5 Tips to Dominate Your Interview Preparation

Many of my coaching clients ask for help preparing for an upcoming interview, and gaining a better perspective on how to sell their value to a hiring manager. Having worked for several Fortune 500 companies and funded startups over the years, I’ve learned a ton from interviewing and also as a hiring manager.

When getting ready for an interview, I always recommend preparing a few days before the actual interview - especially if you’re nervous or really really want the role. The five areas I recommend focusing on to dominate interview preparations are to research the company, prepare for common questions, make sure your answers focus on the value you bring if hired, consider job fit by reviewing the role, company, culture, and who will be your manager, and know that a hiring manager will expect at least one counter to your offer.

Make sure you research the company

This is very important, because knowing about the company during the interview shows your interest level and commitment regarding the role. Make sure you are comfortable with things like the type of product or service, history of the company, location, and check out their LinkedIn page.

Prepare for common questions

The most common question is “tell me a bit about yourself?”. This is an easy question to go on a bit of a tangent detailing. Make sure you don’t give too much information. Employers typically want a brief blurb about yourself. Practice an answer that is 30 seconds or so detailing how long you’ve lived in the area, your education and experience at related roles you’ve had for such industries.

I typically write down five to ten questions I think they will ask me, and then I detail quick 2-3 sentence answers on paper for each question, and practice. Some of the other questions are “tell me about a challenging situation with a coworker?”, “tell me about a time you failed?”, “what has been your biggest achievement?”, and “what are your strengths?”

Here are some recommendations on how to answer these types of questions. For a challenging situation, make sure you detail your problem solving skills and fit with culture, and ability to get along with team members. For a time you failed?, make sure you detail what you learned from the experience moving forward. For your biggest achievement, make sure you detail the dollar impact of your contribution to the achievement. For your strengths, early in my career I focused on things like work ethic, education, ability to breakdown marketing strategy into a tactical process.

However, as I’m much more experienced now, I focus on articulating my strengths around my “superpowers” - the best skills I have that will pay top dollar. For a job you really want, I highly recommend practicing for a few hours prior to your interview. You can read my article on “Should You Make a Career Pivot here.”

Make sure your answers focus on the value you bring if hired

Rather than answering questions around what you functionally did, focus on answering questions with a function>work>impact format. For instance, “I created a go-to-market strategy for acquiring new customers using Facebook ads resulting in a $1 million revenue gain at xyz company.”

This answer format works well for resumes bullet points and answers to interview questions. This format can be used for various types of roles. If you need to elaborate on specific interview questions, a problem>solution>result format also works well. This simply means detailing what the challenge was for the business, what the solution was that you provided, and what was the result that you achieved.

Think about the job, company, culture, and manager

The interview process is not only an opportunity to impress the interviewer and articulate why they should hire you, but also an opportunity for you to understand if the business fits with what you’re looking for as an employee.

Owner/manager and employee relationships are a mutual transaction of value. You receive a paycheck and they receive a service provided. When considering the job opportunity, it’s important to fully understand the role and responsibilities, the brand and product or service, the office and company culture, and who your manager is.

These are the typical things that will determine longevity at a business. I’ve had jobs where I loved the job, but not the culture or loved the company, but had mixed feelings about the manager. So evaluating these four areas can really save you some headache when choosing accepting a job offer.

They will expect at least one counter to their offer

If you do receive a job offer, know that most hiring managers are expecting at least one counter to their offer from a candidate. It’s totally normal to ask for 10% more than the offer or in some cases a higher job title than was initially posted. So, it’s ok to think about the salary, bonus structure, benefits, job title being offered and an appropriate counter proposal before deciding to sign.

If you would like help professionally preparing for a upcoming interviews, you can schedule a 1:1 coaching session with me here.