Crafting an Action Plan to make the most of your Job Interviews

In a previous Post I shared with you some easy steps to craft a high quality resume. In this post I complement those ideas with actions that have helped me during the Job Interview process. I hope you can find a few valuable pointers here.

-o-

You need a Plan. Seriously!

Early on my career I didn't use to think too much about my job interviews. I just used to read some background information on my potential employer, give a quick look on my profile to make sure there were no surprises, and made sure I knew how to get there so I could make it early. I tried to project a confident image and build rapport with the interviewer. But that was pretty much it. I just hoped to find favor in the eyes of the interviewer and get the position.

All of those things are good things to do. However there was a problem. They were just isolated things that I did once more whenever I had an interview. 

Nothing allowed me to connect the dots between an interview and the next one. The only way to create value in that way was to actually get the job. And in my experience that doesn't happen every time I attend an interview. There a myriad of things  that come to play a role into that outcome. 

So, by doing that I was destroying huge amounts of value. I could have created value by connecting the dots between my interviews. Seeing this as a career development process I would have found ways to improve and develop my skills. Even if I did not get the position at that time.

This becomes really important since as I mentioned on my previous Post,  Job Searching is something that we don’t do very often (usually not) . So the need to learn and improve as much as possible from one event to the next is great.

So what I did about it?

Planning the Interview

I crafted a simple document format that I could use to plan ahead for my interviews. I captured general things like the position and company I was being interviewed for; the date of the interview; and who was my interviewer (if I knew about it).

Then I entered four things on that form:

A section with the highlights I wanted to make from my experience that I considered could be of greatest value for my interviewer, based on the description of the position they published. Also stopping by on ways I can use to sell my strengths and ways on which I can advocate for my weaknesses.

A section including the 5-10 questions I could get asked. It is very easy to find the most common ones on the internet. And pointers or a short script on how I could best answer them.

Then a section including 3-5 questions I wanted to ask. If you should come with something to a Job Interview it is certainly with questions. Job description as it has been published provides a good idea on the responsibilities waiting for you. But is far from a complete perspective. So you want to dig dipper on what are you getting into. There are also the general considerations about expectations which are likely to feed more questions to put on the table. Just prioritize the most important ones so you don’t annoy the interviewer and don’t jeopardize your own process.

Finally a Things to Remember section. Including reminders and short quotes I wanted to easily keep in mind to stay focused during my interview.

If the interview happened to be the second one or the third one in a process then I also included at the beginning a section including my most important notes from the previous meeting or meetings. I’ll talk more about this in a moment.

During the Interview

There several things that come into play during your interview and there is no unique way to make a good interview. Here are some hints that I find useful to remind myself when I embark on this task.

Stay confident, stay cool – these people already like you, and that is great news. From the huge pile of resumes they got for this hiring process, they liked yours enough to pick it up, make the phone call and invite you to an interview. So your job during the interview is not to mess it up. This doesn't mean you will get the job. It means you want to leave them with a good image of yourself and a sense of how you can contribute if you are brought on-board.  It is their job to decide who is the best match for the open position at this point.

Don’t be a smart ass – selling yourself and present yourself in the best possible way is fine. The Job Interview and the Job Search process in general is all about that. However a good performer knows how to play in a team and knows what he or she is good at and what he or she is bad at. No one can be good at everything. So whenever you are asked about your weaknesses speak candidly about them and what are you doing to improve. Do not hide them. Whenever you are asked about results, it is good and expected to talk about your role, your contribution and your leadership. But make sure to also state the overall performance and achievements on the team. I've been interviewing candidates which every time something goes wrong, they answer blaming their team. That says a lot…

Learn about behavioral questions – there is this thing called behavioral question. It is one of the things that recruiters and interviewers really love these days. It basically means crafting questions that seek for very specific answers from a candidate’s experience. They like them because they are greater quality questions that provide better insights into how you deal with situations. If you answer them in the right way. So make sure you learn about them and how you can craft adequate answers based on your experience and skills.

 Learning from the Interview

As soon as possible after the interview I come back to my planner and enter a few postmortem things. This is critical to do since it will help learn from the process. No matter if I finally land the position or not.

I add a Summary section at the beginning of my document. This summary describes in a few sentences my overall and honest perspective on how I consider I did it during the interview.

I add my lessons learned sections to the form. These are short very specific statements on three things:  What went well during my interview? What did not go well during the interview? What I would do different next time?

Finally I stop by the questions sections on my form and I label the questions that I actually got asked or that I actually made during the interview. In this way I have a much better idea of how the round of Q&A may look like in a future interview.

This tips have really made a difference for me and I pray that they could add value for you. I encourage you to please post a comment to let me know what do you think about them and to share what things have worked for you on your professional journey. You can feel free to drop me an email or send me a tweet about it. I’ll try to get back with you as soon as possible.

Have a nice week!

    - Sergio Calvo

Your Resume: How to get it right?

Job searching is an important part of your career. Especially since it is something that you don’t do (should not do) very often. Here are a few tips I gathered along my way to get right the front cover of this process: The Resume. 

