While I was attending a top MBA program I did well in my studies however, I only received one internship offer from over a dozen interviews. My confidence was blown, and I had a real fear that I could graduate without a job offer. This fear added to the stress I had over my student loan debt. This challenging situation I was in cause me to focus on interviewing.
I did all the normal things, I asked second year students with jobs how they prepared, I read books, I practices and did mock interviews with other students. There was just so much variability in the interview process it seemed like it was impossible to prepare.
I started thinking about all the job interviews I had, when I was scrambling to find an internship. I began thinking through those interviews and even though I did not receive a job offer I asked myself “what worked?” The overriding theme I kept coming back to was that when ...
I was telling stories to interviewers, they were listening, and I felt like I was getting positive responses through non-verbal cues. When I reciting definitions such when answering questions like “what does it mean to be a leader” I felt like I was missing the mark. I took the interviewers blank stares as negative feedback. So, then I thought through all the stories I had used in my past interviews and wrote them down.
I realized through drafting my stories that some of them were a mess. I would talk about stories where I supplied background that was “to much information,” I would tell a story where I did what any normal person would do, basically “I did nothing special,” or I would talk about a conflict where I was partially to blame. After going through this exercise, I thought about how lucky I must have been to get the one internship I got!
I started working through my stories to make them crisp. I figured that if I did really well on the most common interview questions about leadership, being on a team, facing a challenge, and mentoring I would try to hit these out of the park to make up the ground if I had poor performance in other question. Then in an interview I started using the same stories for answering different questions? At first, I thought I had gotten away with one, but the interviewer seemed to really like my answer. At this point I was up to having about eight stories and using this method of answering the questions to the best of my ability I received six job offers. This was obviously quite a bit better than my showing the prior year when I was trying to obtain an internship.
Like all good ideas they often lay dormant for a bit. Later in my business career out of a need to hire the best candidates for my own firms, I became a careful study of how to interview my job candidates. I spoke a fair amount with other people that had diverse experiences, and through this process I became skilled at hiring people for my firms. I learned that as an interviewer that the best hires had three overriding qualities. First, they had good Decision Making Skills, second they were Leaders and third they had the Ability to Adapt and Change their behavior.
Then one day my phone rang, and it was a longtime friend. He said he had a job interview scheduled that was a once in a lifetime position and he knew I interviewed a great deal of people and would I train him. I said “yes, of course” so I sat down and thought about what approach I would use to help my friend and the pressure was on. A crude method that was a mixture of what I learned in graduate school and from my professional life as an interviewer was born. He got the job, and the only problem with being a good teacher of a valuable skillset that is being performed for free is that you become highly sought after. You basically tend to do it a lot. My friend I originally helped I spent hours with, I couldn’t do this every time, so I started making people prepare in advance before they collaborated with me on their interview. This led me to dissecting the interview process and to simplify things for candidates. I narrowed the entire field of questions down to just fourteen questions. We then worked to make sure the stories had the traits contained in them so that with each story given the interviewee would receive maximum point value on that question.
We put together a team of likeminded people and this products is culmination of all of our years of being interviewees, interviewers, and interview trainers.
Using our method, it will take time to get fully prepared for your interview, however if you follow our formula you will be at your true peak self during your interview and when any of us are performing at that level good things have to happen!
