Strategy #19: Design A Compelling Interview Pitch

When you’re job hunting, you need to think carefully about the specific actions you’ll be taking at different stages of the hiring process and designing a compelling interview pitch is one of the most important. This is when you get to make your case in front of a recruiting decision maker so you need to be certain that you’re giving it your best shot.

But what does a great pitch actually look like? What’s the most effective way of constructing the material you’ll use to convince a recruiter that you’re the best person for the job? How should you avoid the traps and pitfalls that conventional interviews present? I’m going to give you the answers to these questions right here. 

I'll use this particular strategy article to talk about some of the problems with a standard interview. This lays the groundwork for designing my much improved version of a hiring meeting which I’ll cover in future articles in this series. But first off, let’s be clear about some terminology because I’m throwing around phrases such as hiring meeting and personal pitch. When I talk about these things, do I actually mean a job interview? Well, yes and no, so let me explain a little more about where I’m coming from with this.

A pitch is just one component of a hiring meeting which, in turn, is the stage of the job-search process when you face off against a decision maker who’ll ultimately decide whether to employ you or not. In that sense it’s a job interview. If it helps you to frame things in this way, by all means think of it as an interview. But in almost all other respects, it’s as far removed from a standard job interview as you can imagine. In some ways, I don’t think that labels are important but in other ways I think the names you give things are very important indeed and the word “interview” is a case in point.

The concept of a standard job interview is extremely reductive and that’s why I don’t like to use the term, and why I strongly recommend that you get the idea out of your head as quickly as you can. I’ll explain what I mean. The major difference between conventional job interviews and hiring meetings is simple yet stark. Job interviews look inwards and not outwards. They linger on the past and not the future. They dwell on you and the jobs you did for past employers, not the job you’ll be doing for the new employer.

As a precursor to this, I can tell you that my research into how standard job interviews work in practice, based on the experiences of dozens of professional recruiters I’ve spoken with, plus my own observations during well over one and a half thousand job interviews that I’ve conducted personally, and hundreds and hundreds that I’ve sat in on as a trainer and consultant, is absolutely clear.

Overwhelmingly, job interviews focus on what a candidate did in the past and not what they’ll do in the future. Standard job interviews encourage applicants to talk about themselves and not the problem that has to be solved. There are sometimes exceptions to this rule but they’re extremely rare. In all my years of interviewing job candidates, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of interviewees who’ve done what I’m about to explain to you in any way at all. This represents a golden opportunity for anyone who has the wit and wherewithal to do things differently.

Standard job interviews tend to spend 90% of the time dwelling on a candidate’s past and just 10% thinking about their future. The hiring meeting flips this ratio around. You spend 10% of the time looking at what went on before and 90% of the time concentrating on what you’ll do in the future, once you’re hired.

This might not seem like a big deal but its relevance to your job hunt is more profound than you might imagine. Psychologically and practically, looking backwards can be problematic as it’s symptomatic of negativity in many people’s eyes. Dwelling on past glories, not future ones, fails to show you as a forward-looking person who has an eye on what’s most important to a potential employer.

Ordinary job interviews are almost always controlled by the interviewer. They call the shots, ask the questions and dictate the format of the meeting. Good interviewers have a structure that they carefully follow, armed with questions that are designed to reveal information, encourage honesty and provide clues that allow them to rank job candidates according to how well they’ll do the job if and when they’re hired.

Or so the theory goes. Well, let’s take a look at what’s going on under the surface of the big majority of job interviews and discover whether that’s really true. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have some major issues with conventional job interviews and I’d like to give you some supporting evidence for this.

Standard job interviews are rarely fit for purpose. If the objective is to find the best person for the job, they invariably fail abysmally and I’ll tell you why that is. Around half of all new hires fail within 18 months. Difficult though it might be to believe, it’s the fact of the matter and multiple information sources testify to this.

Take a look at this book by Mark Murphy of LeadershipIQ for comprehensive data on this topic. When you're done with that, head for the Harvard Business Review which discovered that as many as 60% of newly-recruited managers fall into this pit of short-term failure. There's plenty of other research that supports this grim aspect of recruitment misery but, for now, I’ll offer you with a direct quote from a major employer to show you what I mean.

Do you remember that I mentioned Google a few articles ago? I was talking about the sheer number of applicants they get for every new opening, which is about 500 in case you’ve forgotten. Anyway, Google runs a notoriously rigorous interview procedure, putting candidates through multiple stages of assessments, screenings and gruelling interviews. You can read whole books about how to ace Google interviews. There are hardly any other companies who receive this sort of attention.

So, they must get this part of the recruitment process absolutely spot-on, wouldn’t you think? Well, you’d be wrong because Google admits that job interviews are nothing less than a random mess. They completely fail to predict how people will perform on the job once they’ve been hired. Let me stress that it isn’t an outsider who makes this startling claim.

It’s a highly-place Google HR insider who confesses that there’s zero relationship between interview outcomes and work performance. Let me quote you the words of Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations, in an on-the-record interview with the New York Times;

“We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess.”

Laszlo Bock, Google

Does that surprise you? I can tell you that it certainly doesn’t surprise me. As a busy hiring manager, back in the day when I started interviewing new job candidates, I might have kidded myself that I was hiring the best people. Before I learned the right way to conduct interviews, I was naïvely confident that I could tell the difference between good and bad job candidates at the interview stage. I truly believed that I could discern the cream from the crud, the achievers from the failures, the winners from the losers. But I was wrong. I might just as well have flipped a coin.

The next problem with standard interviews is that they’re specifically designed to catch job candidates out. This negative approach is driven by a paralysing fear of hiring a rotten apple. A bad hire can be extremely costly in terms of the damage done to a business, including lost revenues, major screw-ups and significant hits to company reputations. Closely related to this is that standard job interviews are massively loaded towards the company. In any business negotiation, and be under no illusion that this is what a job interview is, a serious imbalance is extremely bad news for the weaker partner. As I’ve previously mentioned, a typical corporate position attracts 250 applicants, leading to a 99.6% failure rate. Good business results come from a reasonable balance of power and a standard job interview is far from that even balance.

The good news is that what I’m going to show you turns all of these negatives around and converts them into very real positives which will put you in complete control of every aspect of the hiring meeting. That’s all to come in upcoming strategy articles, so look out for those.

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;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster