How to Turn Interview Questions Into Proof You Know the Job

0:00 It has never been harder for a job seeker to interview effectively. There is a systemic issue. You may not even know it exists. But I'm going to tell you what it is. I'm going to tell you why it exists. And then I'm going to help you overcome it. And one of the ways we're going to do that, the primary focus of today is how to ask questions to show your realworld experience. The realworld part is what's really going to help you overcome this particular issue. And that's the lack of trust. And let me tell you why this exists. I want to bring you back to anybody who's old like dear old coach Andy to the 1990s. And as I walk you through the next couple of minutes to let you know why this exists, I want you to think about everything that you go through in your life at a macro level. When I look at trends, I won't I won't so go far as to say I have a crystal ball, but I think I can see around corners. And I think the flow of what I'm about to tell you is going to explain to you why and how you can too. But I think it's important that you understand how we got here and what you're dealing with right now. So if you go back to the 1990s and you think about the world and how we operated, it was very services focus, businessto business services and even if they had products, it didn't matter. Companies really wanted to focus on providing excellent service.

1:21 Everything from the widgets that were created and how they were implemented into your life or used to going in and sitting in a restaurant and the server pours you the coffee or delivers you the food. Everything was about service and it was really really noted and valued. And when 2000 hit, the world changed and it it it had two different ways it it it considered the world. We had information that we had never had before. And and really what I should say is information at at at the ease of our fingertips because the internet was so prevalent now and people were familiar with it by this time. It had been around for a number of years. That information really drove a lot of behavior. But also what drove behavior was the experience economy or the experience phase.

2:09 Think about when you went into a Starbucks and and and overpaid for that coffee because you got to sit down in a comfy chair and maybe talk with a friend or have a business meeting. Heck, a lot of interviews were going on in the in the early 2000s in Starbucks and the world valued that. And by the time 2010 rolled around, we started to see people like me getting on the internet, teaching, coaching, educational services were a big thing. And you could learn at a deeper level than ever before instantly. You had a plethora of things to choose from. Anything that you wanted to learn, there was probably somewhere someone on the internet who was teaching it. And that became very very valuable to people. By the time 2020 rolled around, there were a lot of people that were coaching in in in whatever their topic was becoming influencers, lots of followers, lots of subscribers, and what businesses did was to take advantage of that reach because people buy what's in front of them online. And so, if I have a way to circulate my product through individuals, the only problem with that is those individuals didn't know what they were talking about because that was not their primary area of expertise. also people like you who believed those influencers.

3:24 You went off and bought the products and realized they weren't all the rave that they were that they were going on about. And so the lack of trust started to form. It's one of the reasons why show of hands. Has anybody ever seen me promote anything? I have maybe on a couple of fingers where I actually gained a commission, but for one or two products tops that I that I don't promote anymore and won't promote anymore because I just my reputation is entirely too valuable to me and no amount of money is worth risking it. And so I'm very cautious about that. But not not everybody subscribes to that philosophy. Nor nor need they nor need they do that. But that issue, that lack of trust is the same issue that you are now facing as a job seeker. The reason that the influence and their ability as an influencer is fading is for the same reason you're having a tougher time in the interview because trust is at an all-time low. And why is that? Because you don't get anything for free. Because in the wake of the influencer economy or whatever you want to call it also you got AI on the heels of that and over the last few years while AI has been wonderful in making our lives easier the problem with that is you don't get anything for free because when you go into a job interview if you can get the interview the employer's thinking well first thing is I'm flooded with résumés that all look the same they've all been written by bots or messages that look like they've been written by bots. And so, does this person even know what they're talking about? And if you can manage to get past all of that, maybe you backdoor your way in. However, when you get into the interview, their trust, the interviewer's trust in what you've accomplished is at an all-time low. So, you are starting in a bigger pit than you ever have before. Did you write the resume? Did you actually achieve that? Is that accolade actually accurate? Trust is at an all-time low. Now, it's not your fault. Okay. What What do I always say? It ain't your fault, but it is your problem. And that's why I'm here for you. And that's why we're going to address today. Cool. Okay. So, how do we overcome this trust issue? And and if if you if you if you really want to think about trends, what's next? Think about what's next, right? It was the services, then the experience and information, then teaching, then influencing, now lack of trust. So, what's next? I don't know that that's really a question to be answered at the moment, but it's something to think about. All right. So, one of the things I want to do before we get into into the formula I want to give you today is I want to talk about when you ask questions in an interview. Let's start with the basics. I'm going to give you my three favorite questions that any of you can ask. You can just ask them this way if you want to. This is the most rudimentary way to ask them. It will yield great information, but but you're leaving a little meat on the bone. So, this is the 101 level, not the 401 level. And we're going to go through this quickly because this isn't the primary thrust of today. What does success look like? What problems are standing in our way of achieving that success? And what value would you attach to that success once we, I, us, however the team achieve it? Those are the if I only got to ask three questions to my hiring official, these would be the three. Cool. Not too tough. Why do you want to ask what does success look like? First thing is remember you're evaluating these. Asking these three questions in and of themsel will sell you. We want you to be able to sell yourself by asking questions. And when you do that, if you ask the success question, the first thing that's going to happen is at least you are now going to understand hopefully at a detailed level what constitutes success so that you can gauge is that reasonable. Am I a brand new salesperson and you want me to sell a million dollars in consulting services? But no one in the history of your company has ever been able to sell a million dollars in consulting services in their first year. Right? You're you're trying to gauge are they are they loony? Are they off their rocker? Or does that sound reasonable? Could I do that based on my history and my track record? Would I be able to do that?

