Hi everyone. It's Andy LaCivita, founder of Milewalk and the Milewalk Academy and award-winning
author of The Hiring Prophecies, here with the three part video series titled, Three
Keys to Ace Any Job Interview. We're on video number three. Today it's going to
be about how to interview the employer and how to ask your questions.
Before we get into that I want to mention parts one and two. If you haven't seen those
yet part one was about why you actually succeed in an interview or why you actually get the
job. It has much, much more to do with your communication and your exchange of information
with the job interviewer than it does about your qualifications. So regardless of how
perfect you are for the job or the job is perfect for you or what your experience looks
like, there are three reasons you ultimately get the job; your ability to accurately articulate
your fit and value, the other person's ability to accurately decode what you said, just because
you said it perfectly doesn�t mean they got it perfectly, and the interviewer�s
memory because these hiring decisions don�t happen in real-time.
It�s about the communication. In that communication we talked about the biases and the communication
gaps and other troublesome issues that occur for you, so then in second video we talked
about how to tell great stories so that you can overcome those issues, and that you can
tell you stories in a manner that make you likable and believable, and memorable. We
talked about five common qualities that make stories believable and memorable; keeping
it short and simple, capturing and keeping their attention, talking in their lingo, making
them believe you, and getting them to care and ultimately to act on your behalf. So those
five characteristics.
If you haven�t seen that video, check it out. That�s sending your message to the
employer. In that video, below that video, there�s a great e-book that I offer. It�s
called Ace Your Job Interview. It�s master the 14 most effective job interview questions
so you�ll get an idea of what the employer is likely going to ask you so that you can
frame or at least think about the stories you want to tell. In that e-book I not only
included the 14 best interview questions, but I included 43 variations of those questions,
what the employer is looking for, why they�re asking it, what they�re looking for and
how exactly to respond. It�s a great supplement to how to tell those great stories.
Today we�re going to talk about asking your questions. Before we dive into asking your
questions I want to give you a minute on me. I am the founder of Milewalk, and the Milewalk
Academy, but Milewalk is an executive search for Milewalk Academy is my training site.
Over the last dozen or so years I have helped more than 500 people secure jobs. Five years
ago I wrote this book called, Interview Intervention: Communication That Gets You Hired. It has
been purchased or downloaded by nearly 100,000 people. We�re closing in on 100,000 people
that have taken to this book to help them with their careers. Never in my wildest dreams
where I have anticipated that I would be able to help that many people, but I�m so glad
that people are enjoying it. There�s a ton more information in that book. Although I�m
going to go through these lessons very quickly, you can certainly supplement it with that
book or some of the free e-books that I offer.
Now, I want to talk about the questions. Before we talk about how to ask the questions and
all this other good stuff, I want you to think about what�s actually happening. You are
likely, not 100%, but likely in the fourth quarter of the interview. Most interviewers
these days they start with a little something about the organization, or a little something
about their background, or the unit, or whatever, then they ask you some questions, and then
they turn control of the interview over to you with, �Do you have any questions for
me,� or, �Would you like to ask me some questions,� or whatever they might say.
The moment that they say that they are literally turning complete control of what you�re
going to say over to you. You get to say anything you want. You get to ask anything you want.
You can be ready.
There�s two goals that I think you have at this point with each question that you
ask. The first one is you should sell yourself. Yes, sell yourself. Every syllable that comes
out of your mouth you should be trying to sell yourself to the employer. The second
thing is you should be gathering information, or intelligence, so that you can make a good
decision about whether you want to work there or a career decision for yourself. You�ve
got those two goals with every question.
I think there are three ways that you can think about this to accomplish those two goals.
The first one is the way in which you organize your questions. The second is the way in which
you structure each question, exactly what you�re going to say and how you�re going
to ask it. The third thing is once you get some information from your question, when
are you going to use it. We�re going to talk about each of those. I�m going to run
through those very quickly now.
You think about the organization to your questions. I would hope that you are spending a great
deal of time listing out all the questions that you want to ask the employer, and those
questions should be driven from your requirements and the things that you need to understand
to make a good decision. So if you have gone through, and those of you that follow me and
know I talk a lot about this self-awareness and self discovery, but there are some great
exercises that you can go through to make sure that you are gathering all of that insight
so that your questions that you�re developing are really spawned from what you need to know,
not what the employer wants to tell you. That�s the first thing. That�s a whole other lesson.
