How To Crush Any Interview
What do you think about when you think of an interview? A job you want to land? A position you want to fill? There are other types of interviews, too. Regardless, an interview is a mutual exploration of the proposed value. Today, we'll look at three powerful tools that equip us to do our best with any interview. They comprise a system I've developed over the years of helping professionals with their important conversations. I hope you find them valuable!
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How To Crush Any Interview
We may be involved in more interviews than we think, especially in the sense that we'll talk about them in this episode. Let's consider an interview or any conversation that is a mutual evaluation of proposed value. This includes those situations we typically think about like a discussion around potential employment, but it also includes exits from employment. It includes entrance into schools or other associations. It also includes sales conversations.
Interviews of a sort also happen spontaneously. These can occur at social gatherings such as parties or entertainment events or they can happen at professional functions such as networking events or professional conferences. Thus, interviews can be formal. They can be deep and deliberate or informal, quick, and off the cuff. Generally, we'd prefer to acquit ourselves well, whether we're the interviewer or the interviewee or perhaps the higher quality dynamic or both.
A Google search will give you plenty of lists of the basic ideas about how to do that, so we're not going to spend time talking about those. Over the years of helping professionals with their interpersonal communication skills, I developed an approach I call Impressions Mastery. It's composed of three parts. They're simple but require preparation and work, but once we do that, we can use the tools in every single interview situation in which we engage, whether informal or not.
The first tool I help my clients with is their purpose statement. It might seem obvious at first glance, as in, “My purpose is to impress this hiring manager so I get the job,” or, “I want to hire the best person I can find.” However, a more evolved version of a purpose statement reflects the unique value that the person, opportunity, or organization represents.
Creative and effective statements take reflection, clear thinking, and highly developed communication skills. That's why we use a process to distill the unique combination of skills and attributes of a person with the salient capacities and cultural features for organizations into a single sentence. To illustrate, let me share the case of my daughter, Geneva, who, as I happened to be producing this episode, is preparing for an interview at her top choice of veterinary schools.
Passing Interviews: Creative and effective statements take reflection, clear thinking, and highly developed communication skills.
Before we talked, Geneva had a general idea about her purpose but didn't have it clearly distilled into a single thought. After we talked it through, her statement became the following. “My purpose is to complete my education with distinction at a school philosophically aligned with the kind of veterinary care I wish to practice. Patient care is the top priority and adaptive medicine. A friendly attitude to innovation is the preferred method.”
Geneva is one of those people who knew what she wanted to do from a very young age. Her purpose has and will continue to mature as she adds to her experiences at several veterinary clinics. In her fledgling career, she has seen differing approaches and developed an appreciation for the range of business models in her chosen field. She's experienced environments where she felt accepted and supported, and others where she felt like an outsider.
Perhaps there's something analogous for you. What do you think is wrong about how people operate in your field industry, segment, organization, or department? What practices, standards, and attitudes do you think are right? What about you serves the right practices or philosophy? When I'm working with clients, I can usually detect the potency of their purpose statement. You can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voice. We'll keep iterating until it sparks something deep down.
That's when you know you're starting to dial it in. When that happens, I know they're well on their way to crush their interviews, but only the right ones. The tools we build an impression mastery process don't guarantee success in every interview. What they do is make sure that when the fit is right, it's obvious to the involved parties. They distinguish the person or organization so that where there is alignment and where there isn't, we know it as early in the conversation as possible.
I define that as success too. Hiring the wrong candidate who checked all the boxes or taking a job that doesn't fuel our values is quite costly in the long run. That brings us to the second tool, which is the question template. We created this tool in preparation for formal interviews. It's customized for the situation to reflect the details of a single proposition. That requires the client to do their homework on the organization and persons with whom they're preparing to meet, but it doesn't have to be so specialized.
Hiring the wrong candidate who checks all the boxes or taking a job that doesn't fuel our values is quite costly in the long run.
Even if they don't have an interview or candidate scheduled, it's a good idea to have a generic version because you never know who you meet. The question template begins with a master question. It takes a similar form for everyone regardless of the details of the interview. You may or may not ask the master question, but the questions you do ask are explorations and subsets of the master question.
Aside from revealing important information, this has the effect of centering the conversation on the purpose you already established. In so doing, it distinguishes the experience from the conversations the person has with competitors. The form of the master question is, “How does blank align with your objectives?” Blank is the purpose statement. Again, it doesn't have to be eloquent because we don't ask it directly.
Once we have a master question, we then select 6 to 10 questions that explore the issues it raises. In Geneva's case, she identified six questions for her interviewers. Here they are. 1) “How do you want your graduates to represent the University of Florida in the workforce? 2) “In the eyes of the University of Florida, what attributes distinguish a good from a great vet? 3) “The University of Florida is my first choice because of the unique access to exotic animals. What other resources distinguish the University of Florida students in their journey?”
