Hello there and welcome to You Got The Job.
Like a lot of us, you may find yourself facing a job interview like it is Judgement Day. The meeting can loom large and become the stuff of nightmares. Very few of us feel entirely comfortable at the prospect of others scrutinizing our record, skills and personal qualities. Our inner critic – that little gremlin voice who usually prefers the negative to the positive – goes into overdrive.
Often, we start to imagine that every flaw will be turned over. We forget that the interviewers don’t have access to all our own neuroses and foibles. We imagine them thinking things like ‘ She shoulda got that front molar whitened’ or ‘Are they all this plump from Arkansas/ Manchester/ Dublin?’
We forget an interview is a matching exercise where the interviewer is usually fixated on ‘How well does this person fit the role we want to fill?’
The more you view job search and fit as a matching exercise, the easier it becomes.
You are taking those who interview you on a guided tour of yourself, hopefully with vivid and specific illustrations of how what you offer matches the role requirements.
Now I’m aware that when you’re desperate for a job, it can feel like any role will do. And short-term, it may. Sometimes the isolation of job-search can be so undermining, that it is better for our mental health to take any sort of job.
BUT long term taking a job where you are a cultural misfit, where you have very little in common with your co-workers may be demoralizing. Okay, so your co-workers may end up following you … but it could be a long haul to get there.
Good performance in interviews is similar to other types of selling. And follows the basic rules of selling:
- research your audience
- identify their need
- solve their problem
- agree on their terms
But there is more than selling involved. You are seeking a long-term relationship with your interviewers and their business. One in which you are contributing in an ongoing way to the enterprise. Some employers openly seek organizational ‘citizens’: employees who will commit and engage fully to improve the enterprise. Rather than a one-off trade, your potential is the prized value. You are an investment for them.
Like all books in this series, You Got The Job takes a very practical approach. It’s a coach-yourself programme which will give you clear steps to tackle interviews to reveal your very best self. Exercises running through the text will help you put the content into immediate effect. And you can read more on the subject over at www.mrsmotivator.com
But you need to know what this book is not.
It does not concern itself with psychometric tests, or assessment centres or any of the other gubbins that goes along with job search. It zooms in on the critical activity of getting a job: the selling of you to other people.
Now job search advice can be earnest and humorless. In fact, I’d go as far to say that there’s a heck of a lot of this type of advice about…
So here I’ve tried to involve your imagination and fun to make your job quest easier.
This comes from experience. A member of a team of psychologists at British Airways, helping 15,000 employees survive redundancy, I designed and ran ‘Selling Yourself’ and ‘Excelling At Interviews’ workshops.
At the time of writing, to help with meltdown in graduate employment in the UK, I’ve co-designed and currently run Employability programmes for hundreds of graduates from all over Wales. We keep informal research of who gets jobs quickly and what characterizes their behaviour. Our findings inform the take here.
Without further ado, let’s get cracking. You will find it useful to make notes as we go along. But first, a crucial imaginative leap, so please check your parachute cord.