How to Sell Your Value Instead of Your Skills in Job Interviews

0:00 And today I want to talk with you about how you interview, how you sell yourself, and the biggest mistake that I think most job candidates make when they're in an interview. It starts with a faulty mindset about what's important, and then it continues on with poor execution. So buckle up, get in, say hi. I want to start with a story. I want to take you back 20 years. January 2005. I want you to imagine 20 years ago, January 2005.

0:29 So maybe almost. Almost 21 years ago. And I had been an executive recruiter for about six weeks. Okay? So 10 minutes into my executive recruitment career with MileWalk, I'm in my beautiful condominium. The second bedroom was my office, where I smiled and dialed all day. I talked to job candidates. I talked to clients. And I was in this. Actually, I had just moved into this condo. So the condo was pretty shiny and new. My career was shiny and new.

1:00 And I was on the phone with a job candidate. She had just got. A senior person had just gotten out of an interview with a very senior executive at one of my new clients. And this woman said to me, and we debrief immediately after the interview's over, I practically want them to call me before they even can get to the elevator. And she said that the interview went great. She really loved the opportunity. She was excited.

1:27 She went on and on. She thought she did well. I said, great. And then what's also customary is once I get that feedback, I call my client right away. This all happens within 10 or 15 minutes of the interview. Client picks up the phone, and I asked her how the interview went, and she said, andy, I can see why you really like her. Good. Okay. And she. She's got a great background. Okay. And said all the right things.

1:59 Okay. And I can see, you know, she's been successful, and she had a lot of great stories. Okay, okay, okay. Get to it. Right. Like, I. I know the buts coming. And she said. And she said all the right things, but I'm just not sure she could do it in our environment. In our environment. In our environment. Because she apparently thinks she has the toughest job with the roughest clients and the most complex technologies.

2:33 Just like every employer thinks that their environment is special, but what they really are are human. And what they're really looking for is how has what you've done going to change my life, my company, my team, or what my customers or whatever it might be? And it was at that moment, in January of 2005, where I knew I needed to change the way that I Prepared job candidates. It wasn't about their accolades. It wasn't about how smoothly and how awesomely they told their stories.

3:05 It was about getting that discussion into the future so that you could help whoever is listening understand exactly how you're going to transform the their lives. And that's, that's how it was born. So from that moment forward, I had always talked with the job candidates about moving the dialogue into the future. But if you can't even move it into the future to talk about what you're going to do in their environment and how you're going to do it in their environment and what you're going to do for their customers or their team or them, then at a minimum, you need to show how you've transformed others in a very similar manner.

3:41 When you all, you know, pop into the Milewalk Academy and hopefully you click on the case studies page and you, you learn about people that have used our premium coaching to get their jobs. That is an illustration of what we can do for you. That's the outcome that they've achieved that you're hoping for, whether that's a new job or a promotion or whatever it might be. Well, the same goes for you. You wonder why your degree is not valued.

4:10 Well, a degree is nice. You showed up somewhere for four years. You put the time in. It shows me you're disciplined enough to take the classes. But operating in a perfect environment, in an academic setting where all the variables are perfect, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how you're actually going to react when there's real bullets flying at your head. So it's the same thing. If you've done great work or great projects at other companies, it's just like another degree.

4:37 You did it over there. I need to be convinced you can do it for me over here. And so the first thing I need you to do today is understand that, that they're buyers and buyers by transformation. They don't buy features, they don't buy skills. While it's nice to have cool features and it's nice to have great skills, but you knowing something doesn't do anything for me. It's the application of your knowledge. And you need to help me understand how the application of your knowledge is actually going to transform my life.

5:06 Who gets what I'm saying? Right? Give me a hey in the chat. So let me call your attention to this point. First, you might not be able to make out the colors, but it's the interview is not about your past. That's a little red X, this is a little green. Plus it's about, it's about their future. Okay? So I need that to register it. Sales 101 as you sell to the Gap. In order to sell to the Gap, you need to make sure that you know what the Gap is.

5:31 One what somebody cares about. If I want to know. If you want them to know the value you're going to create for them, you need to know what they value. It's not your skill sets, it's what you're going to do for them. So this is the first order of business today. So another way that I want you to, I want you to get out of this way of thinking and I want you to get into this way of thinking is I want you to stop thinking about what did I do.

5:55 I want you to stop thinking about what did I do in every imaginable facet. That's how you write your resumes. Here's what I did. I managed the call center team. I wrote the marketing social media copy. Right. That's what you did. I don't care about that. This is what I know. I know how to, to run the project. Great. So what. But what will they gain? Start thinking about what is the value I'm going to contribute on your resume.