7:48 Do I have the resources to do that? So, you are trying to ascertain that. Now, the other reason that you want to ask this question is because you're going to be getting information that's going to help you understand how to sell yourself. So now you can go into well if this is success here's how I would accomplish that. So now they can envision you doing it. That's why you want to ask that question. The next thing is well what problems are standing in our way? We don't have enough budget. We have misalignment. No one knows who we are. We're not a well-known brand. Whatever it might be, whatever the problems are, if you've given 10 minutes of forethought to your interview, you should know what all of the potential problems are that they are likely encountering. What you will not know is what their specific problems are. But that's okay because you're going to plan for every possible problem. And then what are you going to do? Tell them exactly how you would solve those problems. That's why you want to answer this question. Then you want to ask them once I achieve this goal, what value are you going to assign to that achievement? Meaning, is it going to be 2 million bucks? That's 2 million in revenue. Awesome. That's a million in profit. Fantastic.

8:58 Oh, you mean if we implement the project on time and on budget, we not only are going to help streamline our customer platform, make the customer service rep's job easier, but we're also going to gain political capital, and it's going to make our life infinitely easier because we now are not going to have to fight as hard with the businesses to get them to open up the purse string so we can implement the great technologies that we want to. It's going to make our credibility go up. It's going to make our ability to sell future projects easier. Great. Maybe that's priceless. I don't know. Put something down. Give me a view of why it matters. Why do I want to ask this question? Because when you get to the negotiating table, you are now armed with an ability to move their eyeballs off your cost and onto the value. You said it's going to be worth 2 million when I achieve that. $100,000 salary sounds like peanuts in relation to that. Well, how hard has it been to get your projects approved? If I implement that on time and on budget like we expect that I will, isn't that worth something more than $100,000? You get what I'm saying? So, I just want to level set us. These are my three favorite questions. Rapid fire. You could ask them all at once. You want all the answers and you want it in detail. Cool. The 101 level. So, I want every one of you to ask these questions. Now, here's here's what happens. When your trust is low and you're doing everything possible to gain a leg up on all the other candidates, you're doing everything you can to impress them, to help them understand that you know what you're doing.

10:44 when you tell stories in a job interview like I coach you to do and I don't want to go off the rails here on storytelling because I really want to focus on question asking but one of the things I spend a lot of time doing when I'm helping people with their with their stories is sorry when I help people with their stories is I say to them if you're ever in this situation we've organized your story according to my car technique it's c a r you have context two parts to the approach and then a result, but you the context really foreshadows the result as well. When you tell them this story in an organized fashion, you might be telling them a story about your past that doesn't completely align to their future. And what's really important for an interviewer is to ascertain how you are going to operate in their environment. Whether they know they're doing that or not, it doesn't matter. That's the easiest way for them to know whether you will be a good hire.

