Strategy #17: Figure Out What Every Employer Needs

An important job interview is just around the corner so you need to get into character and think about how you’ll present yourself, the message you want to convey and the manner in which you can best deliver it. Much of this depends on the particular job you want to do, the employer you want to work for and the business problem you hope to solve – in some small way at the very least.

In addition to job-specific interview content that you’ve got to get your head around, there’s also core material that you should consider, things that are almost universal, irrespective of the employer, the business sector they occupy and the job role you aspire to. I’m thinking of the common traits that virtually every organisation needs to see in every single employee they hire. In today’s article I’ll tell you what these are and why you should incorporate them into your interview presentation.       

There’s plenty of room for showing flair at interview and there’s a lot to be said for making a bold impression by letting your unique personality cut loose. I’ve seen lots of job candidates do this by improvising around an interview plan that’s often too unstructured for comfort, hoping for the best, and sometimes succeeding despite themselves. The trouble is that many interviewees rely too much on this approach without paying enough attention to the basics.

I’m thinking of how you cover the fundamentals properly, whether or not you put your sparkling individuality on display as a bonus feature. This is where an analysis of the employee characteristics that almost every employer ranks highly comes into the equation. There are some obvious things that spring to mind and, if I asked you to list the most important qualities in a worker, I’m sure you could produce one without too much difficulty. The usual stuff includes a problem-solving capability, the ability to work as part of a team, good communication skills, adaptability, commercial acumen and so forth. You’ll find heaps of resources that go into these standard categories online.

All very well but wouldn’t it better still if you had an insight into some carefully-researched data on the most highly-rated qualities, rather than relying purely on your preconceptions? You might be correct about some of the things that an employer needs to see in you, but there could be others that you can’t so easily predict. Well, here’s that data, and if you’re wise you’ll pay very careful attention to it indeed.

Leadership IQ is a management company that has conducted in-depth research into employee behaviour. For three years, they followed 20,000 new employees in all sorts of companies that operate in numerous industries in order to discover the reality of the way new workers perform once they’ve been hired. Half way through the study, 46% of these new hires had been dismissed. Nothing surprising there as this figure correlates with data from other similar surveys, and it’s what many businesses factor in to employee turnover calculations.

The shocker wasn’t the high numbers of duff workers but the reasons for their dismissals. Just 11% of these people were fired for poor technical skills, the sort of things that are baseline requirements to do a job. The remaining 89% were removed because of bad attitudes. Here’s the takeaway from this research.

When you go into any interview, you’ve obviously got to be able to actually do the job that you’re pitching for, meaning that you have the requisite technical skills to perform it to an adequate level of competence. That’s the easy bit and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be there in the first place. It becomes a lot more difficult when it comes to demonstrating that you’ve got the right attitudes. Or, to put it another way, it’s imperative that you don’t display any significant attitude problems.   

So, how do these bad attitudes break down? Top of the Leadership IQ list comes an inability to receive feedback in the right way. Next up is weak emotional intelligence. Poor motivation comes next with a bad temperament filling out the top four problems. In a nutshell, poor performers in nearly every workplace are negative, blame others for their failings, procrastinate or are lazy and tend to resist change. 

Good employees who become high performers do the opposite, and that’s what pretty much any decent employer is looking for in any new employee they take on. So, what’s the lesson to learn from this? Simply, that you must comprehensively demonstrate these attributes in your interview pitch, by way of your words and your actions. You don’t yet know which employers will reach the final stages of your research, let alone which one you’ll eventually target. That’s all to come, but you can bet your bottom dollar that whoever it is needs to know that you don’t possess any of the negative-attitude problems that I describe here.

Quite how so many businesses can allow nearly 50% of bad hires to sneak in under the radar is a question for another time. Perhaps it’s yet another systemic recruitment problem or a bunch of weak interviewers. Just know that any strong interviewer will be able to subliminally detect these negative aspects of a candidate’s character, even if they can’t put their finger on exactly why a particular job applicant doesn’t feel quite right. I know this very well indeed, from my own experience as an interviewer and hiring manager.

Anyone who shines bright amongst a field of dull, uninspiring job applicants is a breath of fresh air to a competent recruiter. Your task is to be that applicant and the best way to do it is to show the person who has the power to hire you that you’re made of plenty of the right stuff because there aren’t any obvious negative character traits lurking beneath the surface. I’ll be introducing the way you do this in a moment, and in more detail later in this series of job-search strategies.

So, the first and most important consideration in what an interviewer needs to see and hear is that you’ve got everything that contributes to a fantastic attitude. As a reminder, these things are an ability to accept feedback, good control of your emotions and an appreciation of other people’s emotions too, a desire to excel in your work, and a good temperament for the job you want to do. In many ways, these qualities are even more important than hard job skills because they’re likely to be the factors that trip you up if you fail in your new position.

With this information now available to you, how do you exploit it? How do you demonstrate to an interviewer that you can not only perform the technical aspects of the job but that you also have the right attitudes that matter most to them? That’s what forthcoming strategy articles aim to answer, although I’ll give you a very brief summary of what’s involved now.

A compelling interview pitch will take you a lot of the way there. If you design and deliver your presentation in the right way, most of the positive attitudes that I’ve been talking about here should become evident to an interviewer. I’ll be explaining how and why in due course, including the power of a narrative structure which underpins the most influential and persuasive interview pitches. 

Before you get that far, you must be certain that you’re pitching for the right job. This requires you to understand your professional goals and how your skills dovetail with an employer’s needs. You then follow a clearly-signposted path that leads you along a route towards the right job opportunity for you as an individual.

Once you’ve identified the best potential employer, you make contact with two groups of people who can confirm or deny the quality of the work opportunity you’re looking at. The first group works inside the organisation. The second are outside it, probably as ex-employees or similar others. You engineer introductions to these people who’ll lead you onwards and upwards, eventually to the decision maker who has the power to hire you.

I’m drastically summarising these steps but, as you’d imagine, I give you complete and exhaustive instructions in how to implement them in my complete Job Search Masterclass. I’ll be offering an introduction in what to do later in this series of strategy articles too.

As you’ll know by now, the Vocation Master programme trains you in a decidedly alternative way of finding work. With reference to today’s topic, the key point I want you to understand is that by doing things differently you’re explicitly showing an employer that you possess the key attributes they’re looking for. You’re demonstrating high levels of emotional intelligence in the way you construct and deliver your pitch. You’re proving that you’ve got a hunger for the job by identifying the problem that needs to be solved, defining your role and making a proactive approach to the company. You prove that you’ve got the right temperament and embrace change by rejecting an inefficient way of matching the employer with a new worker.

Do you see how this all works at a holistic level, in theory at least? I do hope so, and you’ll be learning more about the way my job-search strategy operates in practice down the line, so keep an eye out for future posts.

If you prefer to watch training materials rather than read or listen to them, follow this link to my YouTube channel where you can access the video version of this article;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QgTjW-IQeI

And finally, if you have any questions about the issues I raise here, or if you'd like to contact me personally, please get in touch via LinkedIn;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vocationmaster/