Once you do that and you start generating these questions I recommend that you group
them into four categories. The first category�s company related questions. I would group the
company related questions together and I would ask those first. The reason I would ask those
first is because you�re constantly sending messages to the employer about how you think,
who you are. Asking company related questions first does two things.
Number one, it sends a message to the employer, I�m a team player. I care about joining
a Super Bowl team more than which position I�m playing. I would rather be a utility
player on a Super Bowl team than I would rather be the ace pitcher on a baseball team that
goes 50 and 112. It really sends a great message, and I think you join a company, you don�t
join a job, and if you join the right company you don�t have the job you joined for or
very long. I mean that in a great way. Because great companies know how to develop their
people and they will elevate you and give you more and more responsibility. So I would
be far more concerned about the company�s stability and strategic questions related
to the organization and I would ask those first. That�s everything related to the
organization, the direction of the company, what products and services are they going
to be focusing and expanding with, how are they geographically dispersed. Anything that
is top level or corporate level related those are company related questions.
The second bucket; the role related questions or job related questions. Anything that is
very, very specific to your role, responsibilities, career growth, other things that are associated
with the job itself. The third bucket would be either boss related questions or interviewer
related questions. If you�re speaking with your immediate boss wouldn�t you want to
know things like what his or her management style is, what his or her expectations are,
what the staff thinks of them, what the staff would consider their greatest opportunity
� Whatever you want to ask related to your boss.
There�s boss related questions, and then if you�re not speaking with your immediate
boss, but you�re speaking with some other person that is key in the organization, maybe
it�s a peer, a colleague, a subordinate, who knows, I would want to understand some
things that are of interest to that person. What drew them to the organization, what do
they like about the organization, what surprised them when they joined the organization, what
is kept them here so long, whatever it might be.
Just from an organization perspective; company, role, boss and interviewer. I would ask the
questions in that sequence to send those positive subliminal messages to the job interviewer.
That�s the first thing, organization.
Second thing is structure. Structure your question specifically how you�re going to
ask your question is probably one of the areas where people make the greatest mistakes. Remember,
when you ask a specific question, whatever that question is and whichever bucket it falls
in, whichever of the three or four different groupings that you have, you want to make
sure that you are selling yourself and you�re getting the interviewer talking down the path
you need him or her to be talking so that you can get the information that you need
to make a good decision. Not necessarily having them meander all over the place giving you
a lot of information that isn�t very germane to you making a good decision.
What I see a lot of people do is they ask very close-ended questions where the interviewers
coming back with a yes or no or a one or two response and you�re not getting them talking,
and there�s an abrupt ending to the response. It�s a quick and short response, you�re
on to the next question, and the flow of the interview is disrupted, there�s not a good
cadence to the way people are talking to each other and you�re also not getting what you
need. I�ve often seen the opposite is true, where the questions are way, way too open-ended
and you get the interviewer talking down a path that he or she doesn�t necessarily
need to go, and isn�t benefiting you giving you the information that you need.
So what I�ve done is, and I suggest this, and I don�t suggest this for every single
question that you ask, but I would sprinkle these throughout your questions maybe every
third or fourth question, because otherwise it�ll get exhausting. Remember, we want
to make sure you sell yourself and we want to make sure you get what it is that you need.
A great way to do that is by showing the interviewer that you�ve done your homework, you�ve
made a good observation, you�re going to ask a good question, and you�re going to
explain to the person exactly why you want to know that, so that he or she doesn�t
misinterpret, misconstrue or make an assumption that isn�t a correct about why that�s
important to you.
I�m not going to go into too many examples here just for sake of time, but I want to
give you this little structure that I think will really help you get them talking down
the right path and also sell yourself. One of the things that I like to do is I like
to show that I�ve done some research, I like to show them that I�m making an astute
observation. I ask the question, I tell me exactly why. For example, if I was an executive
interviewing for a leadership position to run a healthcare unit of an organization that
produces widgets that services many different sectors, manufacturing, healthcare, chemicals,
energy, and financial services and so on, but I�m interviewing for the position I
could ask, �Could you explain to me what the current revenue levels are of each of
the different sectors and what you anticipate them to be the following year.� That�s
one way.
