Knock em Dead Job Interview

How to Turn Job Interviews into Paychecks

Martin Yate

• Publisher: Jumpingdude Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780983973454
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

If you are like 99.9% of all other professionals, you have less experience turning job interviews into job offers than you have with any other essential professional skill. Knock 'em Dead Job Interview will turn this weakness into strength, giving you a set of invaluable skills that you will still be using to sustain your professional growth and stability throughout the balance of your career. You'll learn how to prepare for job interviews and pick up tips for answering over 300 of the most frequently asked interview questions, including behavioral questions. You won't get canned answers, but rather an explanation of the thinking behind each question, and a preparation methodology that ensures you'll always know how best to answer truthfully and effectively. With answers to hundreds of questions, every page is packed with tips and tactics that will work for you at any job interview. You'll learn how to prepare psychologically for interviews, how to turn phone interviews into face-to-face interviews, and how to dress for success on the big day. You'll learn how to follow up effectively and negotiate the best possible job offers, and you'll also get 100 questions to ask that help you evaluate both the job offer and your potential new boss. With no filler and never a word wasted, Knock 'em Dead Job Interview shows you how to turn job interviews into job offers and paychecks, increasing your professional success and financial stability. This is advice that you'll value for a lifetime, could you use it?

PART ONE

HOW TO TURN JOB INTERVIEWS
INTO JOB OFFERS

CHAPTER 1

THE FIVE SECRETS BEHIND EVERY
HIRING DECISION

AS YOU WALK IN THE DOOR FOR YOUR NEXT INTERVIEW, I guarantee that hiring manager is thinking, “Please let this be the one I can hire so I can get back to my real job.” How well you perform in job interviews determines the jobs you are offered, the money you earn and, to a degree, the life you enjoy outside of work: You want to do this well. Your job search is a sales campaign, and job interviews are sales presentations. Whatever you do professionally, for the duration of your job search you have another job title: You are a salesperson selling the professional you—a unique portfolio of skills, experience, behaviors, and values wrapped in a living, breathing package that qualifies you to do a specific job particularly well. You are selling a living product: yourself.

At job interviews, you display your product for potential buyers. These buyers—your interviewers—compare your product to the others they have seen. How effectively you pitch your product and differentiate it from the others will determine whether or not you get the job offer.

The Building Blocks of Job Offers

The ability to turn interviews into offers is built from the following components:

•Understanding how your customers make buying decisions

•Understanding what your customers want to buy

•Identifying what you have for sale that they want to buy

•Tailoring your sales pitch to your customer’s needs

•Selling what you have to offer

Preparation is half the work: Prepare properly and succeed; or don’t, and fail. To differentiate yourself from other candidates, you’ve first got to understand how your customers make their buying decisions. This is especially important because the criteria employers use to make hires are the same ones they use to decide who gets the raises and promotions.

How Employers Make Buying Decisions

No employer wakes up in the morning saying, “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood; I think I’ll hire an accountant.” Staff is only ever added to the payroll for one reason: to help the company make money. Whatever your job title, that job is a small but important cog in the complex moneymaking machinery of the corporation.

Your cog has its own set of responsibilities and contributions to make, but it must also mesh seamlessly with other cogs in the department (and elsewhere in the company), working in harmony to execute tasks beyond the scope of individual effort. Your job title is only added to the payroll when the costs of hiring and paying you are outweighed by your contribution to the bottom line, through bringing money into the company, saving money, saving time, or otherwise increasing productivity.

There are five criteria that hiring managers apply to every hiring decision to ensure these goals are met. These criteria are applied when hiring for any job, at any level and in every profession. Understanding these five secrets of the hire will change the way you think about your work, revolutionize your performance at job interviews, and can power greater success in your next job and throughout your career.

The First Secret: Ability and Suitability

Saying, “Hey, I can do this job—give me a shot and I’ll prove it to you,” is not enough to land a job offer. You have to prove it by demonstrating a combination of all the skills that define your ability to do that job. You bring two broad sets of skills to any job:

1.You must demonstrate an ability to do the work: that you are in full possession of the technical skills necessary to execute the job’s responsibilities, and that you have a clear grasp of the role your job plays in the department, as that small but important cog in that complex moneymaking machinery of the corporation.

2.You must also establish your suitability for the job. You possess a body of profession/industry knowledge that helps you understand “the way things get done in banking/agribusiness/pharmaceuticals.” This profession/industry knowledge differs from one industry to the next and it must be obvious that you speak the language, know the protocols, and understand the challenges that your industry exists to help people solve.

