My daughter is about to graduate from college. She’s preparing for
her senior recital. Each day between now and the big event has a task
associated with it, not including her regular classes, part-time job and
time in the practice room.
This weekend she and I will find the perfect recital dress and she will send a Save the Date announcement on Facebook to make sure her friends know her recital date. Next week she will submit her program notes to the person who coordinates the printing of recital programs. Careful preparation is the key to success in any big adventure – don’t you agree?
A job interview is like an audition and a performance wrapped into one. That being said, it’s you sitting there in the chair — not a cardboard cut-out of you or a less-interesting version of you offered for the employer’s approval. It can be hard to stay in your body during a job interview. It’s normal to feel antsy and try to anticipate the answer that your interviewer wants to hear coming out of your lips.
You’ll be more successful on job interviews and have more fun when you relax into the chair and speak with your own voice. If they don’t like the real you, you don’t want to work there anyway!
Here are fifteen steps to take before your job interview. Two or three hours of preparation is not too much for a professional job interview.
The more well-prepared you are, the easier the interview will be. And who needs more stress than they’ve got already?
Research the Employer
The first place to begin your research is on the employer’s own website. Read the whole thing if you can, or at least read the About Us, Management Bios, and Product and Service information. You have to what the organization does. How does it make money? Is it publicly or privately owned? How many employees do they have, roughly, and where are their facilities located?
Who runs the joint? Look up the CEO, your own hiring manager and the other executives on LinkedIn LNKD -1.38%. Read their profiles. Get a sense of the place, and ask yourself: what would this kind of organization be looking for in a person like me? What would it be like to work for these folks?
Form a Pain Hypothesis
You can’t walk into a job interviewer merely ready to answer the job interviewer’s questions. You can get through a screening interview with HR that way, but when you eventually meet your own hiring manager a/k/a Your Possible Next Boss, you have to have a Pain Hypothesis in mind. You have to be ready to ask “So, I couldn’t get a great sense of your social media strategy from looking at the company’s website or your LinkedIn Company page. Could you bring me up to date?”
Why did you ask that question? Because you’re a social media person and the company’s social media presence is awful! They have a lame Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in three months and they have 2000 Twitter followers with a six-year-old Twitter account.
What’s up? That’s what you want to find out!
When you hear about the pain, you can talk about solutions. Until then, you’ll be stuck answering questions on a script. Which conversation sounds like the more fun conversation to have — the one where you’re sitting in the chair answering dumb interview questions, or the one where you’re talking about real issues that you’ve solved before?
Know Your Interviewer
Read your interviewer’s LinkedIn profile page from top to bottom. Look at the Influencers s/he follows and if you’re not familiar with their stuff, read that too. See which LinkedIn Groups your hiring manager belongs to. Join some of those Groups and see whether your hiring manager has posted any messages or comments there. You want to get inside that person’s mind, politely and from a distance, of course! You want to get a bead on him or her.
Choose Affirmations
Write down some quotes from famous people or your own original sayings that will help buck you up and keep you calm on the interview day. Your affirmations could be complete sentences like “If this is the right job for me, my manager and I will both know it, so my job is to relax.”
They could be words or phrases, like “Calm and easy,” “I’ve got this,” or “Breathe.”
Write your affirmations down and repeat them at least once every day between now and your interview date. If you think this idea sounds new-agey and hippified, I can only tell you that I’m from North Jersey, possibly the least airy-fairy place on earth, and this stuff works. When you repeat an idea out of your mouth and say it in your brain, it helps you focus and relax.
Anticipate Common Interview Questions
Get ready to answer the most common interview questions. Here’s a list of some of the silliest but nonetheless most-likely-to-be-asked interview questions and our suggested answer for each one.
Construct Situation-Specific Questions
Here are some good all-purpose questions to ask your hiring manager, but you’ve got to construct your own questions, too. The questions I listed for you don’t have anything in particular to do with the job you’re applying for. You can ask great Pain-related questions to learn more about what’s keeping your hiring manager up at night, and I hope you will! Ask about what’s working and what’s not working. Ask them what they’ve already tried to fix their problems.
Probe for pain! That’s how you will shift the interview out of On the Script mode into Off the Script, Talking About Business mode. It’s fun to do!
Write your questions down on a notepad and tuck it into the padfolio you’ll bring into the interview with you.
Practice Relaxation
How do you relax? Well before your interview, practice sitting and breathing, and not thinking. When a thought comes into your mind, let it go. Focus on your b breathing.
You’ll want to relax the night before your interview so you get a good sleep, and you’ll need to relax just before the interview, too. If working out calms you, don’t wait until the last minute to start working out. Make it part of your interview preparation. The same goes for listening to music, reading, petting the cat or whatever calms your nerves.
Know Your Requirements
You have to know what you want in a new job before the interview. You have to be ready in case the conversation turns to pay, for instance. You have to know what your background is worth on the talent market. Check out Salary and Pay-scale to get that information. Know what you want in ‘soft’ benefits, which turn out to be very important for your lifestyle over time.
