Strategy #32: Craft The Perfect Hiring Meeting

Standard-format job interviews are fundamentally flawed, and for all sorts of reasons. They fail employers who spend enormous amounts of time and money on screening processes that are notoriously unreliable in identifying the best workers. They fail job seekers who are compelled to endure dysfunctional recruitment screenings that overwhelmingly focus on a candidate’s weaknesses rather than allowing them to fully demonstrate their capabilities.

My version of the interview is very different. I actually prefer to call it a hiring meeting in order to distance itself from all of the negative traits of job interviews. There are four key stages to familiarise yourself with, each of which are designed to counter every one of the problems that you get if you go down the usual interview route. In today’s strategy I’m going to outline these stages as you learn how to craft the perfect hiring meeting.

Stage 1: Introduction

The first of the four stages of the hiring meeting is when you make some introductions. On the face of it, nothing unusual here, but you’ll be announcing more than yourself because you’ll also be introducing the format of the meeting. I’ve already covered much of what happens during this stage of the hiring meeting in strategy #29 of this series. To save me repeating myself I suggest you review that article if you need a refresher, but I’ll give you a quick reminder of what I spoke about there.

The objective of the introduction stage is to establish control over everything that happens in your job pitch from this point onwards. This sets you up to deliver your prepared presentation, and to do so with the agreement of the hiring manager. If you don’t achieve this grand aim straight away you’ll struggle to present the rest of your pitch in the right way, so it’s crucially important to use the first two or three minutes of the hiring meeting to seize control. It isn’t difficult to do this, provided that you use the words and expressions that I give you, practice them well and ensure that you’ve got the right attitude firmly in place.

Above all, nailing the introduction stage depends upon your mindset. The most challenging aspect of taking control is fronting up to a person who’s in a position of authority, and quite likely to become your new boss if everything goes well. The default attitude of most work searchers is one of deference to the interviewer, and it’s an understandable one in many ways. However, you need to combat any residual feelings of this kind which is why rehearsal is so vital. I’ll be talking about the way you do this in strategy #39.      

Stage 2: Presentation

I’ve explained some of what happens during the presentation stage of the pitch in previous articles, but it’s worth going into a few more details of how you I recommend you construct your content in a way that will make its subsequent delivery as powerful and effective as possible.

It’s really important to have a workable framework to help you do this, and the best one is similar to what a film-maker or scriptwriter might use. It’s called a storyboard and it allows you to see the outline of your content at a single glance. It shows how each part of your presentation fits together, all in one simple document.

The storyboard is a visual representation of a three-act beginning, middle and end structure that reflects the one that all of us understand whenever we read a book, watch a film or engage with any other sort of story. It presents dilemmas and resolutions, asks questions and gives answers, builds tension and creates emotion, and all of those things deliver genuine impact. And a pitch is simply another sort of story which must be brimming with impact.

My storyboard method distances you from the sinkhole that conventional job-search candidates swirl around during standard interviews. A severe lack of structure in an applicant’s presentation is a common feature of conventional interviews. My system gives you focus and total control because you employ the most effective and persuasive tools at your disposal and that doesn’t happen if you follow the tired steps of a standard job interview.

This is the pitch format that I’ve taught thousands of clients in businesses large and small, over many years and in countries right across Europe. No matter what the situation might be, if you’re making a presentation or doing something that features an explanation and requires persuasion, this is the way to go. 

It works like a dream because it’s simple, allows for interruptions and deviations within each section and provides enough structure to keep you grounded and focused on what matters at all times. I urge you to adopt this system as you build the presentation stage of your job pitch. I haven’t discovered a better one for any kind of encounter that requires persuasion and influence in over 30 years of business skills training.

You get complete instructions in how to design potent pitch content in my Job Search Masterclass, and as part of my in-person training seminars and individual coaching programmes, all framed within an easy-to-follow three-act story structure. This includes an amalgamation of the all of the data and information you’ve gathered regarding the business problem you’ve uncovered, the solution you propose of course, and how you weave your personal business story into the heart of the presentation.

Stage 3: Expansion

When you’ve finished your presentation, the decision maker will almost certainly have plenty of questions. You can probably anticipate most of them so you need to have some good answers that you can deliver without any prevarication. A question-and-answer session is virtually guaranteed to be a key aspect of the expansion phase of the pitch, but it’s only a link into the most important part.

This is when you must demonstrate how you’ll do the job once you’ve been offered a work contract. The way you do this will depend on lots of factors including the nature of your work, the accuracy of the information you’ve uncovered, the viability of doing so inside your prospective boss’s office and many other things besides.

Your planned presentation will have outlined the problem as you see it. You now have to expand upon the solution to the problem in the way that you’ve suggested. The best way to approach this is to imagine that your boss has asked you to research a pressing business need and come up with a proposal that will solve this problem. The expansion phase is the moment you present this to them in a demonstration of how you’d do the job once you’re hired.

You should keep this part of the hiring meeting brief and support materials to a minimum. You won’t have the time to incorporate detailed spreadsheets or intricate flowcharts into proceedings. It’s best to stick to an executive-summary level presentation, unless circumstances dictate another route. The aims of doing the job in front of the decision maker, by way of expanding on your presentation, are threefold;

1. Demonstrate your depth of understanding of the business problem and your technical skills as they relate to the specific task at hand.
2. Show that you have all the right attitudes, that you appreciate that you have to dovetail with other members of staff and that you can work within the financial parameters and whatever resources are at your disposal.
3. Prove that your solution to the problem will make the company money, save them money or improve efficiencies in some demonstrable way. If you can demonstrate that you’ll become a rainmaker by bringing in new business to the organisation all the better. Proof that you’ll add profitable numbers to the bottom line is the perfect scenario.

The expansion phase is impossible to script in advance as there are too many variables to consider. It’s not desirable in any case, because you’ll largely be responding to questions, inviting comments and soliciting agreement to your proposals. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be well-prepared. Use your research file, of course, and be sure to link your most pertinent skills that address the business problem with everything you do in the expansion stage of the meeting. 

Everything that happens here is what I mean when I talk about doing the job in front of the person you’ll be reporting to. It’s an extremely powerful way of allaying any fears they may have about your suitability for the role. Very few, if any, conventional job candidates will do this, mainly because they don’t have enough information to use but also because they don’t have the gumption to do so.

Stage 4: Commitment

The last thing you must do is to seek commitment for whatever comes next, and this is what the final stage of the pitch is all about. If everything has gone well, you might believe that a contract negotiation is imminent. If so, you should initiate a commitment from the hiring manager to this effect. Perhaps a follow-up meeting is more appropriate, in which case you open your schedule and arrange the date and venue for this. In a worst-case scenario, you may have reason to believe that this work opportunity is, in fact, the wrong one for you. Therefore, you commit to terminating any future business relationship immediately.

The point of commitment is that you mustn’t indulge in the cardinal job-pitching sin of leaving things up in the air. You want a positive commitment, but you can handle a negative one. What’s totally unacceptable is a reaction that’s somewhere in the middle.

So, those are the four stages of the perfect hiring meeting. Of course, it takes practice to make truly perfect and that’s something I’ll be thinking about soon.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

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