11:39 If you're focused on your past, it's really, really difficult for them to understand how to translate what you did in an environment they do not know or understand and translate it into their environment. And one of the easiest ways for you to do that, even if you've never operated the project the way you'll need to or sold the widget that they have, is when you're walking them through your story, you interrupt your story and you say, "And here's how I did this." and your environment will also need to do this, this, and this because your product is like this, and that product was like that. You take a few seconds, you move them into into the future. And what that's doing for them is it's it's getting them to see that you truly understand what to do and will know what to do when you get there. That says to them, you have a wider range of experience than the story you're telling me right now. And the more real world experience and the more in alignment experience you have with what they do, the staggeringly higher you exponentially higher you go up on their on their radar. So when you're asking a question, the same principle applies. So what does that look like? It's called preloading the answers. And why do we want to do this? We want to ask a question. We want to give them their answers so they can choose from our list that we give them. And what that does is a number of things. Number one, it gives them an understanding that you have real world experience. It's a wide range, but it also gives you an opportunity to follow up their response with exactly how you would handle what's important to them. So let's look at this in practice. What does this mean? So let's go back to the success question. What does success look like? That's you can ask that question and ask them for the detail or you can follow up with that with okay with those success parameters is it more important that it's speed to market quality of output consistency over time or something else. So you're giving them a multiple choice. So you can say, I'd love to know what success looks like and based on your parameters is the most important thing about success the speed we get it up and running, the quality in the first version or the 10th version, the consistency over time. You're giving them multiplechoice answers and then when they give you their answer, you're then going to tell them how to make that happen. So if you need speed, the fastest way to do that would be this. If the quality output needs to be 100% in the first version, the fastest way to get to that would be this way. So, you're going to tell a story, you're going to bounce on top of their story with whatever they answer. What does that look like in the problems? This might be even a little easier for you to see.

14:37 But when something goes wrong and you're not able to achieve those goals, I know you said you have a lack of budget as your primary problem. So we will need a business case in order to show them that the ROI is there. But whenever you have problems in your organization and you're unable to achieve your goals as a result of them, is it usually because the priorities aren't in alignment, the execution was poor, there were competing initiatives that drew people's attention or there were a misalignment AC right across groups that that that stalled the project. And then you're going to tell them how you've handled each one of these. Or even if you've never handled it before, you will tell them the solution because it's never been easier in the history of the world also to AI something and educate yourself. So this is what I mean. You will always frontload it. Now, I'm only giving you a couple of examples here, but you can pick this for any question that you feel is meaty and you want to have further discussion or you want to flex your muscle about how much you know. Same kind of thing when you when you preload the value question. Okay, where will the value show up first? Do you want it to show up in speed, revenue, cost savings, quality, or risk reduction?

15:59 Something like that. And so now what you can do is you can say, well, in order to ensure we're able to show it in revenue, here's what we'll do. If you want to if you want to accelerate the the the launch of it, here's what we'll do. So this to me are these front-loading of your questions or what I call preloading. This to me is letting their answers determine your stories. But what it's really doing is it's showing that you already know all the scenarios. And so if you're ever telling a story in a in a job interview, your story may or may not map exactly to what they're doing. So what you want to be able to do is you want to extend your story, not lengthen it, not be verbose, not put a lot of dead weight or inertia in it. I'm talking about showing alignment between what you do and have done and how it fits into what their environment and what it will look like, but also should you encounter something that they likely have encountered or will encounter that you know what to do. And so to really drive this home and to combat that trust problem, I spelled it out for you. When you are answering questions and you're telling a story, you want to tell it the schematic. You want to tell it to the level of context and heft that you can get in there about the level of importance of why you're doing something. But the way in which you answer a question, meaning tell a story, shows your competence and knowledge. When you supplement that with good questions, it shows experience that you know what to look for. When you give them a structured question that is preloaded, you're showing not only competence and experience, but you're also showing excellent judgment. So, just to recap it, what I want you to do is I want you to as much as possible, pick whatever questions are the meatiest, juiciest, or the ones that are going to get you having a conversation with them the most that will give you the chance in order to flex your subject matter expertise, your experience, as well as your troubleshooting or analysis skills. Just remember, I want you to preload their answers in your question.

18:12 That'll show them that not only do you understand, but it will also give you something to immediately address with a follow-up portion to your story or with a new story of how you would address it. Cool. Okay, quick one today. I just wanted to make sure that you're thinking about this. I want you to have every leg up. Trust is at an all-time low for so many reasons. You're going to need to be able to overcome it and overcome it quickly. This is one way to do it. If you're interested in more on how to do it when you struct the way you structure your answers to their questions, check out my videos C A or my job interviewing playlist on my YouTube channel. If you enjoyed this, please click the like button, subscribe to the station, make sure you are sharing this with people because a lot of people need job searching help. If you're here with me live, we're going to the chat if you're watching this on the recording. I'll see you next week.