You can go on a job interview and bleat out manicured answers like a little sheepie job-seeker, but I hope you don't. You'll have much more impact, learn more and have more fun if you treat the job interview like a sales call for a consulting project.
If you haven't consulted before, you may think that consultants go in to see prospective clients ready to dive into a presentation about themselves and their capabilities. Some consultants do that, and those people seldom get the consulting work. Who wants to hear a consultant (or anyone) drone on and on about their skills and talents?
At Human Workplace we call it "trumpeting your fabulousness." It's never a smart technique. The prospect couldn't care less about your trophies and accolades unless they believe that you understand their particular problem. Hiring managers interviewing job candidates are no different.
How do you let a hiring manager know you understand his movie and can solve his biggest problem? You don't do it by saying "This is your lucky day! I have lived your movie and I can solve your problem."
That's insulting. It's presumptuous. You haven't lived the hiring manager's movie, anyway. Your situation is always going to be a little different from his. You can let your hiring manager know that you have a good idea of what he's up against. (I'm using the masculine pronoun for simplicity's sake.) You can let him know that you have a sense of the Business Pain he's facing. You'll do that by asking questions and putting forth a Pain Hypothesis.
MANAGER: So, you saw our job ad on LinkedIn, eh?
YOU: Yes, it hit my news feed and I sent over my resume the same day. I was really excited.
MANAGER: Why's that?
YOU: This is just what I want to do - build a reseller channel in consumer financial services. (Resist the urge to tell the manager how you've lived, breathed and slept this kind of work for the past five years! You'll get to that part later. You're going to talk about him right now, not about you.)
MANAGER: Well, there's a lot to be done.
YOU: I'm dying to hear. Can you bring me up to date on how Acme Financial got to this point, poised to enter the consumer market?
MANAGER: We were a payment processing company for twenty years or so, went public, everything tanked, we were bought by a private equity firm and the idea was to get into consumer credit services and online banking. I joined four years ago, and it's been a real rocketship ride. It's very exciting, but the market is so fragmented, it makes no sense to try to do everything ourselves. We need to get a very strong affiliate channel in place and partner with credit unions and retail banks. You've been doing that kind of thing, it looks like from your resume.
YOU: Definitely, the past five years have been all about building channels for me. Is it okay if I ask you a few more questions? I'm curious how the pieces fit together. (I want to know more about your pain, so I have more leverage in the conversation, too.)
MANAGER: Great! I love your curiosity.
YOU: You say the reseller channel is the next obvious move. Right now, are 100% of your sales direct from your website?
MANAGER: Maybe sixty-five percent, and growing fast - not as a percentage of our overall sales but growing in volume. The rest is B2B client relationships where we perform as a back-end -- kind of a private label thing. That is good business for us but the real margins are on the consumer side.
YOU: So a consumer visits your site to get financial information maybe, or to check on refi rates -
MANAGER: That's exactly the kind of thing. They visit and give us an email address and then they're offered various services.
YOU: So maybe you've run into channel conflict - or sales from the website aren't getting you to the revenue plan (these are Pain Hypotheses!) --
MANAGER: Well, we haven't had a channel at all, but there are people we should be partnering with that we're competing with now. So that's what this new job is all about. And yes, if we can give away a few points in reseller commissions and get the extra high-margin revenue we'll zoom past our revenue and our profitability goals. So we're very channel-focused right now.
YOU: And the size of the opportunity, once it's realized? Any ballpark estimate on that? (The gap between what they are doing and what they want to be doing is more Pain!)
MANAGER: Oh, I'd like to think $10M after two years, which is about twenty percent of total sales.
YOU: So it's about $10M on the table right now? (You're naming the Pain. Make it real for the hiring manager. Dang - ten million dollars unrealized! That's a lot. For a mere hundred-and-ten-thousand dollars a year you can make that excruciating, career-limiting pain go away.)
MANAGER: Or more. Depends on which new products we roll out, and we're very opportunistic. We move fast.
YOU: What would be the product you'd like to see launch?
MANAGER: Me? Credit protection. Been on my hot list since I've been here, but I understand, we have a lot of products to get out of the pipeline.
YOU: Why is credit protection so appealing?
MANAGER: It's an annuity, a subscription. Sell once, bill every month theoretically forever. It's a great value, gives peace of mind and we can do it cheaply.
YOU: Would the creation of a strong reseller channel make that product easier or more likely to come to market?