If you need to be able to flex your work hours or work from home sometimes, better have that idea in mind! That way you can ask the interviewer some questions about work hours and flexibility. You don’t have to lay all your cards on the table in a first interview. Just be mindful of what you need in a new job, because you’ve got just as important a decision to make as the employer does.
Prepare Your Kit
Here’s a complete menu of the materials you’ll bring to your job interview. Put the whole thing together several days before the interview date so that you’re not panicked the night before.
Take a Test Drive
Drive to the interview location or walk, take the take or catch the bus to get familiar with the area and make sure you know where to park or where to get off the bus. The worst feeling in the world is the feeling you get when you’re about to be late for a job interview and you can’t find the place. Plan ahead!
Practice Spinning the Table
Spinning the Table is a critical new-millennium interview skill. Your objective is to get off the tired interview script that your hiring manager doesn’t care about any more than you do, and talk about what’s really going on in the department and how you’ve slain similar dragons before.
Get Your Gear Together
Prepare your interview clothing a few days before the interview. They used to say “Dress for the job you want” but that’s not good advice these days, when so many people wear casual clothing to work. Dress for a job interview — more formally for a law firm, a health care firm, a government agency or a financial services firm and more creatively for a creative firm.
Dress the way you’d dress if you had the job and were invited to represent the firm at a professional event. Make sure your shoes are shined and you’ve chosen colors and fabrics that look great on you. That’s going to make a big difference in your mojo level on your interview day!
Get a Map
Even if you rely on Siri or your car’s GPS to get you where you want to go, get a map and have it with you as you travel to the interview, just in case. I’m talking about a paper map. Yes, they still exist.
Wind Yourself
If you can manage it, physically exert yourself on the day of your interview. Get winded! Run up a flight of stairs five times or take a really brisk walk. Get your blood moving and tire yourself out. That’ll make you more relaxed and allow you to speak more confidently with your own voice at the interview.
This weekend she and I will find the perfect recital dress and she will send a Save the Date announcement on Facebook to make sure her friends know her recital date. Next week she will submit her program notes to the person who coordinates the printing of recital programs. Careful preparation is the key to success in any big adventure – don’t you agree?
A job interview is like an audition and a performance wrapped into one. That being said, it’s you sitting there in the chair — not a cardboard cut-out of you or a less-interesting version of you offered for the employer’s approval. It can be hard to stay in your body during a job interview. It’s normal to feel antsy and try to anticipate the answer that your interviewer wants to hear coming out of your lips.
You’ll be more successful on job interviews and have more fun when you relax into the chair and speak with your own voice. If they don’t like the real you, you don’t want to work there anyway!
Here are fifteen steps to take before your job interview. Two or three hours of preparation is not too much for a professional job interview.
The more well-prepared you are, the easier the interview will be. And who needs more stress than they’ve got already?
- Research the Employer
- Form a Pain Hypothesis
- Know Your Interviewer
- Choose Affirmations
- Anticipate Common Interview Questions
- Construct Situation-Specific Questions
- Practice Relaxation
- Know Your Requirements
- Prepare Your Kit
- Take a Test Drive
- Practice Spinning the Table
- Get Your Gear Together
- Get a Map
- Wind Yourself
- Repeat Your Affirmations
Research the EmployerThe first place to begin your research is on the employer’s own website. Read the whole thing if you can, or at least read the About Us, Management Bios, and Product and Service information. You have to what the organization does. How does it make money? Is it publicly or privately owned? How many employees do they have, roughly, and where are their facilities located?
Who runs the joint? Look up the CEO, your own hiring manager and the other executives on LinkedIn LNKD -1.38%. Read their profiles. Get a sense of the place, and ask yourself: what would this kind of organization be looking for in a person like me? What would it be like to work for these folks?
Form a Pain Hypothesis
You can’t walk into a job interviewer merely ready to answer the job interviewer’s questions. You can get through a screening interview with HR that way, but when you eventually meet your own hiring manager a/k/a Your Possible Next Boss, you have to have a Pain Hypothesis in mind. You have to be ready to ask “So, I couldn’t get a great sense of your social media strategy from looking at the company’s website or your LinkedIn Company page. Could you bring me up to date?”
Why did you ask that question? Because you’re a social media person and the company’s social media presence is awful! They have a lame Facebook page that hasn’t been updated in three months and they have 2000 Twitter followers with a six-year-old Twitter account.
What’s up? That’s what you want to find out!
When you hear about the pain, you can talk about solutions. Until then, you’ll be stuck answering questions on a script. Which conversation sounds like the more fun conversation to have — the one where you’re sitting in the chair answering dumb interview questions, or the one where you’re talking about real issues that you’ve solved before?
Know Your Interviewer
Read your interviewer’s LinkedIn profile page from top to bottom. Look at the Influencers s/he follows and if you’re not familiar with their stuff, read that too. See which LinkedIn Groups your hiring manager belongs to. Join some of those Groups and see whether your hiring manager has posted any messages or comments there. You want to get inside that person’s mind, politely and from a distance, of course! You want to get a bead on him or her.
