Our job as an Executive search firm is to find the very best talent for our clients
and the reality is that talent is not looking for a job.
And then it becomes time that engage them in the opportunity and they are very interested
in it that they go in and interview and it’s not something that they practices and its’
not something that they are ready to do based on the fact that they weren’t thinking about
a new job when we called them.
Interviewing is very different than anything else that you do in corporate America; it’s
almost the opposite of what you do on a day to day basis.
On a day to day basis your focused on what’s next for my company, what can I do to achieve
success and you may achieve ten meaningful things in a day and 8 of them you forget by
the time you’ve had dinner.
Now I’ve got to sit down in an interview process and talk about myself and talk about
the things that I’ve done that are meaningful, that I’ve accomplished that have moved things
forward for the organization that I was in and most of those aren’t at the top of my
mind.
I’m focused on other things, so it’s very important when you go into interview and especially
as you get more senior in your career what we find is the competition gets much more
difficult to get to that next level.
And so it’s really important that you take time to prepare, well how do I prepare to
interview and the reality is you’re going to interview for one hour, you need to spend
at least one hour researching the company.
What do I need to know about company X?
What do I need to know about where they want to go?
What is my understanding of their culture, their challenges and difficulties that they
are having and how am I going to help them overcome those?
But that’s only one hour.
You need to spend at least 4 hours for every hour of interview time reviewing your own
background, reviewing your own accomplishments and writing out, and when I say writing out
I mean good old fashion hand writing.
We as people are much more creative when we handwrite then when we type on a computer
and so I want you to go back to everything you’ve done before and every position that
you have been in starting with the most recent but working backwards all the way through
your career.
What was the situation I was in when I started?
What were the challenges that the organization was facing?
What were my goals?
What were the things that my boss said my bonus was based on?
And then what were the results that I achieved relative to those challenges and relative
to those goals that maid a different for my organization?
And you will be amazed at how much you remember that you completely forgot prior to starting
this process.
And you want to do that both for the Marketing area that you’re in so if you’re an eCommerce
person or a Direct Response person or a Brand person what did I do relative to those specific
challenges.
If you’re a Chief Marketing Officer how did I move the organization forward from a
marketing perspective?
You also want to do the same thing from a leadership perspective, for each role you
were in, what was my greatest hiring success?
What was the time I turned a mediocre employee into a top notch performer?
What was the most difficult management challenge that I had?
And you want to outline that for every position that you had direct reports.
What is your leadership style?
And how did that leadership style mesh with the culture?
And you also want to go back and look at the culture of the organization that you were
in because making sure you find that right culture fit for your next opportunity is very
important which means you’ve got to take the time to go back and figure out the cultures
you were in and made you successful in the first place.
And so what was the culture, what did you enjoy about it and what would you change if
you had the ability to?
And so how do you take all this information and all these accomplishments and now put
them in a logical format so they are top of mind and you now have the ability to access
them when you go into the interview process.
Then before you go into the interview, go ahead and compare those back to the job descriptions,
compare those back to the challenges of the organization is facing and make sure that
you some real ideas on how you can impact this company before you ever walk in the door.
Preparing for Multiple Interviews One of the other questions we have from candidates
is I’m going in for multiple interviews, right, I have a first round interview and
then I’m called back for a second round interview.
Well what we talked about before was for every hour of interview time you need to prepare
four hours.
So if you’re going in for a 1 hour interview you need to prepare for 4 hours.
If you’re going in for 6 hours of interviewing back to back you now have to prepare for 24
hours.
And so every time you go back in for a new round of interviews the clock starts again
for how much time you need to prepare.
And that seems like a lot of time, I’m going to prepare for 24 hours and the reality is
it’s about right for a senior level executive for someone that wants to go in and get a
senior level position I need to be able to engage each one of those people in a meaningful
dialog based on where they sit in the organization.
In order to do that I need to take the time to understand both my past accomplishments
and successes as well as how that may integrate and interact with where they are in the organization.