Job Interview Secrets/1 - The Pitch

Do you want to master the single most crucial aspect of any work search, the part where you sit down with a hiring manager and try to convince them to employ you? I’m talking about the job interview of course. Would you like to learn a recruitment insider’s success formula, the secret to nailing every part of every job interview you attend in the future? Do you want to be in control of the entire interview process, to create an outstanding impression upon demanding employers and to positively influence the outcome of any sort of hiring meeting as comprehensively as possible?

This is the first of five Job Interview Secrets articles where you’ll learn how to do all of these things. I’m Neil Grant, the person behind the Vocation Master job-search programme, and I’m about to introduce you to a range of powerful strategies that will supercharge your chances of interview success.

Whether you want to earn more money, find a more meaningful occupation, shoot for a promotion or jump into a completely different line of work, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for an employed position with a private-sector employer, and particularly if you do any sort of white-collar, corporate-style job, I can help you. Whatever your occupation and wherever you sit in the hierarchy of an organisation, you’re about to discover how to vault yourself to the top of any employer’s want-list.

Nothing out of the usual so far, but this is where it gets a bit more interesting because there are different ways of approaching job interviews.

You can do things the way you’ve always done them, accepting all of the problems and frustrations you usually get with old-style, reactive interview procedures. On the other hand, you can think outside the box by adopting a proactive interview strategy that will massively increase your chances of success. My approach is the latter one.

So, straight away, I want to be absolutely clear about the radical nature of my job-search system, including the interview of course. I’m not going to be giving you standard careers advice that you get everywhere else, about how to write CVs or resumes, where to find the best job bulletin boards, how to answer stock interview questions or any of the other humdrum interview stuff you’ve heard a thousand times before. I do things very differently, and you’ll discover how and why very soon.

I cut through the noise and nonsense you get with conventional job-search advice by presenting an alternative and hugely improved method of interviewing. In this article series I’ll be revealing the unvarnished truth about what goes on behind the scenes of standard interviews and explaining why the odds are firmly against you getting you the job you want if you do things the usual way. I’ll then outline a much better way of interviewing to get a perfect job that really works for you. My system will do nothing less than transform your career prospects, I promise you. ????

Here’s a quick introduction to this Job Interview Secrets article series.

·??????In the first article I make a pitch for your attention as I present an overview of the interview landscape. ?

·??????Article two investigates some of the problems that are standard features of any conventional job interview.

·??????It’s really important that you understand the context to my strategy, so this lays the groundwork for article three where I give you an outline of my solutions to these problems.

·??????You need a solid action plan which comes along in article four as I tell you the best way of preparing yourself for a face-to-face hiring meeting.

·??????This leads into the fifth and final article of this series which draws everything together as I present a summary of the transformational job-interview strategy.

Without further ado, let’s get into this. My contention is simple: I believe that the standard job-hunting format that most of us are quite familiar with is so fundamentally flawed that it’s not fit for purpose. This is particularly evident during traditional job interviews which rarely function in the way they should. All too often, they fail to achieve their most basic aim which is to match the most suitable worker with a job vacancy that needs to be filled.

This is a structural problem that’s woven right through every conventional work search, every standard employment application process and every traditional job interview procedure, and it affects employers and candidates alike. It’s a major difficulty for employers because it’s a costly and inefficient way of hiring staff. And it’s a massive challenge for job hunters because the fallout from this dysfunctional hiring process seriously compromises the chances of someone like you getting the job you really want. It often stymies your career success and even affects your health, happiness and wellbeing.

I make this claim based on my personal observations during many years spent as a professional interviewer and recruiter, and on my experiences working with all sorts of organisations in multiple business sectors, training them in advanced job-interview techniques and helping them improve their general recruitment processes. And I’m not alone here. Plenty of independent research supports the idea that conventional job interviews don’t work properly, and so does the testimony of major employers who are dismayed about the number of poor candidates they interview and the failing employees they inadvertently hire.

If you’re in the market for a different job, you need to be aware of the scale of this problem by opening your eyes to the reality of what’s going on with almost every traditional interview. If you’re serious about the direction you want your career to go, and if you want to get high-quality, well-paid work that you really deserve, you owe it to yourself to do something about this situation.

Throughout these five Job Interview Secrets articles I’m going to explain exactly what I mean by this and introduce you to a much better and quite radical job interview method that you can put to use quickly and effectively. This will give you a major head start over all of your job-search competitors and genuinely transform your chances of getting the job you really want. My interview method will catapult you to the front of the job-hunt race and position you as a high-value employee who’s worth a top-dollar salary. And because work is so central to everything else we do, mastering the concepts I’ll be explaining will unquestionably improve the quality of your life as a whole.

