Strategy #16: Do The Job In The Interview

Job hunting is invariably a high-pressure situation, especially when it gets to the interview stage. However well prepared you are, whatever position you’re going after and irrespective of your strengths and weaknesses at interview, your immediate future is riding on a successful outcome. Sometimes the trajectory of your entire career can hinge on getting one key job so this isn’t the moment to mess things up by going into a crunch interview without a winning strategy tucked under your belt. How confident would you feel if you knew that this strategy meant you could nail any job interview, comprehensively and convincingly?

I’ve personally interviewed one and a half thousand job applicants in all sorts of organisations and in multiple business sectors in countries right across Europe. I’ve trained many high-level interviewers in addition to teaching countless motivated professionals in advanced job-interview techniques. I can tell you from long experience that I know what the most impressive candidates say and do to grab a recruiters’ immediate attention. These are the best of the best that I’m talking about, the interviewees who go straight to the top of the hiring list, then get offered great jobs and negotiate top salaries from positions of genuine strength. You’re about to learn exactly how they do it in today’s article. 

Any job search comprises multiple activities. To start with, you have to find the best work opportunity to target. Then there’s the planning phase, background research to do and preliminary meetings to get out of the way. All of these things are unquestionably important, but they’re subservient to the single most crucial part of the process and that’s the job interview. Any meeting that will result in a final decision to employ you or not is when things get serious. That’s why it’s imperative that you go into an interview knowing that you’re giving it your best shot.

Job interviews are an art and a science. The art bit concerns the performance you deliver on the day and I’ll be talking about this in articles 33 through 36. The science bit is about the strategy you use and that’s what I’m focusing on here, although I’ll be returning to this area in articles 29 through 32 of this series, so make sure you look out for those too.

The big question is this: what’s the secret to interview success? Which strategy is most likely to deliver the goods when you’re facing off against a recruiter who’s got the power to offer you a lucrative work contract?

Without wishing to over-simplify the method I recommend, the basic answer is this: all you have to do is take control of the interview and do the job, right there in front of the interviewer. This is what elite job interviewees do, and the best ones do it supremely well. It might sound easy when I put it like this, and it’s a deceptively simple-sounding plan, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface.

Before I unpack the details of this approach, let me say that this is only a very brief introduction to these ideas. I’m describing the essence of my strategy in a few words although it takes me around fifteen hours or so to give you a complete set of instructions in how to implement the entire plan in my full Job Search Masterclass. If you don’t have that much time available to you, I also present an abbreviated version of this interview strategy in my Job Interview Secrets course, so that should be your first port of call.

Anyway, back to today’s topic and the two parts of the perfect interview. The first is to take control of the hiring meeting. The second is to do the job, right there in the interview. As you probably realise, this is a major divergence from orthodox interview protocols. As far as control is concerned, in the vast majority of conventional job interviews it’s the interviewer who controls the way the meeting unfolds, sets the agenda and directs the flow of the conversation. The job applicant follows their lead, from start to finish.

Regarding doing the job in the interview, the huge majority of interviewees don’t get anywhere close to achieving this in any meaningful way because the meeting is usually set up in a way that prevents this possibility. The substance of a typical job interview focuses on the content of a candidate’s resume or CV. It features a general discussion of their character and personality, the qualifications and work experience they’ve earned, work achievements, strengths and weaknesses and so on. There are occasional exceptions to this pattern but rarity proves the rule.

If you’ve been with me from the start of this series of articles you’ll know why I think it’s a major mistake to get sucked into doing a conventional interview. This is what average job candidates do, which makes it extremely difficult for them to stand out or demonstrate their true value to an employer. It’s almost impossible to show why you’re uniquely different to all the other people who want the same job as you, and it’s a really tough way to prove your authenticity if you stick with a standard routine. I suggest you look back at my earlier pieces if you want to refresh yourself on these concepts.  

The good news is that there’s an alternative interview method that’s readily available to you, because I teach you to deploy a modified version of the strategy that the most successful job hunters use all the time. Unless you’re in the recruitment business you probably haven’t watched what these people do in the job interviews they attend, but I have. Neither will you grasp the prodigious impact that this makes, but I do. Their actions and behaviours are what my entire training programme is based upon.

Taking control is a state of mind and it’s also a series of pre-prepared actions. This is the modus operandi of virtually every winning job applicant that I’ve interviewed myself, and those I’ve observed as part of my interview consultancy business. The reason that taking control of the interview is such a powerful and effective strategy is that it allows you to shoot straight to the heart of what really matters. In upcoming articles I’ll be talking about what’s most important to almost every employer out there, and why seizing control of the interview is the best way of proving you’re made of the right stuff.

Action Step 1: Define Your Agenda

First and foremost, you must be absolutely clear about the purpose of the hiring meeting, and as soon as reasonably possible. Defining the agenda according to your needs allows you to present your case from a position of influence and strength.

The point here is to dictate the format of the interview in a way that puts you in control of what happens during the course of the conversation. Almost no other job candidates will attempt to seize control of a job interview in the way I tell you about, I can assure you, which instantly differentiates you and enhances your credentials as a person who’s assertive and focused on achieving a specific outcome.

Action Step 2: State The Problem

After establishing the agenda comes the substantive part of the interview when you begin to demonstrate how you’ll do the job once you’ve been hired. This starts with a statement or clarification of the business problem that you’ll address in the remainder of the interview.

Your pre-interview research will have revealed a pressing business problem that you can legitimately deal with, according to your skillset and experience, and this problem should be the fulcrum around which you structure a demonstration of how you’ll do the job. Discovering the nature of this problem is central to the planning phase of your job search. More on this to come in future strategy articles.

Action Step 3: Raise The Stakes

As a general rule, the more acutely the interviewer perceives the problem you’ve identified, the better your solution will be received. Therefore, you need to drill down into the implications of leaving the situation as it is and to emphasise the benefits of solving the difficulty or improving things in some specific way.

Raising the stakes by gaining confirmation of the problem, preferably by encouraging the interviewer to elaborate upon the challenges that the employer faces in their own words, serves several purposes. It strengthens your hand, gives you confidence to proceed and provides tacit approval of your strategy of doing the job in the interview.   

Action Step 4: Outline Your Solution

The crux of your presentation comes by way of answering at least one of three key questions that each and every employer will have when they consider taking on a new staff member. They might not articulate these questions in precisely this way but make no mistake that they loom large. The interviewer will want to know which one of these three questions your solution most pertinently addresses.

Depending on your job function, how will you make the business money, save them money or help them improve efficiencies? The more specifically you can present a business plan that addresses a minimum of one of these three things, the better, even if you have to make educated assumptions about anything that you don’t have absolute knowledge of at this stage.

Action Step 5: Ask For Feedback

You’ll know you’re on the right track when you gain commitment from the interviewer and agreement with the viability of the proposal you’re delivering. The way to get this vital support is to ask for feedback as you proceed.

These action steps are not necessarily sequential and this applies to feedback in particular. Positive reinforcement of each stage of your pitch will embolden you to carry on, whilst neutral or negative feedback will allow you to re-set, revise or make adjustments to your approach.  

So, those are the five practical stages of the transformative job interview which describe the framework for taking control and doing the job in the interview. Some of them might sound quite straight forward whilst others may seem difficult to implement at first sight. In advance of making judgements, I recommend you wait for my guidance about carrying out each of the interview action steps. This is coming up in future articles when I talk about the delivery stage of my strategy.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master, London, August 2022

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

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