Interviewing – Page 11 – Penn & Beyond

Telling The Story: A Narrative Approach to Interviewing

by Sharon Fleshman

Once upon a time — those words signaled the start of many stories that captivated us, particularly in our younger days. Whether it is meant to scare, delight, convince or teach, there’s something about a good story that can pull listeners in. As it relates to a job search, a narrative approach can be used to present your career interests and qualifications in compelling and creative ways. Consider the following tips for incorporating “story” into your interviews:

1) Prepare for the “Tell me about yourself” question. Indeed, your answer to this can set the tone for the entire conversation and should make clear why you are sitting in front of the interviewer. Don’t default to just stating “I’m a senior at Penn majoring in…” Trace relevant themes in your background. For instance, suppose you are applying to a position in international development. You may not have a track record in that field per se, but perhaps you can help your interviewer connect the dots regarding your international experiences. You should also identify the defining moments that helped you discern your interest in a given career. For the international development example, you could talk about what occurred during your travels that caused you to become interested in development work.

2) Make sure your stories illustrate relevant skills and accomplishments. Go through your resume and develop the stories that emerge from your experiences. Your stories should have a “plot” with a beginning, middle and end that speaks to the job description. A good way to structure such a story may be to start with the situation at hand, proceed with discussing the actions you took to address the situation, and then end with the result that came from your actions. This approach is especially useful for behavioral questions (“Give me an example of how you served a difficult customer”) or other questions (“What are your strengths?”) where the interviewer wants evidence to back up what you claim to be true. You may not know exactly what you’ll be asked, but anticipate the types of skills that employers seek. Prepare to address areas such as problem solving, teamwork, leadership ability, strengths, weaknesses, and working with difficult customers/clients. Whether you played a key role in increasing membership, improving operations, boosting morale, or strengthening your own performance, you can build a story around the impact you made.

3) Keep it professional and positive. Stories for job interviews should not sound like autobiographies as much as snapshots of experiences that demonstrate that you are a great fit for the position. For instance, discussing resolution of conflict on a team for a group project is likely better than reminiscing about how you broke up a fight between two housemates. Look for the most pertinent highlights from your previous jobs/internships, volunteer experience, study abroad, extracurricular activities and class projects. Also, make sure you maintain a positive attitude. Even if you have to discuss a negative situation, resist the temptation to cast yourself as a hero and others as villains. Stick with sharing what you learned and how you developed in the process.

4) Practice. Storytelling flows from the human condition. It is very natural for us to reflect on what has happened on a given day and “tell the story” to those closest to us. However, applying this tendency to the job search may not feel as natural, so it is good to practice with those who are willing and able to offer helpful feedback. Career Services counselors are available to help you with mock interviews.

Use of stories in the job search can also be applied (in a more concise way) to resume and cover letter writing, as noted in the book Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career, written by Katharine Hansen and available in the Career Services library. Using storytelling will not only help you to prepare well, but will build your self-awareness and confidence along the way to a positive “The End.”

Vampire Teeth and Other “What Not to Wear” items for OCR Interviews

By Claire Klieger

I guess the Twilight series had a more profound impact on college pop culture than I thought because earlier this week we actually found some fake vampire teeth in our waiting area at Career Services. (Sorry, if they were yours and you were hoping to claim them, I’m afraid they’ve already found their way to the trash). While it should be obvious that fangs are inappropriate interview attire (and I would think inappropriate to bring to Career Services in general—but hey, maybe that’s just me), students do often agonize about what is appropriate to wear to interviews.

vampire teeth — Taking the "bite" out of interview attire.

As we enter into the start of OCR interviews this week, here are some tips:

1) Go easy on the “pieces of flair.” I once saw an interviewing guide that encouraged people to wear no more than 13 accessories, but I think even that is too much (frankly, I’m not sure I could even list 13 different types of accessories). Any jewelry you wear should be fairly subtle. Avoid overly large or dangly earrings and especially if you have a facial piercing, you may want to consider removing it for the interview. Essentially, you don’t want to wear anything that will distract from what you are saying.

2) Skin is not in. As popular as they may be at frat parties the world over, short skirts or low cut tops are not a good idea. Trust me ladies, those are not the assets you want to be stressing in your interview. Skirts lengths should be right around your knee and while you certainly don’t have to wear a turtle neck, use good judgment about necklines.