4) “What is the University of Florida's employment rate, and in which fields of vet medicine?” 5) “What attributes are most valued in staff at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine?” 6) “How does the University of Florida involve its students in decision-making for implementing changes to the program?” In those questions, you can see the common threads that show her goals to distinguish herself by way of her educational background and align herself with competent innovators. The questions we ask always reveal how we think and what we value.
The key to improvement in this area is to pay attention to the subtext, the thoughts, and the meaning behind our words. We do better when we take the time to think about these things thoroughly. It's even more powerful when we have a competent thought partner to help us see our blind spots. In any interview, it's not practical or desirable to only ask questions. We need to answer them too.
We do better when we take the time to think about things thoroughly.
The quality of our answers determines our effectiveness and how we stand out compared to the other similar conversations the person may have. Whenever we want to be understood and remembered, there's a not-so-secret formula that helps us. It's the magic of the story. When I say the word story, what comes to your mind? I'm not talking about a big, long involved tale. Those are hard to remember. Nor am I talking about making something up. To serve our purposes, it must be factual and mean something to us emotionally.
A story, especially in the way we're thinking about it here, is simply a narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end along with an arc and a point. An arc means that the end is different than the beginning. The more dramatic that difference, the more potential power in the story. The point is what you take away from the journey from the beginning to the end.
A single story may have many points. To make powerful impressions, we want our points to be clear, so it's best to pick one for a story and tailor the message to emphasize the point we wish to make. We all do this naturally because we think and feel in story form, but we can all stand to improve our storytelling. That's why it's valuable to decide in advance the major points you want people to take away from the conversation.
Passing Interviews: To make powerful impressions, we want our points to be clear, so it's best to pick one for a story and tailor the message to emphasize the point we wish to make.
You can include up to perhaps three main points, but adding more begins to detract from the top ones. Therefore, I recommend the third tool in the Impressions Mastery Process. Prepare a story inventory that helps you optimally communicate 3 to 5 points. To illustrate, let's look again at Geneva's situation. I'll give you two of her stories. First, to makes the point that she has found an effective method to deal with the stresses that plague veterinary professionals who work in an environment of sadness as they must routinely euthanize sick animals and counsel bereaved pet owners.
She tells this story that when she first started as a veterinary assistant at a clinic, it bothered her how the remains of euthanized animals were treated. She decided to take it upon herself to love them to the other side. It means she treated the animals with love and kindness even after they expired. The self-imposed responsibility gave her a sense of purpose that helped mitigate the sadness she felt.
She still felt sad, but she also felt positive emotions as she served the no-longer-suffering pets and their grieving owners, whether they knew she was doing so or not. I cried when she first told me this story. It seems like it has power to me. What do you say? Another story Geneva has in her inventory highlights her leadership style. She studied dance for fifteen years from age 3 to 18.
In the final years of her experience at the school, she was an assistant dance instructor. She remembered how it was to be a beginner at all ages and levels along the way. Girls can be a bit unruly and unkind. To put it mildly. In one class, there was a girl who was disruptive. Geneva took her aside and gave her special challenges like, “Can you do this exactly like me? Can you do this twice as fast as everyone else?”
The girl enjoyed the challenges, attention, and the feeling of being treated special. She quickly settled in and caused no further problems for the other dancers. Geneva learned that it was best to show respect to people by treating them as individuals rather than expecting students to learn the same way at the same pace. For this and other such victories, she was rewarded by the school's director with increased responsibility and more opportunities to teach.
Stories are much more powerful than responding to a request like, “Tell me about your qualities as a leader in a general non-specific way.” Stories give dimension and weight to the impressions we want to make. They increase believability and make them more memorable. Another way of thinking about this is the ability to tell effective high-quality stories increases our personal power. To maximize this and make the best impressions we possibly can, we must be clear about our values and attributes.
Stories give dimension and weight to the impressions we want to make. They increase believability and make them more memorable.
We need to spend the time to condense them into a form that is easily understood in a way that feels powerful to us. That energy transmits to others, most dramatically, when the values and missions are shared with the person or organization we are evaluating. In those cases, the partnership has exciting potential. Whether the timing is right for immediate action, such interactions become a powerful part of a long-term success strategy.
I'll let you know how it goes for Geneva. Whether the University of Florida is the place for her or she gets her education somewhere else, I have zero doubt that she will have a successful career. She has the passion, drive, and talent it takes. The variable is the people with whom she will share the ride. The same is true for all of us.
We simply need to get clear about what matters to us, figure out ways we can do something to help, and direct our energy with all we can muster to make as big a difference as we can. When we clearly state those aims with a concise purpose statement, ask coherent, cogent questions of potential allies, and communicate our value proposition with unforgettable moving stories, we can't be stopped. Let's go.