Winning the Right Job - A Blueprint to Acing the Interview

By Pratibha Messner and Wolfgang Messner

You know you have the right skills, a curious mind, the drive and discipline to make your career goals a reality. And yet, do you find yourself lost in a maze of job portals, social networking, online applications, call with agents and futile rounds of interviews?

That 'dream job' does not come easily. At the beginning of your career and unguided by a mentor, the challenges are manifold: getting it right during the phases of application, the interview and the negotiation can be tricky.

Relevant for both entry-level jobseekers and those planning a change, Winning the RIght Job - A Blueprint to Acing the Interview shows you how to approach a potential employer and answer questions on attitudes, life skills, ambitions and expectations.

The book guides you through the interviewing and negotiating days, helps you decide whether the role on offer is right for you, and provides tips on making a gracious exit from your current and a powerful entry into the new organization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Jul 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781509814114

Pratibha Messner

Pratibha Messner is Director of GloBus Research with international experience in project management, risk management and service provider governance. Her industry experience comes from a variety of roles covering technology, operations and risk management in startups and the Deutsche Bank group. She has worked for many years in Germany, India and UK and covered assignments in Singapore and the USA. Pratibha is deeply familiar with the vetting and recruitment process - both behind and in front of the interviewing desk which led her to write Winning the Right Job - A Blueprint to Acing the Interview, alongside co-author Wolfgang Messner.

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Introduction

You are new to navigating the job market, or your interviewing skills are a bit rusty perhaps. You need a resource. And that is precisely what this book is meant to be.

Why do we think we know what works in an interview?

We have, in our wildly diverse corporate and academic careers, gone through scores of interviews ourselves, as candidates and hiring managers, across industries and geographies. We have interacted closely with decision makers during the recruitment process, giving us a window to observe influencing factors in play. Our experience gives us the confidence to put these tips together. In addition, one of us teaches in business schools around the world, providing a special insight into the fears and challenges of interviews and placements that new graduates have to overcome.

Why should you read this book?

The road to a dream career is littered with questioning filters. Organizations want to make judicious use of their resources to hire the right talent. As a candidate, you want to avoid a job that takes you nowhere. All parties involved want a perfect fit which, inevitably, leads us to a selection process. Carefully planned recruitment procedures will take you through an intricate maze of resumes, cover letters, written tests, telephone interviews, conversations with multiple stakeholders on job responsibilities and capabilities, and conclude with delicately poised negotiations on compensation. The path ahead is likely to be strewn with potential landmines.

It is not uncommon for some corporate roles to involve seven to eight rounds of discussions before a decision is communicated. All this is nerve-wracking if you are not prepared for the process, or if you have had a stable run in one role with little idea of the changes in the corporate world since the last time you applied for a job. In parallel to multiple conversations with the recruiting organization, you yourself are constantly evaluating options wanting, like anyone would, to arrive at the best solution possible.

Having the right technical or functional skills is no longer the only key to a great role. Today, it is also about knowing how to approach a potential employer, answering questions on attitudes, life skills, ambitions and expectations. If you are looking for that extra bit of support in the interviewing process, we hope this book will come in useful. We will take you through the hiring phases, give you tips on how to make your application more attractive and stand out from the rest of the competition in an interview.

How to use the book?

While we look at the big job interview in great detail, we will also take you through the steps of writing a resume, applying, preparing, interviewing, negotiating and starting a new job.

We shall examine all of these aspects carefully in the pages ahead. And while we have designed the book in a soup to nuts sequence, each chapter is written as a self-contained piece which allows you to read them in any order you find appropriate. Here is a brief sketch of what we cover:

•   Chapter 1. How to Get Invited to an Interview? This section gives you tips on creating an online profile, building a pipeline of positions and applying for a position using resumes and cover letters. It also gives you an overview of the employment background check and how to balance the hunt for a new role with your current job.

•   Chapter 2. Preparing for the Interview. You have an interview appointment! The goal now is to make you a well-informed interviewee and help identify what is really important to you in this phase of your professional journey. It also touches aspects of how to present yourself and how to overcome interview stress.

•   Chapter 3. First Impressions and Positioning. This is where the rubber hits the road, the beginning of the job interview. First impressions count, so you might want to go through this chapter before moving on to more specialized interview topics.

•   Chapter 4. Your Experience and Ambitions. This section introduces you to questions on your achievements, how you have built your career so far, and what you expect from the future. Your experience is your selling proposition for the job.

•   Chapter 5. Behavioral Questions. Here we offer advice on how to structure your answers when you are being asked to show how you achieve great results at work.

