If you can get the interview you can get the job. Mindset is crucial and confidence is important but if you’re too worried about failing in the interview you will fail.
Stories, Stories, Stories. You want to have stories about things you’ve accomplished and things you’ve learned. (P.S, you can make these up)
Story about Failure
Story about Success
Story about helping a teammate
Story about working through a difficult team situation
Story about growth
The MOST Important question to answer is who are you?
Know your resume! This should follow your resume and your linkedin, so actually read and know the lines
You want the story to start in college/first professional experience
You want to tell the story from each job to each job
What did you learn there, accomplishments/achievements and then to the next job
Max 5 minutes, preferable 3.5 to 4
End with why you want to work at this company
Questions you need to answer
Your why for the company
Your why for the industry
Your why for the role
Think about it, would you want to hire someone who doesn’t know why they want the position? Does that sound like someone who would be passionate or even good at it?
You want to flip the interview. Your interview should be a back and forth conversation. So in order to make it a good conversation, you want to have a bunch of questions
5 questions about the team
5 questions about the role
5 questions about the job
5 questions about the industry
Make the questions high level! This means that they can’t be googled, if you can find the answer you haven’t done a good job.
The job description is your guide, each bullet point represents a skill/attribute that you should have a story about. Make it a good story.
A good interview story represents a time you learned a skill. For example, A job description might say, * Ability to translate complex information into easily consumable insights.
While at Yonder, we developed a new capability. Being able to seed a story to a certain community and make that story go viral. This allowed us to market to an entirely new market and we needed to examine our SF data to determine how to leverage existing and past conversations for quick meetings and wins. This was an initiative, I championed and led to my first deal.
Pause before answering and speak slowly. Whenever you are in an interview you’re probably speaking too fast. So adjust for that but speaking slower which gives you more time to answer questions and you will sound smarter.
Dress professionally, the stupidest reason to not get a job is because you didn’t dress well.
You should have a good understanding of who your interview is and have some personal questions to ask. I always start my interviews by saying “I was super excited to speak to you, I was looking through you linkedin and saw _____”
You should end every interview with 2 questions and 1 statement
What are the next steps in the process?
I’d still love to work for X company, after speaking with you, I feel as if my experience aligns with the role
Any advice for the next round?
Things to know about a company
How does it make money
Who are its competitors check
Check out its Glassdoor
How much investment has gone into the company
Why is it different than its major competitors
What trends are happening in the industry
Ask your questions as if you have the job. You come across as so much more thoughtful and you eliminate the means to the end. Acting as you’re just at the end is perfect.