6:22 Why do you think I always say to you, put the effect first, the benefit first. Here's what happened, here's what I did to make that happen. It's so far secondary. So it's the same thing in an interview. And many people who look at these legacy interviewing formulas that are God awful because they don't take this into account. You get, you get, you get on a, on a path that is sending you into a bad spot in the interview and you're not able to actually show them the value you're going to create.

6:54 So I want you to start thinking this way. All right, so how do we, how do we do that? What's the, what's kind of the, the protocols and the steps that will enable you to do that? Well, the first thing you need to understand is if you're going to try to help somebody achieve their goals, that's what I want to do for you. That's what I want you to do for your, your clients, your companies, your, your team, your boss, your division, whoever, your partners, whoever it might be.

7:22 You need to know that there are always five important factors when an organization is hiring somebody. But the leading factors of what they, they consider. Even if they don't spell it out in this language, I'm telling you that these variables are always at play for you, and this is the fastest way for you to figure out what they care about and move things in your direction so that they desire you, want to hire you, and want to pay you more because.

7:50 Because you're gonna add more value. That's what it's all about. So first thing is, there's goals, problems, the solution, the profile, and the cost. I'm gonna run you through each one of these just like I do almost every week at live office hours, because I cannot possibly drill this into your head enough. The first and foremost thing is every employer has a goal. I like to use myself as an example. I think you guys get the analogies.

8:13 I'm a career coach. There's a lot of career coaches. Every career coach on the planet, what do they want? They want to help people, right? Find new jobs, thrive in them. That's great. But from a business operator's perspective, what do I. What do I want? Well, I need more leads. I need more potential clients. I need more potential customers. So my goal in anything that I would do from a marketing and sales perspective is to attract more of you.

8:40 Now, some of you come for the free shows, and that's great. You're part of my community, and some of you enroll in my premium stuff and you pay. And I can help you on a deeper level. But the more of you, the better. I always want more. I always want to help more people. That's my mission. Okay, well, my goal is to, what, have more people find me? Have more people engage in my work. So if you're a marketing person or you're a seller, you know my goal is more, right?

9:04 So I show up every week, I talk to you. There's 115 of you right now still stumbling in. But some of you are going to talk to your friends. That's helpful. I circulate information on social media. That's helpful, right? I send you emails, newsletters, those kind of things. Talks in groups or whatever. But goals, what are their goals? You should know what their goals are. How are you measured? What is it that you're doing? Every marketing team in the world wants more leads.

9:30 They want more leads. They want them faster, they want them cheaper, they want a higher conversion rate, so more of those leads turn into customers, and they want everything for the least amount of cost. So that's simple. Well, what are their problems? Well, there's umpteen different problems when it comes to getting leads and marketing a company. So the, the. The more you have helped organizations achieve those Goals for which I would need you to achieve with my organization, the better, the more specific the problems that you have helped them overcome, the better.

10:05 So a person who is a marketing person who has helped a business to business organization that sells widgets increase their marketing or brand awareness or increase their marketing leads or their prospect base is not as attractive to me as somebody who's done the same thing for a small business, small services business, a small coaching business, a small career coaching business.

10:38 Because my problems lack of recognition, a lot of noise in the market, a lot of people competing for your attention. You know, all the problems that I have that are very specific to me, I want the person who's been able to solve those. So the more specific and the more narrow the problem or the more analogous the problem that you've solved for a prior employer helps me become more attractive to your history because that tells me you have the domain expertise and the know how to solve my specific problems.

11:13 That makes you more attractive for that. I'm willing to pay more for somebody who's not going to learn on the job how to solve my specific issues. And then there's the solution that I have in mind of what I want you to do or what I think you need to do in order to help help me achieve my goals and overcome my problems. But the solution itself can be variable. So I might think that to solve my problem, I need to run Facebook ads.

11:39 You might say, no, no, Andy, you don't need to spend money doing that. We can set you up an organic distribution process of your social media and we could do it this way. Fine, you have a different solution or yes, Andy, you do need to run these ads, but if you run them this way, it's going to take you a lot longer. I can shrink the process by doing certain things that will accelerate that and reduce the cost.

12:03 Awesome. So you've, you've. While you might be working within the same solution set, you've been able to do it faster or you're able to achieve it at a higher level. No, no, Andy, we think it'll take about the amount of time you think it's going to take. Except I won't get you 10 leads. I'll get you 100 a day. Okay, great. You've exceeded the goal or my going in goal by either optimizing the solution or running it more effectively.

