a decision and act on it alone, without a manager’s guidance.
2. A story about a time when you worked on a team.
3. A story about dealing with a difficult customer or co-worker at work.
4. A story about a time when you had to change course on a dime.
5. A story about learning from a mistake you made.
6. A story about something you improved on or fixed at work.
7. A story about a time when you taught someone how to do something.
8. A story about overcoming adversity to save the day. Don’t say you don’t have one! You do.
9. A story about how you pushed for something important to happen and made it work.
10. A story about your leadership capabilities – when you took the lead to make something good happen.

Practice telling your stories to a friend or to your cat so that you can share them comfortably in an interview. Shine your shoes and hang your interview clothes all together in your closet so that you’re ready when the phone call or email message comes, inviting you for a face-to-face interview.

LIZ RYAN

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/10/29/what-to-bring-to-a-job-interview/3/