So, here’s the really good news. You’re about to shift from being someone who’s got a job interview problem to one who’s cracked the job interview solution. You’ll gain an unparalleled edge in the heat of any interview battle because you’ll learn how to work around every one of the problems I’m going to tell you about.

My system will allow you to present yourself to a potential employer in a truly innovative way that will immediately grab the attention of any interviewer or hiring manager. I’ll show you how to command any interview and prove that you’ve got what it takes to not only win the job, but to succeed in it once you’ve got your feet under the desk. My strategy will put you in a powerful position when you get down to negotiating the nuts and bolts of your next employment contract, and all of the ones coming down the line as you progress in your career.

But to balance the good news, I’m afraid I also have a couple of bits of bad news for you. First, I’m sorry to disappoint you if you’re expecting a magic bullet because this strategy isn’t designed to be a quick fix that enables you to breeze into an interview tomorrow morning and waltz off with a juicy employment contract by lunchtime. You need to get into character, do some work in advance of the interview and apply yourself to the task at hand if you want to master the skills I talk about here.

And second, you’ll need to ditch any negative beliefs that are holding you back by adjusting your thinking about what’s possible in a job interview. This might be bad news if you think you already know everything there is to know about job hunting. But if you’re not daunted by the prospect of moving outside your comfort zone, get ready to flip the interview odds in your favour as you take the first steps of an exciting journey that will take you towards a much better work place.??

OK, so what’s the problem with standard job interviews? Well, there are all sorts of practical difficulties, and I’ll get to some of those in the next article, the second in this series, but the first challenge is a psychological one. ?

The truth of the matter is that most people don’t see the glitches for what they are, until someone like me points them out. They’re conditioned to believe that the downsides of traditional interviews are completely normal and unavoidable parts of any job-search process. This can prompt a defeatist attitude which makes average job hunters blind to the alternatives that are readily available and condemns them to a pattern of repeated interview failures.

Upwards of 95% of all work searchers persist with the usual methods of finding a new job, despite their seriously problematic nature. They do this in the mistaken belief that there’s nothing they can do about the status quo, other than applying for as many advertised vacancies as they can or submitting as many speculative job applications as possible, hoping that something will hit the mark.

They listen to all sorts of well-intentioned but largely useless advice from people who don’t know anything about the way job-hunting or interviewing really works. They put up with all sorts of frustrations and prevarications from human resources departments, employment agencies and other recruitment flunkies whose only function is to complicate matters, not to oil the wheels of an effective job search. ???

They attend any job interviews they’re offered, however unpromising they may be, grinding it out until they eventually get offered a position. In many cases, undemanding job hunters are prepared to grab whichever low-quality work that’s going on the basis that any job is better than no job at all.

This is what I call the brute-force, work-hard option which is symptomatic of a fixed mindset about interviews. I’m not a big fan of this way of job hunting for the simple reason that it massively compromises your chances of career success. Rather than slugging it out and hoping for the best I prefer to do things differently by adopting a growth mindset. This leads to a work-smart solution, a highly-targeted and proactive approach which is precisely what you’ll be learning about here, as I present an alternative and genuinely transformational way of managing your next job interview.

To flesh out the differences between my approach and the usual interview format that you’re probably very familiar with, let me start by listing a few things that you won’t be getting in this short course, or anywhere else in my training programme for that matter.

For starters, I don’t talk about how to present your CV or resume because there’s no need for these documents in my improved version of a job interview. That’s right. You don’t need a resume or CV if you do things my way. This is a decidedly alternative method of job search that I’ll be telling you about, some aspects of which might surprise you, including the absence of CVs and resumes.

Neither will I tell you how to defer to a seemingly all-powerful interviewer. This is because you’ll be learning how to approach any employment meeting from a position of equal status to the person you’re talking with. You’re simply two people who are discussing a work opportunity that matches a business problem with its corresponding solution, and on a strictly win-win basis. Kowtowing or pleading for a job isn’t appropriate in this scenario.

You won’t get a list of snappy answers to tricky interview questions either. The idea that you have to memorise pre-prepared responses to predictable lines of questioning is one of those persistent interview myths that don’t make an appearance here. There are only three essential questions that you must deal with and I’ll be telling you what those are later in the course. In fact, you can usually get away with answering just one of them.

