Ok, now we’ve got the in. Our influencer passed along our resume to HR and they reached out to set up a phone screen. Once we get past that, we’ll be on to interviewing with the team, and then getting the job! Easy though, we still have a lot of work to do.
[Insert Company Name] Interview Template
Interviews can be daunting, especially at companies like Google, Amazon, or Uber. I’m sure you’ve read the horror stories about crazy questions they ask people like “Quick! How many golf balls can fit inside a school bus,” or, “how many gas stations are there in Manhattan?”
The truth is, most of these companies have done away with those questions. They crunched the numbers and found that the answers didn’t correlate with high employee performance (shocker, I know). In fact, Google’s own Senior Vice President of People Operations called them a "complete waste of time".
These companies have since reverted back to the standard style of interviews, which is great for us because it makes it much easier to identify patterns. We can essentially “guess” what questions will be on the test and prepare answers that will blow our interviewers away (it works way better than it did in college, I swear).
Here is the process I used to prepare for each one:
Nailing The Basics: Questions You’ll Get In Every Interview
According to renowned career guru Penelope Trunk, one of the easiest ways to be a better interviewer is to prepare for the most obvious questions. You may be saying “well duh,” but you’d be surprised by how many people spread themselves too thin by trying to prepare answers to every possible question.
99% of the interviews you go on will follow the exact same template. If you can master the format, your confidence will skyrocket and you’ll be prepared for almost any situation you get thrown into.
The Universal Job Interview Format:
Tell me about yourself (your experience, why you are interested in this role, etc.)
A mix of behavioral questions, which we’ll dive into shortly
What questions do you have for me (the interviewer)?
Let’s tackle each individually.
Tell Me About Yourself!
This is your first impression. More importantly, it’s the only part of the interview that you totally control. Do NOT rattle off your resume like a grocery list.
In order to nail this part you need to craft an interesting story – your story. You want it to be concise (around 2-3 minutes) and you need to think about what you want to convey. I recommend:
Choosing 2-3 themes to build your story around (for me, those themes were Persistence, Agility, and Success)
Including quantitative metrics whenever possible
Addressing the question of why you want to leave your current position (they are going to ask you this anyways, addressing it early shows that you’re aware it’s a concern of theirs and helps put them at ease)
To help get you started, here is what my story looked like. To give you some context, I was a biology major who was interested in landing a job in digital marketing:
Growing up, like most people, I wanted to be a doctor. I went to [college] where I majored in biology and planned my course to medical school. Not long after, I decided that pre-med wasn’t for me. I wanted to get into digital marketing, and I wanted to be in New York. I set my sights on this goal and created a plan that would get me there.
In 2013, I graduated with my biology degree and took a job in medical device sales where I worked from 5:30am – 12:30pm covering surgical cases in the operating room. Then, every day, I would come home and study digital marketing until 8:00pm. In order to gain relevant experience, I got certified in Google Analytics & AdWords and created my own consulting firm that focused on using search engine marketing to generate leads for private golf communities. We were able to increase home sales by an average of 20% while reducing the cost per lead by around 10%. Armed with my new credentials, I began to look for positions in New York.
Eventually, I was offered a position at my current company (a promotional analytics company in New York). During my tenure there I have grown my book of business by 467%, spearheaded the creation of an internal group dedicated to marketing the company on the internet, and helped close the 2nd largest deal in company history.
However, the company has restructured several times since I was brought on. I’ve had 3 different managers over the past year, as well as 3 titles with different sets of responsibilities. I’m looking for something a bit more stable and has been somewhere that I have wanted to work since I got into this industry. I’m really excited to have this opportunity.
Pro Tip: You are telling a story. Don’t be afraid to embellish a bit. I’m not saying you should lie or make up stories, but you want to sell yourself and you can bet your butt that your competition isn’t afraid to inflate their credentials. Kathryn Sollmann says it best, “we can all say anything [we want], but it just registers as “blah, blah, blah” until you wake someone up with impressive results.”
Behavioral Questions
Next up is the dreaded set of behavioral questions. The ones meant to tease out your thought process and your ability to be a “team player.” This is the part where our educated “guesses” are going to come in handy.
The behavioral section is broken down into two parts that I call Standard Questions and Company Specific Questions. Let’s start with the former.
Standard Questions
You are going to be asked a variation of one, if not all, of these questions in every single interview you go to:
Why do you want to work for us?
Tell me about a time you exhibited leadership
Tell me about a time where you had to work as a team
Tell me about a time you’ve had to work with a difficult person, or difficult people
Tell me about a time you failed
Tell me about a time you overcame an obstacle
Tell me about a time when you had success
If you can answer these 6 questions, you could handle 9 out of 10 interviews with no other preparation and be totally fine. Just follow the same set of rules I mentioned above in the Tell Me About Yourself section:
Craft a concise story
Make sure to include quantitative metrics that illustrate your success
Anticipate and address objections
Company Specific Questions
These are questions that fall in the middle of the 7 listed above and “why are man hole covers round?” Never fear though, we can anticipate these too.
Head over to GlassDoor. If you’ve never heard of GlassDoor, it’s a great resource for any job seeker that includes salaries, reviews, and interview information for almost any company in the world.
First, you are going to search for the position you’re applying for. Next, we’re going to click on the “Interviews” Tab. Then scroll down and click on “Filter Interviews” which will bring up some advanced settings. Here we’ll type in the title of the job we want (Account Manager, in this case) and the location (New York, NY). We’ll also select “Received Offer” because the people who didn’t receive offers tend to be slightly, ahem, biased. This will pull up a list of reviews from everyone who interviewed and received an offer for that position. The general comments are really helpful, but we want to focus on a section called Interview Questions towards the bottom. I usually comb through 10 – 15 of these and add all of the interview questions into a Word doc so I can answer them later. Now you have your second set of questions to prepare for!
What Questions Do You Have For Me?
Finally, once they are done peppering you with questions, your interviewer will ask if you have any questions for them. In my opinion this is the most crucial part of the interview.
Why? Because so many people neglect it. If you can ask some questions that are even slightly outside of the box, I’ve found that really sticks with the interviewer more than any other part of the meeting.
After every interview I’ve been on, I asked for feedback. Without fail, the interviewer made a positive comment about the questions I asked. The good news for you is that I asked the same exact questions in every single one! Here they are:
What is your favorite part about working here?
What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now?
Let’s say that, in one year, you are looking back on this hire. What has that person done to exceed expectations on every level?
Ask about a current event (for example – I saw that [Competitor X] came out with this product. How do you see that affecting your business?)
What is the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned while working at ?
Tell me a little bit more about you, what do you like to do outside of work?
The first four are fairly standard questions, but the last two really seal the deal. Don’t be surprised if you get a “wow, I’ve never been asked that – give me a second” when you drop the unexpected lesson.
That final question opens up a personal dialogue with the interviewer that allows you to establish a connection that moves you up from “interviewer-interviewee” status to “personal conversation” status. Plus it will give you great content to put in your thank you email.
Say Thank You!
While we’re on the subject, be absolutely sure to send a thank you note to everyone you interviewed with. Also include a personal touch to each one (something that you gained from that last question).
Many people I talk to say “but I don’t have their email Austin!” Ask for it!! At the end of every interview always, always ask for a business card or write down the person’s email in your notebook (you did bring a notebook, right??).
If you do end up in that bucket, try using the techniques I outlined in the previous article for finding people’s emails and you should be fine.
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