MANAGER: It actually would do that in a big way, because when we have lots more eyeballs hitting out site thanks to our resellers, a low-margin, big-volume product like credit protection makes more sense.
YOU: And what would the channel have to look like for that to be feasible?
MANAGER: Give me that ten million in sales and I can propose anything I want.
YOU: Should I tell you the story of the last channel I built?
When you dive into the storytelling part of the interview, don't go into exhaustive detail. You have to leave some parts of the story to the imagination, because lots of hiring managers will imagine that they know all that you know by virtue of hearing the five-minute version of your story, and will feel they don't need to hire you!
You have to keep the part of the story they didn't hear more intriguing than the part they did.
Here's a step-by-step on that process.
Notice how the job-seeker in our example kept asking questions. You can do that as long as the hiring manager is happy to answer questions, like the manager in our example. Some managers will clam up. They don't want to talk about themselves or their situation. You can't force them to do it, so your job is to listen carefully, notice the energy in the room and go with the flow.
If you want a simple rubric for probing for pain at a job interview, here are ten questions to jot down on your interview pad (inside your professional leather or vegan-leather portfolio) and bring with you to the interview:
1) So it sounds like you're dealing with [X - the Business Pain]. How long has that been going on?
2) How does it show up? How did that problem get the attention of your management team, and its current priority?
3) What bad effect does the Business Pain have on your business? Why is it a problem?
4) What is the Business Pain costing you, roughly? (If the Pain takes the form of missed opportunity, the question is "How much are you leaving on the table?")
5) What have you tried so far, to relieve the Business Pain? (You need to know, so you don't suggest something that already failed.)
6) How did it work when you tried that? (It couldn't have worked all that well, or you'd be talking about a different Business Pain.)
7) What is the appetite here in the organization for solving this problem? (Is this your hiring manager's own pet project, or is there organizational support for it?)
8) What is the ideal state, let's say a year from now? (What does pain relief look like to your hiring manager?)
9) Since the problem is costing you roughly $X per year (from question Four, above) what have you budgeted to relieve it? (This will help get you over the hump, "We have a forty-million dollar problem and we're creating one sixty-thousand-dollar job to solve it." REALLY, Jackson?)
10) What's your timeline for solving the problem?
You'll start with a Pain Hypothesis, the way our imaginary job-seeker did. He threw out two hypotheses -- that direct website sales were bugging Acme's partners, who don't want to be in competition with them, or that website sales alone wouldn't get Acme to its revenue goals. Our job-seeker tossed out two trial balloons in the form of Pain Hypotheses. He has been a devotee of this interviewing approach, called Interviewing with a Human Voice, for a long time. You can start with one Pain Hypothesis, like this:
MANAGER: So, can you tell me about yourself?
YOU: Sure! I'm a Marketing Manager, I've been involved with digital marketing for about a decade, and I'm excited about what I've read about your company. Can I ask you a quick question, just to make sure I understand the role?
MANAGER: Sure! (Here comes your Pain Hypothesis)
YOU: If I'm reading the job ad correctly, you need someone to support the salespeople in the field with marketing materials and competitive information, so they don't lose sales or have to make things up on their own. Is that anywhere near what you're thinking?
MANAGER: Bingo! We have a Marketing department, but they're very concerned with product numbers and styles, keeping our catalog up to date and keeping our website running. All that stuff is great, but we need true sales aids that our salespeople can use at every stage of the sales process. So this is a very sales-support-focused role.
YOU: How would one of your salespeople articulate the problem he or she is experiencing as they sell without benefit of these sales tools?
MANAGER: Great question! I know, because they tell me all the time. "How am I supposed to make a sales presentation without marketing decks? I used Stacy's slides in my last presentation, and they didn't match the information we'd already sent the prospect." So you see.
The hiring manager may give you the pain outright once you show that you have some understanding of his or her movie. Resist the urge to jump to solutions! There is no sense shoving solutions at a hiring manager who's heard it all and then some.
Wait and be patient, little Grasshopper. Pique the hiring manager's interest and gain his trust by letting him know that you've lived his movie already. (But I haven't lived his movie! Yes you have. Don't think so narrowly. Business Pain takes many forms. Your story may have right-brain relevance to the hiring manager's pain, even if you worked in a different industry and function.)
You'll get your chance to tell your story when the hiring manager leans forward and says "So, you've done this before! I want to hear all about it.")
Now, go forth! Just don't forget to probe for pain first, and share your awesome story afterwards!