•   Chapter 6. Your Personality and Way of Working. What do interviewers really want to know when they ask you about your strengths and weaknesses? We look to guide you on how to approach questions on your personality.

•   Chapter 7. Special Interview Types. This is an independent section covering job fairs, telephone interviews, panel interviews, group interviews, case interviews, presentations, written tests and the (in)famous assessment center.

•   Chapter 8. Wrapping Up. We deal here with the last few moments of the interview; last impressions are almost as important as first impressions – which we previously covered in Chapter 3.

•   Chapter 9. After the Interview. There are a number of things you need to do immediately after the interview, including reviewing your own performance in the interview room. We provide you with a summary list of all key interview questions to help you evaluate where you did well and where you might need some fine-tuning. This final chapter will also help you decide whether to take the job and, assuming you do, how to get off to a flying start in the first weeks and months at work.

We would like to tell you straightaway, this book will not give you copy and paste answers to interview questions. There is nothing here that you can pick and drop unchanged in the confines of an interview room. Instead, we look at the business background to potential questions. We will present frameworks that you can use as your tools. We will cite examples, both from business leaders and personal experience, but to truly make this work, you will need to put in your own preparation. It will require you to sift through the contents, take the part that is relevant to your situation and build a story around it that will leave an impression on the interviewer. Winning takes practice and while we have endeavored to give you a blueprint in this book, the journey will be yours to make, success yours to savor.

We also like to use the word ‘story’ quite a lot in this book. It’s not about making up something from thin air, it is not about lying or fabricating stuff on work experience. When we talk about storytelling, it’s more as a positive experience. We want you to use it as a tactic to build your case, bolster your profile, all this while holding the attention of the interviewer. For the questions we present as most likely to come up in the interview, what are the aspects of your life’s experience that can be relevant, that you can use to build a narrative? We encourage you to think about these as a part of your preparation and give you relevant tools in the process.

We cite often from personal experience in this book, but we don’t want to distract you by specifying which one of us went through a particular situation. So, instead of confusing our readers with ‘I (Wolfgang)’ or ‘I (Pratibha)’, we say it simply with an ‘I’. We thought this would be enough to show that this is something one of us underwent and not an episode we have only read about.

For the purpose of this book, the words ‘recruiter’ and ‘interviewer’ refer to anyone who stands between you and the job you are applying to. Some organizations prefer to have third parties sifting through applicant profiles and conducting initial interviews before shortlisting candidates for further rounds of discussion with the company’s internal hiring team. No matter whether the interviewer is an employee or an outsourced resource, the procedures will remain similar, and it is best to take every round seriously.

An entire spectrum of industry interviews in just one book?

There is, very obviously, a variety of jobs in the industry today. It would be quite impossible, and we are not the best qualified in any manner, to cover the technical and domain related questions that your interviewer will have. We are, however, of the firm opinion that employers these days are looking for people who are a ‘good fit’ for the organization and not just the role. This means that they will be addressing many areas that conventionally go by the phrase ‘soft skills’. Your personality, attitude and values go a long way in influencing how you learn, work and interact with colleagues. It is something hiring organizations are very interested in, and we shall delve into a lot of it in this book.

While the nuts-and-bolts of the hiring process might differ from country to country, from industry to industry, the essentials – of finding an employee best suited to the company culture and to the requirements of the job profile – remain the same. Also, we live in an increasingly international work environment where it is not uncommon for an employee in India to be overseeing teams in North America, or vice versa. Which also means that the more rounds of interviews you have with a multinational, the more likely it is to be talking to a person from a different country and culture. It is another reason why companies are interested in how you work and whether your attitudes are aligned with those of the organization. This book is intended to help you irrespective of the industry you work and the country you live in.

A word of caution!

Interviewing, unfortunately, is not an exact science. Often there is more than just abilities under evaluation. At the close of it all, this is still a process with human emotions and egos in play, not to forget the X-factor that will make one candidate more appealing than others. Nailing the job does not automatically mean that you were the best candidate for the role; just as failure does not necessarily imply a rebuff of your capabilities. We hope this book will help you put your best foot forward, but we urge you not to take rejection to heart if a job offer does not materialize.

Finally, we want you to win the job that is right for you. We want you to use the information here to build your own path to success. If we come across as a bit of a know-all, it’s only because we have reflected on our own experience, pored over material, looked up all possible references, discarded irrelevant details and present to you here that which we think is useful. We are not perfect – nobody is – but this is what we have learnt along the way and we dearly hope it will be of help to you.

Good luck!

1.

How to Get Invited to an Interview?