12:29 And then there's a profile of the individual that I have in my head. That profile looks like. What does it look like? The job description and the role, the responsibilities are what I want you to do. But then there's a section in there that says, and the Ideal candidate has 5 years of experience in social media marketing. 5 years. 5 years of experience in copywriting, 2 years of experience working in the coaching industry. Something like that.

12:56 Well, they have a profile, except that's their going in profile. It's not the only profile that'll work. And this works in multiple dimensions. So from a profiling perspective, think about yourself. Well, I, as a 59 year old professional could be competing for a job with a 30 year old professional. So do they want eight years of experience and the 30 year old will do just fine, or can I convince them that their goals can be achieved faster, their problems are stiffer, much more difficult than they think.

13:30 And you're gonna need somebody with my level of expertise because I've seen all this, I've done all this, and not only will I be able to overcome all of that, those problems that you haven't even anticipated, that you don't even know you have, that no 30 year old or somebody working eight years is gonna be able to figure out because they just don't have enough tread on the tires. Right. I could raise the profile or I could go in the other direction.

13:52 Somebody might think they need 20 years of experience when that same 30 year old might be able to do it with their eight years of experience. So this profile can be manipulated throughout the interviewing process. You need to figure out how to leverage, how to leverage these three components, the goals, the problems and solution, in order to do that. And then there's the cost. Well, your problems are worse than you think. It's going to be more difficult than you think.

14:18 I can overcome those more difficult problems and achieve more at a higher level goal or I can achieve it faster, which is gonna save you money, therefore you're gonna pay me more or. No, no, no, it's not as complicated as you think. You can get away with me and you don't have to pay 100 grand, you could pay me 50 grand and I'll do it. So what you're doing is you're going through the process and you're trying to massage these, so to speak, and in your favor.

14:43 But there's a number of ways to do that. And I'm not going to go into any more of that right now because I got a video out there, because I got dozens of videos on this. What every job seeker needs to know about negotiating salary is one of them. Five ways to get more salary, that's another one. Check it Out. I talk about these five variables in greater length. But the most important thing for you right now is to understand that you can't even get to the start line if you don't know what their goals are.

15:10 You have to know what their goals are, and it's easy to determine what their goals are. So I want you to know that. I want you to think about what is it that you do in your day in and day out job. Are you on the marketing team? I can tell you any of you that are on the marketing team. I want more leads. That's your goal. I want it faster. That's a goal. I want it cheaper.

15:30 That's a goal. And I want the highest conversion rate, meaning you need to be targeting the right demographics so you're not wasting our dollars and cents on people who are not ultimately gonna buy our products. Okay, great, everybody. Those are the goals. All right? You're the sales team. I want what. I want more revenue. I want it faster. I want it from clients that are ideal. I want the clients to be super happy. Right? All of those are the same for all the salespeople.

15:56 It goes on and on. The accountants, I want the books closed as fast as possible. I want them as accurate as possible. I don't want to be. I want to be compliant as possible. If we get an audit, I want everything as fast as possible. If you're an engineer, I want you to create the semiconductor as fast as possible, as cheap as possible. I want it to be bulletproof so that it never breaks and no one ever returns it and it doesn't fry.

16:20 Right? So you, you. These goals are very easy to determine. And you. And you can think about, well, how is it that I measured today? And you have your AI tools and you can figure those out. Now, where I would point you and I want you to start is with the Great eight. If you don't know what the Great eight is, I'm going to fill you in on that here in a second. It's only going to take me a few seconds because I'm not going to go very deep in it.

16:42 But there are eight major goals or accomplishments that every employer in the world, no matter what widget they build or service they provide, there are eight things they care about. They want revenue generations. They want to make more money. They want market awareness. They want everybody to know who they are. They want more leads, whether it's on billboards or people finding them, on social or whatever. They want to attract customers. They want to make those customers happy.

17:09 Customer happiness. They want to grow their company and put the entire infrastructure in place for growth. Whether that's M and A divestitures, whether that's going public, getting, getting venture capital money or whatever it might be, and everything that is associated with it, all the compliance, all the risk management, accounting, everything that goes along with making the company and positioning the company for growth. Then there's the employee happiness. There's also expense management or expense reduction, and then process efficiency, doing things quicker, which also in turn reduces expenses.

17:45 Those are the great eight. What I want you to do when you're thinking about selling your value is you want to start with, what are the great eight accomplishments that I need to demonstrate I've helped other employers attain? I don't want to know about the how to just yet. I. It's really important that you can show me that you're going to transform me. What's the analogy I always use? Right. We want to grab the. Grab the.