And I won’t be showing you how to obtain an interview by way of scouring job vacancy ads, making endless applications or going through any recruitment agencies and the like. The simple reason for this is that the best way to advance your career is to discover employment opportunities before they become available to anyone else, and by using your own initiative. I explain this whole process in my full Job Search Masterclass, with the benefit being that you get no competition from any other job hunters.

In summary, I won’t be teaching you any of the usual stuff that you get when you look for standard job interview advice. Instead, I’ll be introducing you to a very different, supremely effective way of persuading a hiring manager to employ you by using smart strategies that put you way ahead of the pack.

I’ve dismantled the conventional methods of hiring and interviewing, reimagined them to eliminate all of the problems that you usually get and repackaged everything to suit the needs of motivated work searchers who want to stand out in today’s challenging job market. If you’re looking for an employed position with a private-sector employer, especially if you do any kind of white-collar work, you’ve come to the right place.

The interview is just one small part of the big job-search picture, so let me give you a few insights into how I see recruitment issues at a macro level.

Lack of agency is one of the most pernicious features of a traditional job hunt, but you get precisely the opposite with my system. You’re in charge the whole way. You guide the entire job-search process and take personal hiring decisions according to your criteria alone. You pick your preferred employer and you select or reject job offers as you wish. You can forget about taking your chances against hundreds of other job candidates, hoping for the best, waiting for the right opportunity to come along or otherwise reacting to random job-search events that pop up along the way.

Proactive job-search is what super-successful people do. My method is a distillation of the hiring strategies that elite job hunters use when they attend any kind of face-to-face employment meeting. I’m thinking about the sort of workers who are at the top of their game, people who are confident, assured and in control of their career destinies, the ones who regularly get the best and most satisfying jobs which pay right at the top of the salary range.

These are the kind of people who never struggle to find high-quality jobs, whatever they do and wherever they work. They sit at the top of the employment tree because they know how to obtain employment that’s perfectly suited to their interests, skills and ambitions. For these reasons, they go on to achieve successes that others can only ever dream of.

They’re in this enviable position because they identify lucrative work opportunities before anyone else has discovered them. They position themselves as in-demand, skilled workers who provide high value to their employers. They engineer personal introductions to decision makers who have the power to hire them immediately. They deploy exceptional interview techniques that put them in complete control of every kind of hiring meeting they attend. They select the employers they want to work for and don’t wait around for an employer to choose them.

To draw all of these ideas together, let me summarise the essence of a potential career transformation by way of my elevator pitch;

I show you how to take control of every part of the hiring process. You do this by adopting a radical shift in mindset whereby you assert agency over each and every phase of your work-search project. No longer are you the person who is selected or rejected by the employer. This is what happens in almost every conventional job interview and it’s a dispiriting experience, as you may already know very well.

Instead, you flip the deal and claim ownership of every key choice and decision that impacts upon the work you wish to do. You choose the specific employer you want to join, whether they’re actively recruiting or not. You select the precise job you’d like to do, whether it currently exists or not. You discover what to say and what to do in order to seize the immediate attention of named decision makers. You learn how to deliver a formidable case for why you’re the best person to hire through a powerful narrative-based presentation.

You engineer personal introductions to hiring managers who urgently need your skills and have the authority to employ you on the spot. You dictate the format and agenda of every hiring meeting. You put an employer through their paces to assess their compatibility with your objectives, entirely according to criteria you set. Ultimately, you decide whether to permit an organisation to become your employer or not. In effect, you’re hiring yourself a new employer. That’s what I mean by a different mindset.

At no point do you need a CV or resume, whether that’s part of the application process or during the interview itself. You don’t have to look at job advertisements, nor make speculative or bulk resume submissions and you don’t make contact with human resources personnel, employment agencies or any other groups of recruitment staff. And you do all of this without competition from other job hunters. Let me repeat this last point. There’s zero competition with my job-search strategy.

Above all, you get to control the sharp end of the process which is the hiring meeting. I give you inside and expert knowledge of job interviews, then present a comprehensive strategy that will help you develop the high-level pitching skills you need to positively influence the outcome of any and every face-to-face employment encounter you find yourself in.??

That’s my offer to you - do I have your attention yet?

If so, and especially if you’re frustrated by the imbalance of power that is inherent in virtually every conventional job interview, and you’d like to know how to decisively gain the upper hand over any job interviewer you encounter from now onwards, stick around for article two which is coming up next.?