-o-

YOUR RESUME IS A SELLING TOOL - Each time that we deliver a resume, essentially we are selling ourselves. We want to communicate that we are the best match for a position. So we should craft the resume with such a mindset right from the beginning. There is a pile of resumes on the desk of the hiring manager. We only have a few seconds to make ours stand out from the crowd. It must be compelling, clean and simple. One misspelling can very easily lead us to the trash. 

PLAN YOUR REAL STATE - Everyone is busy this days. A person leading a hiring process is even busier. This manager simply does not have time to read a novel about us. The most condensed the resume is, the shortest it will be, and the less time it will take to read it. So we want to communicate as much as possible in the shortest possible space. Though it is not written in stone, it is often recommended to keep it 2 pages short. We can use a header on the first page to present our contact information up front. Let's make easy for them to find us if they like what they see. Wasting space by speaking about personal details like marital status, social security number or such is senseless. In some places it is even illegal to ask for such information. Playing with font sizes, styles and positioning to take advantage of the available space is good. We don't need to be afraid to use narrow margins. Planning the sections we  want to include and how we will layout the information is also good. 

MAKE IT MATTER- We want to distinguish ourselves and our career in our resume. So it is perfectly OK to project us in a good light. That’s part of the idea. If we played a lead role in a position, we can describe it that way, and we can be specific. But a lie is the worst idea of them all in a resume. We must be accurate on the accreditations and memberships we have, the universities, degrees and specialties we achieved. We must never include a position that we didn't have. It sounds like common sense, but CEO’s have fallen because of things like these. Seriously. 

We want to include measurable data or facts that can communicate a strong idea about our performance. Distinguished grades or career achievements are never better friends than at this point. It is not the same thing to say that we speak English than to include the average of our TOEFL or TOEIC exam. It is not the same thing to say we are Project Managers than to include our PMP credential. 

For every position think what value we really added for those around us. If we were telling our grandchildren the story of our career, which three things would we say about each position we held? Use bullet points or short descriptions and stick to the point. 

KEEP THE TARGET MARKET IN MIND - For the hiring manager, the goal is to find the candidate which best matches the open position. We can do our part to make this process easier. We should try to apply for an specific position whenever possible. Taking the time to digest the description of the role. This is not just a bunch of human resources jargon. It is a very reasonable description of what they are looking for. We can analyze how our career and experience match that role. 

We can look for skills that we can transfer from our current position to that one. Specific is good, we should look for examples that make our case. If we don’t match some aspects of the position, it is better to recognize it as such; and be ready to describe how we would work around that in a potential interview. Make any pertinent updates to your resume to better show how do you match the open position. 

(Yes, this means that we keep a resume template that we can craft or adapt depending on the position we are applying to…) 

ASK FOR A PEER REVIEW - Asking for feedback or for advice from our peers about our work is always a good practice. It provides us with perspective, it let us catch blind spots the we can’t catch on our own, and it help us to correct the mistakes that we make. It makes our work better and makes us improve. Our resume is not the exception to this rule. Especially since it is a selling tool. Take the time to ask a few trusted colleagues to take a look at it and let you know what they think. 

DON’T BE YOUR OWN WORST ENEMY - This is one of the best pieces of advice I have received from my mentors through the years. It actually comes from a relative which I admire and which I take as an inspiration. He told me something like: You are the candidate for the position. You are not the hiring manager. Do not disqualify yourself by not submitting your resume for a position just because it looks like an stretch assignment. That is not your job. Make sure to submit your resume and let them do their job and make their decisions. 

ALWAYS READY! - We can book specific times through the year so you can update your resume as your experience grows. A very few times a year would be more than enough. It is useful to think about what we have achieved, how we've made a difference in our assignments. If we see that at any point a given experience is not relevant anymore, it is OK remove it. Our career is not frozen in time nor written in stone. Our resume doesn't have to be it either. In this way we’ll have an up to date overview of our work and whenever an unexpected opportunity arises, we don’t have to burn ourselves doing it in a rush overnight. 

HOW ABOUT THE REFERENCES? - Word of mouth is one of the best selling tools ever created. This makes references a very important part of your resume. You want voices that can speak for your resume. Keep them relevant, do not overwhelm a very busy manager with a ton of them. Three or four at most will make it. Make sure these are people which whom you have worked directly. At least one of them should have been your manager. Though a business partner, a trusted colleague, or a professor would make it. An interesting approach is to remove them and only indicate that they will be provided upon request. 

GETTING READY FOR THE NEXT STEPS - A resume is never, ever, ever going to get you a new job. If you have such an expectation, do yourself a favor: remove it right away from your hard drive. Your resume’s job is to get you a Job Interview. Nothing more. Nothing less. In fact your resume is going to be the script that most likely will guide that conversation. So make sure you are absolutely familiar with it. 

Have a nice week!

  - Sergio Calvo.

4 Things I learned this week

This week I had the opportunity to represent a group on a radio show, deliver my first worldwide lecture at HP, listen to a conference on Leadership, share with hundreds of youth people at a Catholic event, and discuss with my wife about handling difficult conversations at work. As I rest thinking about the journey, this is what I learned. 