18:12 Grab the little colorful phones. When I go to my Instagram and I'm swiping because I'm a health nut and I always see the washboard tummy, right? That's the first thing I see. That's what the outcome is. If I'm interested in achieving my health goals and I wanna look fit, I wanna see the washboard stomach, and then I wanna know how I'm gonna have to achieve that, but I wanna know that's what I'm gonna get. So when you're telling a story, you're doing the same thing.

18:37 You can think of my Instagram analogy about the washboard abs, right? What is it that they care about? And then think about what you've done in terms of a story you can tell where you have achieved those exact goals. Start with the goal. So what A lot of. A lot of you do. And I know this because I coach multiple of you every day. What a lot of you do is you think about. What's the question they're going to ask me?

19:05 They're going to ask me about a challenge. Well, what's a good challenge that I think I overcame? Why? Why are you thinking about that stuff? Think about, what is it that they need me to do for them? What do they care about? What's the story that I can tell them that helps them achieve what they want? And I'm sure you can. You overcame challenges along the way. Pick one from that. But the story starts when you are conceptualizing what you're going to share in an interview.

19:31 It starts with, what do they need me to do? What do they need me to help them accomplish? That's how you get the value. If you think about the Great eight, and you start there, you're going to be able to work backwards to who or whom or what teams or what customers that you've helped achieve any of those Great eight. But not all the Great Eight are, are equal. It depends what your function is. If you're a seller, you better be talking to me about revenue generation and client happiness.

20:00 If you're on the marketing team, you better be talking to me about how you're increasing the market awareness. Right? If you're, if you're on the accounting team, talk to me about your operational efficiency and your understanding of GET principles. So, so that's, that's what you need to do, is think forward to where they want to go and what they need you to accomplish and then talk about the impacts you've had historically. And then if you want more on the Great Eight, I have a video, eight ways to show your value as an employee.

20:27 It breaks down the great eight. The video is probably a half an hour or 45 minutes, so you can have all the nauseating detail that I know you want. Okay, the other thing I want you to do when you are gonna tell your story. Now, I've taught you my car technique. C A A R. We're not gonna go into the mechanics of the entire story here because I've done that, oh, I don't know, at least three dozen times on the YouTube channel you can find the car videos.

20:54 I'll point you to one of my favorites here in a minute. But there is a storytelling formula that I propose, and my storytelling formula is built on you selling yourself. And the one thing that I think is a huge mistake that people make with the STAR technique is they talk about the situation or they get right into the chronology of what it is that they were asked to do or what it is that they do. Every single answer you ever give in an interview starts with the value or the result first.

21:29 The STAR technique holds the result to the end, which is the absolute worst time to have it, because by that time, your boring story has already lost them and they're already meant mentally wanting to check their phones. So you need to show them the result up front. That's the impact. And so when you're talking about history, your history, if you can highlight the transformation that you helped somebody attain or the opportunity or aspiration that existed that you attained, that's going to get my attention.

22:00 It's no different than the washboard Abs. When you're flipping through the Instagram and you see the washboard abs, that's the result. Do you do any of you go to Instagram and actually look for health and fitness coaches and do any of them start with, hi, my name's Andy, I'm a health and fitness coach. Let me tell you about the 30 day plan that you're going to have to go through to sweat your butt off in order to get this right.

22:25 They don't do that. They show you the result, they grab your attention, and then they fill you in on how they made that happen, how they did this for this customer, how they're going to do it for you. So every one of your answers starts with the result. You need to understand this. This is sales 101. Whoever developed the star technique didn't know thing one about selling. You're in the biggest marketing and sales job of your life.

22:50 If you're looking for a job, start with the result. Always, always, always. So you need to resequence your answer. So resist the temptation to start. Whenever you get asked, tell me about a time or even if they ask you, how did you do that project? Don't go into step one. Don't go into a diminutive description of your situation. Give them the result right up front. Give them the result right up front or what the opportunity was the result is.

23:20 If I'm the IT project manager running a CRM implementation to fix my call center system, I don't say I was. The situation is I was the project manager and it was my job in order to implement a technology system. Yawn, I'm gone, I'm dead. I'm thinking about something else. I'm daydreaming about the date I'm going to have with my wife or whatever. I'm not going to be paying attention. But if you say to me, we have a large call center and we had a 62% attrition rate, average is 15.

23:52 This was costing us 120 million a year and lost customers. Okay, now you have my attention. Now, you didn't necessarily say, I ran this project and here's what I achieved. You didn't say it that way. You told me what was broken. And if you're going to tell me what was broken, I'm going to naturally assume you're telling me this because you fixed it. Now I'm in a wait with bated breath on. Tell me how you did that.