There�s a lot of ways to misinterpret why would I care about that, why I would want
to know that. Where I could do a better job selling myself and I could also get the interviewer
talking right down the path that I want her for him to be talking. I could say something
like, �I was reviewing your ,� � and then insert whatever it was you were reviewing
� �website, an annual report, a video interview I saw, I noticed that,� � what
your observation is � �I noticed that there was a great imbalance between the level
of revenue across the four or five sectors that you service. I�d like to know what
the current levels are today and what you are shooting for anticipating those current
levels to be by the end of next year. The reason why I want to know that is I want to
make sure that the company I�m joining is financially stable in the event there�s
a downturn in one of those sectors that are where a lot of our revenue is coming from.�
So now the interviewer�s thinking, �Oh wow, he or she did her homework, they�re
asking a good question and I understand that the reason that they�re asking it is because
they�re investigating the financial stability as opposed to maybe something else.� Maybe
the healthcare unit was the lowest revenue-generating unit across the organization, and the interviewer
might�ve been thinking, �Oh, the person is a bit concerned that we�re not investing
time, energy, resources and so on to keep that industry up.� It just a great way to
shape the question to sell yourself and also make sure that the interviewer�s talking
down the path that you want him or her to be talking.
The third aspect of question asking � You got organizational structure, you got how
to structure the specific question, and then the third thing is when am I going to use
the information that they�re going to give me. People don�t give a lot of thought to
this, but you can use the information now or you can use the information later. I�ll
be really specific because this will also help you sequence your questions so that you
can sequence the questions where you�re going to use the information right away to
sell yourself in the interview, you put those first. The ones that you want to contemplate
for later, you can put those toward the bottom so that you think about them � You get them
last, and you think about them later. So I�ll be really specific.
A short term, or a now type of question I might during an interview is, �Can you tell
me what the greatest attributes are about your best-performing employees?� If the
interviewer is going to respond to that question they�re going to provide you the traits
and the characteristics of their greatest employees. Throughout your interview you now
can turn around and make sure that your stories or the questions that you�re asking are
highlighting how you match those characteristics. That�s now short term. You gave me the information
and I can use it to sell myself and respond back to you, versus a longer term or more
thoughtful, or a question that you need to contemplate, things like, what kind of training
do you offer, what are your healthcare benefits, things like that. Things that are important,
but you�re going to go off and you think about as you decide whether or not you want
to work there, whether or not those are appropriate for you.
I think give some thought to, are these the types of questions where the job interviewer
is going to give me information and I�m going to use it right away during the interview,
or it might be during that interview, but it might be during the next interview. Maybe
you�re interviewing with a bunch of people in the same day or maybe you�re going to
be talking to somebody in the next week. So now you can use that information throughout
the interview process. That�s what I mean by now. Now doesn�t necessarily mean this
minute. It could mean this minute or it could mean tomorrow or next week, but it�s really
while you�re going through that interview process.
Let�s just recap this really quick. You want to make sure you�re selling yourself
and you�re getting the information you need. Great way to do that is organizing your questions
into four buckets; company related questions, role related questions, boss related questions
or interviewer related questions, how you structure your question, make sure you�re
showing them that you did your research, you made an observation, you asked the question
and you tell them exactly why. So, �I was reviewing your� � �I noticed that,�
�Here�s my question,� and, �The reason I want to know is.� That�s how you would
ask your question or at least several of them throughout your battery of questions. The
third thing is when will you use the information. Will you use it now or will you use it later?
I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it please share it. There�s a plug-in at
the bottom. Let me know if you�ve got any comments or questions. I'd love to engage
with you and hear what you�re thinking. If you got any questions I�ll be happy to
answer them. There�s also a register button. You can register for webinar. I�ve gotten
a webinar along these topics and others. A lot of the other interviewer intervention
concepts are in that webinar. I hope you can attend one of those. I sprinkled out different
dates and different times. I hope you can attend one of those because I�m giving away
some great gifts, but you have to attend the webinar to get those. I hope you can make
that.
I want you to be on the lookout for deeper training related interviewer intervention
and a lot of other career related aspects like resume writing, and job search strategies,
and a bunch of other things. I�ve even got a do-it-yourself program coming out here soon.
Until then, I hope you follow me on the channels. Catch me on the Tips for Work and Life blog
and podcast and YouTube channel. I�m out there. I�m looking forward to hear from
you. Until next time, be great. Have a good one.