-o- 

It is not about me – working as part of a team does not come easy. A good intention for starters could be to perform individually as best as possible so the team benefits from that. The drawback on that approach is that it is self-centered. If you want to achieve best performance you must switch the focus: you must face the fact that it is not always about you. No matter how much we love to fool ourselves, or even how good we really are; we are not the center of the universe. There is little or nothing we can do alone. We depend on a team to work, to research, to play, to build a family, or even to do business. 

So it is critical to stop competing against those around you and start cooperating with them. You should invest time knowing those on your team: What skills do they excel at? What duties are a challenge for them? And for you? In this way you can align and manage the work by taking advantage of your combined strengths, and covering each other’s backs on what does not come easy for someone. A big plus on this approach is that powerful feeling when a task comes and you say, OK I take this one. Next one is yours. Knowing that anyone on your team is able to perform as well as you are. 

A work well done – from time to time we may be tempted to work out our careers on the fast track. Trying to spot any shortcuts or jumps whenever available. However the only true critical activity to ensure career progress, is to do a job well done. Every time you get an assignment. You can start thinking more strategically, you can define where you may want to be, you can develop your influence, you can network and meet new people to help you get there. 

Nevertheless you must ensure that you are not neglecting the true scope of your work. No matter how good you are at building an image, you build it on top of whatever you do. If this is not the case, you may fool some people some of the time. But you won’t be able to fool all people all the time. 

If it is the first time you are delivering certain activity, do not fear asking for feedback about it. Take your time to polish your product or your service. Show your appreciation to the people which gave you the task or to your mentors by working diligently to add their pertinent recommendations to your job. 

Building a Legacy – I mentioned on a previous post the responsibility we have with people that come after us in their journeys. That responsibility is inherently related with legacy. That’s what we are going to leave behind us whenever we pass away. 

There is this temptation to think that such things are saved only for the folks on the magazines or on the altars. Quite to the contrary, we need to ask ourselves about that responsibility and we need to deliberately look forward to build something useful with it. 

Leadership demands – many times we find ourselves in positions when we have a clear vision of how things should be, but our influence to turn that vision into a reality is limited. How to act as a positive leader in such situations?

Initially challenge your own vision and your position, do not take it for granted just because it came from you. That’s a bias. However if you are positive about the way you envision things, determine which are the right forums to raise your case and dare to do it. Just because you find your influence limited, do not make that a pretext to avoid its exercise. That’s by leadership, by principle. 

Also make sure that the any other positions or visions on the matter are also properly discussed and questioned. If there are biases on those positions, stand up and point it out. Also make sure that you don’t let the conversation turn into an us against them kind of skirmish. If you got to have a difficult conversation, then make sure that you are having the right difficult conversation. Do not forget to be hard on issues and soft on people. 

Till next week, 

- Sergio Calvo.

You are in debt

I remember this week a conversation that reminded me the importance of being grateful for what you have and where you are. In a world that is constantly pushing you to revolve about your next big thing or to benchmark with the folk next door, you may risk to neglect such an elemental attitude as staying grateful for what you are able to do today.

- o -

A quick stop by a supermarket in a rural town while on vacation, for one reason or another I was wearing the corporate t-shirt with the small logo on it. It didn't go unnoticed for the young man serving as cashier. 

- Do you work there, sir? 

- Yes, I do. 

- Gee… I would love to work in a place like that someday. It is kind of my dream, You know? I love computers and I’d like to go to the capital and study something related. 

- If you really are into it you should definitely pursue that. Though you don’t have to go that far, you have the TEC or INA quite near. 

- Thanks, Sir! Here is your bill, have a nice day. 

- Good day for you too. Make sure you follow-up on that dream. I mean it. 

Let’s not mention right now the fact that I live in a Country that, despite its challenges and misadventures I usually complain about, allowed me such an answer for this young man. A fine university and a good technical school (both state run) with branches actually close to the rural place we were at. That in itself should be a motive of reflection and gratitude. 

Let’s mention that I feel good about the things that I have been able to achieve, but I don’t consider them particularly exceptional. I am not Bill Gates nor Linus Torvalds. I haven’t started my own business. I am not yet at the C-level of my company and I don’t have a PhD. So I am not really used to think that what I do for living could be an inspiration nor a dream for someone else. Yet that day I learned in the least expected place that it certainly was. 

Here is my point. Most of the time we are too busy thinking about tomorrow, the opportunities to come, the positions to pursue or the folks whose path we should follow. But we seldom take time to value today, the opportunities that took us here, and the folks who would like to follow our path. 

If you haven’t thought about it yet, I challenge you to do that today. 

Because your debt is not only with yourself, your family, your future opportunities or your own dreams. Your debt is also with the folks that would sincerely like to make it as far as you have in your path. Because whether you know it or not, you have both a chance and an obligation to inspire someone, most likely someone younger than you, every day. It comes with the journey.

- Sergio Calvo