For example, a computer programmer working in a bank has technical skills. She shows ability to do the job by demonstrating possession of coding skills in different programming languages and how to apply them in writing good code for specific applications.

This programmer shows suitability for the job by demonstrating an understanding of how the program will be used in application and why it will be used that way. This understanding comes from a familiarity with the operations of banking, the unique needs that banking operations generate, and the terminology used to communicate in banking. Familiarity with these industry-specific considerations has considerable impact on that programmer’s ability to do a satisfactory job.

The Reality of Industry Bias

But wait, you say, a computer programmer doesn’t have to know banking: He can pick that up fairly quickly. It’s the programming skills that are important. I don’t disagree, but if you were the hiring manager, and you had to pick between two programmers with equal technical skills, identical except for the fact that one candidate comes from your industry and the other doesn’t, which would you choose? It’s a no-brainer: You’d choose the one who knows your business.

When employers interview candidates from other industries, they first look for the technical skills used to execute the responsibilities of the job. If you’ve gotten as far as the interview, you clearly have many of these skills. Your issue now becomes one of “suitability”: your industry-specific understanding of why things get done the way they do.

The Causes of Industry Bias

Every industry develops distinctive characteristics in response to the unique qualities of the service it delivers to customers. Every company is engaged in industry-specific methodologies and challenges, and there are always idiosyncratic situations and sensitivities that arise from the nature of that industry’s product or service. Industries naturally develop their own languages, priorities, and ways of doing things in response to their needs.

Industry bias springs from real concerns about a candidate’s understanding of the building blocks of commerce in the new industry: the industry jargon, the myriad problems likely to crop up on the job every day, and the working relationships necessary to execute on the company’s promise of excellent service or product.

A candidate who doesn’t understand the language of the new industry almost certainly won’t be sensitive to the other industry-specific challenges and the methodologies developed in response. This candidate is seen as having a longer, steeper learning curve, which means more time and money in training and greater odds of a failed hire, both of which managers prefer to avoid because these costs lead to failed managers.

What can you do to overcome this industry bias if switching industries is part of your job search plan and you are stalling out in job interviews?

The Solutions to Industry Bias

You already have many of the technical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills of the new job; what you lack is that intuitive feel for how your work fits into the overall moneymaking machinery of this particular industry. Understanding the unique challenges posed by the services the new industry exists to satisfy—the needs of the clients, vendors, colleagues, and coworkers with whom you and your work interact—will be at the core of both your research into the new industry and your subsequent positioning at job interviews.

How do you deal with this? Give yourself a “new industry 101” orientation course. Take the time to understand the unique qualities of service that define your target industry and the challenges these present to the workers within the industry.

Identify people already doing this work: They can educate you about these issues, and tell you why things work the way they do. You can ask these questions of contacts in your alumni or professional association, your professional networks, or on industry/profession-specific groups on LinkedIn. You can also search databases on LinkedIn and other social networking sites for people who have made similar transitions.

The insights you gather will enable you to understand your future place in your new industry. (How you use social networks to help you do this is beyond the scope of this book, but it is detailed in the latest edition of Knock ’em Dead: The Ultimate Job Search Guide.)

When an employer sees your grasp of industry-specific issues and protocols, the risks associated with hiring you will diminish.

The Second Secret: Every Job Is about Problem Anticipation, Identification, Prevention, and Solution

As we have seen, there is only one reason any job is ever added to the payroll of a company, and that is to help the company make money. Jobs do this by bringing money into the company, saving money, improving productivity in some way, or through some combination of these activities.

This mandate of contributing to the profitability of the company in some small way is at the heart of every job. Take a few moments to determine whether your job is chiefly concerned with generating revenue, protecting assets, improving productivity in some way, or is perhaps a combination of these imperatives.

The day-to-day realities of your working week—the real meat of your work—involve:

•Identifying and preventing problems that limit your contributions to the bottom line.

•Creating timely and efficient solutions to the problems that cannot be avoided.

So, regardless of profession or title, at some level we are all hired to do the same job: We are all problem solvers, paid to anticipate, prevent, and solve problems within our areas of expertise. This applies to any job, at any level, in any organization, and in every profession.

Your challenge at a job interview is to show how your efforts support these goals. You can start work on this by creating a comprehensive list of the typical problems you tackle on a daily basis. Then for each item on your list, identify...