See whether your hiring
manager has a blog, or has posted to the company blog or spoken at a
conference. Google his or her name and see whether s/he’s ever been
interviewed by the media. Here’s the best interview conversation-starter
I know: So, Gayle, I read your blog post about kelp being the new hemp
and I wondered what you think about the current seagrass craze?”
Everybody likes to talk
about their favorite subjects and to be recognized for their thought
leadership. Your hiring manager is no exception!Choose Affirmations
Write down some quotes from famous people or your own original sayings that will help buck you up and keep you calm on the interview day. Your affirmations could be complete sentences like “If this is the right job for me, my manager and I will both know it, so my job is to relax.”
They could be words or phrases, like “Calm and easy,” “I’ve got this,” or “Breathe.”
Write your affirmations down and repeat them at least once every day between now and your interview date. If you think this idea sounds new-agey and hippified, I can only tell you that I’m from North Jersey, possibly the least airy-fairy place on earth, and this stuff works. When you repeat an idea out of your mouth and say it in your brain, it helps you focus and relax.
Anticipate Common Interview Questions
Get ready to answer the most common interview questions. Here’s a list of some of the silliest but nonetheless most-likely-to-be-asked interview questions and our suggested answer for each one.
Construct Situation-Specific Questions
Here are some good all-purpose questions to ask your hiring manager, but you’ve got to construct your own questions, too. The questions I listed for you don’t have anything in particular to do with the job you’re applying for. You can ask great Pain-related questions to learn more about what’s keeping your hiring manager up at night, and I hope you will! Ask about what’s working and what’s not working. Ask them what they’ve already tried to fix their problems.
Probe for pain! That’s how you will shift the interview out of On the Script mode into Off the Script, Talking About Business mode. It’s fun to do!
Write your questions down on a notepad and tuck it into the padfolio you’ll bring into the interview with you.
Practice Relaxation
How do you relax? Well before your interview, practice sitting and breathing, and not thinking. When a thought comes into your mind, let it go. Focus on your b breathing.
You’ll want to relax the night before your interview so you get a good sleep, and you’ll need to relax just before the interview, too. If working out calms you, don’t wait until the last minute to start working out. Make it part of your interview preparation. The same goes for listening to music, reading, petting the cat or whatever calms your nerves.
Know Your Requirements
You have to know what you want in a new job before the interview. You have to be ready in case the conversation turns to pay, for instance. You have to know what your background is worth on the talent market. Check out Salary and Pay-scale to get that information. Know what you want in ‘soft’ benefits, which turn out to be very important for your lifestyle over time.
If you need to be able to flex your work hours or work from home sometimes, better have that idea in mind! That way you can ask the interviewer some questions about work hours and flexibility. You don’t have to lay all your cards on the table in a first interview. Just be mindful of what you need in a new job, because you’ve got just as important a decision to make as the employer does.
Prepare Your Kit
Here’s a complete menu of the materials you’ll bring to your job interview. Put the whole thing together several days before the interview date so that you’re not panicked the night before.
Take a Test Drive
Drive to the interview location or walk, take the take or catch the bus to get familiar with the area and make sure you know where to park or where to get off the bus. The worst feeling in the world is the feeling you get when you’re about to be late for a job interview and you can’t find the place. Plan ahead!
Practice Spinning the Table
Spinning the Table is a critical new-millennium interview skill. Your objective is to get off the tired interview script that your hiring manager doesn’t care about any more than you do, and talk about what’s really going on in the department and how you’ve slain similar dragons before.
Get Your Gear Together
Prepare your interview clothing a few days before the interview. They used to say “Dress for the job you want” but that’s not good advice these days, when so many people wear casual clothing to work. Dress for a job interview — more formally for a law firm, a health care firm, a government agency or a financial services firm and more creatively for a creative firm.
Dress the way you’d dress if you had the job and were invited to represent the firm at a professional event. Make sure your shoes are shined and you’ve chosen colors and fabrics that look great on you. That’s going to make a big difference in your mojo level on your interview day!
Get a Map
Even if you rely on Siri or your car’s GPS to get you where you want to go, get a map and have it with you as you travel to the interview, just in case. I’m talking about a paper map. Yes, they still exist.
Wind Yourself
If you can manage it, physically exert yourself on the day of your interview. Get winded! Run up a flight of stairs five times or take a really brisk walk. Get your blood moving and tire yourself out. That’ll make you more relaxed and allow you to speak more confidently with your own voice at the interview.
Repeat Your Affirmations
In the car or on the bus,
don’t drive yourself crazy thinking about the upcoming job interview.
Repeat your affirmations, instead. You rock and rule, and only the
employers who get you deserve you anyway. Job interviews are great ways
to get better at thinking on your feet and saying what you believe.
Whatever happens after that is in the universe’s hands. You cannot fail.
Just be yourself and have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment