Hi everyone, it's Andy LaCivita, founder of milewalk, and the milewalk Academy, and award-winning
author of The Hiring Prophecies, bringing you this three part video and email series
titled, Three Keys to Acing Any Job Interview.
This is video two, so if you haven't seen video one, you might want to pause me and
check that one out.
I'm also going to recap it here for just a minute or two, just to give us a running start
as we get into this lesson.
Now, video one was titled, Why You Actually Get The Job.
Really, it was aimed at helping you understand why you really succeed at the job interview.
It has very, very little to do with your qualifications.
Your qualifications are what got you the job interview, but in order to succeed in the
job interview, there are three reasons you ultimately succeed.
It comes down to your ability to accurately articulate your fit and value, it's the other
party or the interviewer's ability to decode what you said, to accurately interpret what
you meant, and then memory plays a part.
We discussed those three challenges, and it really comes down to if you want to encapsulate
it, there's two biggies; there's biases that the individual has, there's communication
gaps, and actually, melding those together, there's really these communication biases
that everybody has throughout their life.
It comes from the experiences you've had in your life, and a job interviewer is no different.
What we want to talk about today, is how do you overcome those challenges, those biases,
and those communication gaps with great storytelling?
The one thing that I want you to understand is those biases will always be present.
Number one, they're natural.
These are human beings, and they have experiences, so they have drawn conclusions based on their
experiences, and they start to formulate opinions.
It's actually, as sad as this sounds, necessary in a job interview, because they have insufficient
information.
They're only going to be speaking with you for 30, or 45, or 60 minutes, or maybe a little
bit longer, but that's really not going to tell them the whole story about you.
How are you going to overcome that?
I'm going to teach you how to do that.
Before I do that, I want to give you a quick minute on me in case you're not familiar with
who I am.
I'm the founder of milewalk, which is an executive search firm, and for the last dozen or so
years, I've been focusing exclusively on executive recruiting.
I've built an interviewing methodology that's been used by many, many thousands of people,
and as a matter of fact, I've encapsulated it in Interview Intervention, Communication
That Gets You Hired.
I can't believe we're on our fifth anniversary of this book.
Over the course of my executive recruitment career, I've helped more than 500 people secure
jobs.
The candidates that I and my firm recruit and prepare for their job interviews, who
review this book, but also get great coaching from us, outperform the rest of the job seekers
by 233%.
In the last couple of years, that number is hovering around 500%, so these tactics work.
I've decided to take a couple of lessons out of the book, encapsulate them into this three
part video series, and I want to share them with you.
Now, I don't have this book for you today, but I have another book for you today, and
I want to discuss it here, only because before we get into talking about how to tell your
stories, I wan you to be really, really armed for what stories you're likely going to have
to tell.
I think it's a great eBook, it's titled Ace Your Job Interview, Mastering The 14 Most
Effective Job Interview Questions.
Depending on how you found me, you might have already downloaded that book, but if you haven't,
there's a button underneath the video, you can get that book.
What that book does is, is it highlights what I consider to be the 14 most effective job
interview questions that an employer can ask.
If an employer asks you those 14, that employer will know about 80 to 90% of what they need
to know about you.
In that book, I also included 43 variations of those 14 questions, they're all the same.
I also included why they're asked, what the employer is looking for, and how I would respond.
If you have an idea of what those questions might be, collecting, preparing, thinking
about the stories you want to tell, you can match them up with those questions.
Hit the pause button, grab that as well, let's get into how to tell your stories.
Now, what you're ultimately trying to do, is you're trying to overcome those communication
biases, you want the interviewer to like you.
You want the interviewer to remember you.
You want the interviewer to understand that you are qualified for the job, but there are
challenges not only from a communication standpoint, and biases standpoint, that are going to be
present during your job interview, as you tell your stories.
I'm not going to go into how I know these five components to be true, but every great
story has these five components.
If you're really interested in the methodology and how it evolved, the evolution of this,
and why I know it works, and tons and tons of great examples, you can check out Interview
Intervention, but right now, I want to run through what those five components are, and
talk a little bit about each one, just to get you thinking about what subject matter
you ought to include in your stories as you tell them.
Number one, all great stories that will make you likable, believable, and memorable, have
a short and simple component to them.
You've probably heard that expression, "Keep it short and simple."
That's extremely, extremely important in a job interview.
I'm not talking about being overly brief, or abrupt, or giving yes or no answers, I'm
talking about including the information that is necessary for the interviewer to digest
that you have good understanding of what he or she asked, or you've got representative
experience, or how you think through an issue.
So number one, keep it short and simple, I'm not going to spend a ton of time on that one.
Number two, every story captures and keeps someone's attention.
Now, this one I do want to talk a little bit more about now.
Think about the job interview.
You are likely sitting across from somebody in most cases, who was an untrained interviewer,
who has a regular old day job that they were hired to do, something other than interviewing
you.
Unless you're talking to a recruiter, or you're talking to a human resources director, or
official or somebody like that, the individual who's sitting in front of you is getting paid
to do something other than hiring you, and they probably haven't had a lot of training
either.
Because they have all these other distractions, this job, all these other responsibilities,
you're not his or her first priority.
Like it or not, you likely don't have his or her attention, so you've got to capture
it.
Once you capture it, you've got to keep it.
Now, there's a couple of real simple techniques that you can use to do that.
Number one, whenever you are a pioneer, or you've done something that no one else has
ever done, you were the first, people love to hear stories about firsts.
If you can think about anything that you or your organization did that you were a part
of, or stories that you can tell about firsts, those are great.
People love pioneers, because they know that they're about to hear something that they've
never heard before.
That's a great way to do it.
"This was the first time I did it, and here's what I discovered."
Sprinkling expressions like that.
You might not be a pioneer, but you've experienced a first.
Maybe it's your personal first.
You want to stress that it was your personal first that you went through, and what it taught
you, what you discovered, how enlightening it was, what were your reactions like?
Those are also great ways.
People like to hear stories about when other individuals went through something for the
first time, those are a couple of good ones.
Another one, you might hate this one, but when were you wrong about something?
Being wrong does not need to be a negative story.
Being wrong could have been you recognizing you were heading down the wrong path, or maybe
you tried something, and your first version, or your first launch, or the first iteration
wasn't perfect.
What did you learn?
How did it change you?
How did it change your company?
Whenever you make mistakes, people love to hear about how you respond.
They're human, they know everybody makes mistakes, so those are a couple of great ways to capture
and keep someone's attention.
Number three, you have to be able to talk in their lingo, in their language.
Relate to who they are, how they would want to hear that story.
Now, every time you're talking to somebody, their title is not going to be a dead giveaway
about what it is that they know, or what they've been through.
If you're not really sure the level at which you should articulate your story, great way
to do that is just ask somebody.
"At what level would you like the detail, would you like me to go down to here, or would
you like me to stay up here?"
Then as you're talking through that, look for the verbal cues.
Is somebody responding positively?
Are they giving you the shrug or the puzzled look?
Always if you need to, you can always ask them, "Am I giving you the appropriate level
of detail or would you like me to raise it up or lower it?"
Those are great ways, but you always want to make sure that you're talking at their
level.
Number four, this one is probably ... it might be the most important element after capturing
and keeping their attention, is making them believe you.
People want to know ... job interviewers want to know that you have been through this before.
They want to understand your experiences, but they want to believe you.
Even if you are simulating something, or how you would handle a problem in their environment
where you've never been through the experience before, the way in which you organize your
story ... So number one, organizing your story will really help you and help them keep following
you, and it will also show them that you have a logical understanding of what you're explaining,
so that becomes much more believable.
The second element to making them believe you, is the details in which you include in
your story.
People that have lived through a big project, there's heightened emotion around the stress
level that you probably ... or the enthusiasm, or the enjoyment that you got in doing that
project, the longer it was, and the more impact it had on you emotionally, it's likely that
you remembered it well.
Be descriptive, give details.
I'm not talking about being verbose, I'm talking about giving details when you tell that story.
The details can also include, "I did step one, then I did step two, then I did step
three."
That's one way of including details, to show that there was a very deep understanding of
the methods, or the practices, or the patterns that you used.
Another way to do that is to sprinkle in precise statistics, so you would rather not use round
numbers.
When I said I helped 500 people, more than 500, it is more than 500, but it was more
like 537.
Is it specific to the point where they are understanding that you actually lived it?
If you're using dollar amounts, or time frames, or percentages, 37% sounds better than a third.
You want to make sure that you are sprinkling precise statistics in there as you're talking
about it.
They'll be getting the impression that you actually lived through it, and that's ultimately
what you want to pass along to them, because you want to make them believe you.
Those are a couple of great ways to help people believe you.
Organization to your story, the details in which you include, and the precision in the
statistics or any other elements of data that you can put into a story leads to credibility.
Then the fifth element is getting them to care, and getting them to care about you,
so ultimately they will act on your behalf in positive manner.
When we talk about getting someone to care, every story has an emotion in it that helps
you relate to that other person.
Now, the interviewers, most interviewers, I like to think are interviewing on behalf
of their organization, and they want to pick good people to join that organization.
That's great, but they're humans, and subconsciously, they will also care about how having you join
the organization benefits them personally.
One of the greatest ways that you can relate to them, and get them to care about you, is
showing how you care about them.
I'm going to run through three real quick examples here.
If you're interviewing with a superior, potentially your boss, or maybe a higher up in the organization,
you might want to highlight whether you're making a statement, or you're asking this
question, "How hiring you directly benefits them from a standpoint of will it make their
job easier?
Will it free up time for them?
Will it save them money?"
Those types of things.
"What we be the first thing that I could do when you hired me to make your life easier?"
or, "If you hire me, here's what I'll be able to do, and hopefully that will free up time
for you to be able to work on more strategic initiatives," and those kind of things.
That's if you're talking to a superior.
Maybe you're talking to a peer, somebody at your level, a colleague, or maybe someone
in a different unit with an analogous title, something like that, but somebody you might
work hand-in-hand with, or side-by-side with.
It's great to learn from him or her, it's also great to teach your peers.
You might want to find some way to work into your response how hiring you will benefit
them, because they will learn, or you will help cross train them on the things that you
know, that might benefit them by having some understanding of what it is that you do, or
how it is that you do it, and you would be interested to learn from them, so that you
can also grow.
That cross training perspective with peers is a really, really great thing to highlight
if you can, because it will benefit them.
Whenever I'm working with somebody side-by-side, I'm going to benefit from their knowledge,
and things that I don't know.
The third type of person that you might be interviewing with is a subordinate.
Perhaps you are being hired to manage a group and you're given the opportunity to talk to
some people that would report to you.
One of the greatest things that you can work in to that conversation, is asking those individuals,
"How could I best help you?"
Or offering up, "Here's what I can share with you, and here's my management style.
I love mentoring and coaching, these are the areas that I love."
Teaching about what are you interested in, trying to match up what it is you're great
at, and the knowledge that you could pass along to them, or the grooming that you could
do to bring them up through the organization.
All of those things will get a subordinate to really, really connect with you.
That's ultimately what you're trying to do.
I hope this helps give you an idea.
I know we didn't go too, too deep, there's a lot more examples in Interview Intervention.
I'm also going to be conducting a webinar that you probably can find underneath the
video, that I'm going to go into more details on these, and give more detailed examples.
Just to recap, you're trying to overcome communication issues, you're trying to give the job interviewer
enough information, so that he or she can make a great decision, but you're ultimately
trying to become believable, likable, and memorable, by telling stories that have five
components.
You want to keep it short and simple, you want to make sure that you capture and keep
their attention, you want to talk in their lingo, you want to make sure they believe
you, so that you have credibility, you want to get them to care.
I hope that helps.
If you enjoyed this lesson, please share it, comment below, let me know what you're thinking.
If you want more detailed insight, you can check out Interview Intervention, or you can
check out my Tips For Work And Life blog, or my YouTube channel, or the Tips For Work
And Life podcast, any of them will have a lot of information about storytelling.
Be on the lookout for the third video in this series, because I'm going to talk about how
to organize, ask questions, and use the information that you get from your questions to make sure
you're making a good job choice, or a good career decision.
Until next time, we'll see you.