No matter where you live in this world, the brutal truth is that competition for a job is high today. The world’s economy is going through peaks and unforgiving troughs in shorter business cycles which makes companies wary of hiring like there’s no tomorrow. This, coupled with a continual increase in new graduates entering the workforce every year, means fewer jobs are on offer to an increasing number of applicants. Take a look at these facts and see if you agree:

•   The global investment banking firm Goldman Sachs hired only 330 analysts in 2014 – selected from 17,000 applications.¹

•   The international e-commerce giant Amazon has several hundred bar raisers across the company and worldwide. With a word, a bar raiser can veto any candidate, even if their expertise is in an area that has nothing to do with the role the prospective employee is applying for.²

•   More than four in five students graduating from college in the US do not have jobs lined up even though they are actively seeking one. Students in supposedly hot areas like engineering, technology or math have no better luck.³

The emerging markets have experienced a revolution in higher education in the past decade. The number of young people who complete university degrees has risen from a few hundred thousand to many millions each and every year. Such a dramatic expansion of the education system should have provided new graduates opportunities unheard of in their parents’ generation. And yet:

•   In India, one in three graduates up to the age of twenty-nine is unemployed. While Indian students spend a lot of time on their degrees, the chances of getting employment become notably less once they have acquired a college degree.⁴ The education system is producing graduates beyond what can be reasonably absorbed by the job market. Simply put, many young Indians are overqualified or have the wrong degree. Craig Jeffrey, Professor of Development Geography at Oxford University, explains:⁵

In the past, India was seen as the country of the bus conductor with a BA. Now it is the country of the MA manual laborer. It is a revolution of rising aspirations and the economy can’t keep pace.

•   In China, unemployment among new graduates, six months after leaving university, is officially, and conservatively, estimated at around 15 per cent; the real rate could be about twice as high. The social and political implications of ‘idling’ graduates are already being studied by scientists – they will become alienated from the growing and prospering middle class.⁶

These numbers are staggering. And yet, to get to where you want to be, you will need to make career moves. Almost every time you make a change, an interview will lie between you and the next step on the ladder of opportunities. Stand out from the competition in the interview, and you will be well-positioned to make the move. Stumble and you may be hard put to find that chance again.

Creating a Pipeline of Open Positions

Prabir Jha, President and Group Chief HR Officer at the industry conglomerate Reliance Industries Limited, has a word of caution for you: ⁷

Careers cannot be a victim of an accident of education.

Or of college placements, for that matter. Be active, be your own manager, take the fate of your career into your own hands. But how to spot rewarding positions out there in the industry? How does one find that elusive opening which promises the next important role in your career?

The traditional channels still apply, that is using job portals and headhunters. But today’s world does not stop there. How about your own network? The network of your friends and colleagues? Are you intimidated by the thought of reaching out for the first time to professionals on social platforms?

Let’s start from the beginning!

Unsolicited Applications

Are you perhaps thinking of sending out an application along the lines of ‘Hello, I’m writing to enquire whether you have any suitable vacancies within your company for me?’ Such speculative applications did work but a long time ago. We too landed our first jobs, in Germany and India respectively, this way. However, this was back then, some fifteen to twenty years ago. Jobs were advertised in newspapers or on a blackboard in the university’s cafeteria, there was no networking via social media, no job portals, and an unprompted application was often the only way of getting in touch. And while the economy was not brilliant, it was not shrinking either and companies, still unscathed by crises to follow, were actively recruiting fresh talent. Even today, a call for spontaneous applications has remained on many a company’s website. Take the example of the chemical company BASF:⁸

A speculative application is always worthwhile at BASF. Even if we aren’t currently offering any positions that tailor with your career or requirements, we’d be happy to hear from you.

Sure, you can upload your resume and it will go into a general pool of candidates. Chances are high that no human will ever look at it; there are simply too many resumes in this database. Our take on it is that, in today’s economy, unsolicited applications are for the really desperate ones.

Headhunters

Headhunters have inside information on the job market and might know of openings that will never be advertised. An experienced headhunter can search more efficiently for jobs than you can, so choose and use your headhunter wisely. If you get the job, the headhunter gets a fee and so it should be a win-win situation in an ideal world. That’s the theory, but there are four things you should know about headhunters in real life.⁹

First, headhunters might not fully understand what you do and what the requirements of the position are. Headhunting is not a degree one can study for. People in this business are generalists and as such have to mediate between specialists.

Second, headhunters don’t have time. They give your resume a ten-second glance and decide whether to talk to you. You need to get your message across to them in the first few lines of your email or your resume. Chances are extremely high that they don’t read your CV till the end.

Third, headhunters might not find you a job. Headhunters take on ten candidates and are successful in finding a job for one or two of them, that makes a 20 per cent probability at best. The odds are against you. And it’s no better if the headhunter is recruiting for