24:19 If you say, well, Andy, I just was hired to because everything was fine with this small $10 million company, but they'd been $10 million for three years, and they wanted to grow internationally, and they thought there was a European demand, but they had never done this. So there wasn't really a problem? Well, no, they had an aspiration, or you could think of the problem in terms of lack of growth. Now, I'm not saying everybody's got to be a $50 million company.

24:46 So you could tell me that this organization was stagnant with revenue at 10 million for the last three years, and they really thought there was an opportunity in the European market. They hired me because of my track record of expanding international practices. And I knew when I was interviewing that if within the first year, I could probably help them triple their revenue. Okay, now you told me. Now you told me that, and now I'm going to assume it was 30 million.

25:12 So you got another 20 million from here. Now you're going to walk me through the story. Okay, now you have my attention. Now I want to know how you did that. So that's what I mean by you lead with the result or you lead with the opportunity. I coached a woman, she was in the coast of Africa to open up an arm for her oil company. And she said, well, it was my job to kind of get there and break ground.

25:39 And I said, okay, well, all right, well, how much opportunity was there in Africa in oil? Like, what was the market share of spend on oil in Africa? She had the number. She knew it. I said, okay, well, you lead with that. And you had zero of that. So it's your job to go and get a fraction of that. And in the first year, everybody knows the first dollar is the hardest dollar to sell. So the fact that you were able to figure this out, strategize, open the market, get your brand, who was not known in the country known, and you were able to sell a seven figure, whatever.

26:14 That's a big deal. Okay, well, that's how you open a story. So I want you to make sure that you resist the temptation to start going into the steps. So the first thing, I yawn, you can get to that second. Okay, so I want to remind you, you're selling your future. The value is in what you do next, not what you've done. Historically, the biggest mistake that a lot of you make is you're spending a lot of time in your past.

26:42 If you ever want to know how well you did in an interview, if you do a lot of video interviews, just record yourself. Just record yourself. If you don't want to record the zoom Screen or teams or whatever, just record it. Just sit your phone down and record it. What percentage of the time were you talking about your past? The larger the percentage of the time you were talking about your past, the worse you did in the interview.

27:06 It's your job to make sure that you're getting them to see your future value. Here's how I would do it in your environment. Here's what it means to you. I want you to write these words down when you do this. This is what happens. That creates pressure, that creates urgency, that creates conclusions, that creates a projection of imagination. It is not negotiable when you do this. This is what happens.

27:36 And so when, when you're using language like that, they, you are immediately shifting their attention to what's going to happen for them. These are, these are tricks you can implement anywhere in the, in the interviewing process. Anytime you want to get them in their eyes on. If you feel like you're talking about and you're taking them through your story, you can even interrupt yourself and get them into the future. So here's how I was doing it in this case, because we had these constrictions, but you don't have that problem.

28:04 So we're going to do it differently in your environment. Keep going. They're going to come back to that or you're going to give them an illusion or something that they're going to hold on to. You can totally control the flow of the dialogue because there's absolutely no way they're not going to want to come back to that. Because why? Because the easiest thing for them to do is to see how the best judgment they can make on how you will operate in their environment is to be talking about how you will work in their environment.

28:32 If you can't connect the dots for them in their environment, it's much harder for them to look at your past and say, oh, how does that translate way the hay over there. That's a tall order, number one. It's a tall order for anybody, even the most savvy of interviewers. But it's an impossibility for somebody who's a novice, which is what a lot of you deal with. So I want you to make sure it's about what you will do next.

28:55 Now, one video I mentioned about my car technique that I would watch, the job interview formula, guaranteed to get you hired. I have my car formula. I also have a car formula for different purposes. We call that the coop. We call this the sedan. So, so check this out. And then just to recap Just a few of these points. I want to make sure that you are thinking in terms of their future, not your past. And in order to be thinking about about their future, you need to be thinking about what their goals are, what their potential problems are.

29:29 Now, the goals are easy to ascertain the problems, you might have to take a guess, but just guess at every problem, understand every problem and how you would overcome it. And then the last thing that I would say to you is always make sure the last two things is focus your analysis and your stories on the grade 8. There's the video that I mentioned on the grade 8. And make sure whatever you do, the result comes out first.

29:55 And if you want more on the result coming out first, just check out that video I mentioned about the job interview formula. Guaranteed to get you hired. Okay, 30 minutes. That's what I was shooting for. All right, if you're here with me live, we're going to the chat. If you're watching this on the recording, I will see you next week. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, I love doing this for you. Please make sure to click the like button.

30:15 Subscribe to the station and share this because people need help because this is a terrible job market. It's very confusing. All right, all you watching this on the recording, I'll see you next week.