3) Know “the uniform.” What you wear to an interview depends a lot on the culture of the organization in which you’re planning to work. For more conservative industries like finance and consulting, this means wearing a dark suit, and ideally, for women, a skirt suit. However, for interviews with say….Polo Ralph Lauren, what you wear is a chance to highlight your fashion sense, which is much more central to your job. Similarly, for interviews at tech organizations that often have a more business casual working environment, you may look much more like a member of the team if you dress in business casual attire.

What you wear to an interview should be something that makes you feel confident, which, in turn, will help you come across that way to a recruiter. The best attire draws the attention to your face because ultimately, you want to remembered for what you say, not what you wear.

Don’t Let Your Case Interview “SPIN” Out of Control!

If you’re thinking about a career in consulting, you already know that a “Case Study Interview” will be a major component of the interview process. I’ve found that a useful way to approach this challenge is to use the system of “SPIN Selling”, which was developed some years ago by Neil Rackham, based on his extensive research on “consultative” selling.

The four letters of the acronym “SPIN” stand for the four steps in the system, and are a handy way to remember what kinds of questions you should use to handle the case study interview successfully. The first letter “S” stands for “Situation”, which means that you should ask questions about the features of the case that the interviewer presents.

Here’s a typical case: “I’m the president of a medical device testing company with $600mm in sales per year, and am concerned about the costs of doing business with our clients. We make a variety of products used to test for pregnancy, allergies etc. and distribute them across the U.S. A third of our customers are hospitals and the other two-thirds are small clinics and independent medical practices, but that group only represents 15% of our sales, so I think I need to stop selling to them in order to save money. What do you think I should do?”

If you just do the math, you’d see that eliminating two-thirds of this businesses’ clients would lead to a $90mm decrease in revenue, so you might be tempted to suggest ways that the business might make up for this shortfall–by finding more hospital clients, streamlining the manufacturing process etc. But according to Rackham, this could be exactly the wrong thing to do, for at least two reasons. First, you’ve simply accepted the President’s view of the situation, and second, you are introducing some ideas that, however creative they may be, haven’t even been put on the table. So instead of prematurely coming up with clever ideas, you should ask “Situation” questions like, “What are the actual distribution costs?” “How efficient is the manufacturing process?” “Which customer segment (hospitals or clinics and independent practitioners) has been more stable over time?” or “Which segment might increase in size?”

“S” questions like these might yield information like, “We ship over 3000 testing kits a year to most of our hospitals but only 40 or 50 a year to our clinic customers.” “Our clinics and MD’s have been loyal, steady long-term customers and we’ve built our business on them.” “Our manufacturing and packaging logistics are state-of-the-art.” or “Our hospital business has actually decreased in the last few years because of the shift in the healthcare field to smaller, more independent medical practices.” Given this information, it’s pretty easy to see that just trying to get more business from hospitals or finding greater operational efficiencies might be totally off-target.

The information you get from your “S” questions should be enough to move the discussion to the “P” step in the process, or questions that focus on the “Problems”. The goal here is to get a greater understanding of what the core issues might actually be, rather than just get more information about the “Situation”. [NOTE: At this point of the SPIN process, I find it helpful to remember what one of my counseling professors said to me years ago, “Never trust that clients are telling you the truth, always trust that they are trying to tell you the truth–and you have to help them do it.”]

Typical “P” questions you could ask are “So what’s the actual problem you’re having with distribution–is it the number of shipments or the postage or what?” or “What problems would you have if you stopped serving your most loyal group of customers?” or “What’s the problem with concentrating your entire business on the hospital segment?” “P” questions like these are critical because they cut through the generalities of the “Situation” and get down to the real issues.

Let’s say that the interviewer responds to your “P” questions with: “The problem with distribution? It’s the hundreds and hundreds of little packages that we need to get out the door every week.” Or, “If I abandoned my most loyal customers, we’d lose a lot of good will.” Or, “If I focused on the hospital business, my revenue stream would probably go down.” As you can see, “P” questions not only get down to the specifics, they also are a great way to look at all sides of a problem and bring out issues that haven’t been previously mentioned or considered.

Responses to “P” questions lead to the third stage; “I”, or “Implications” questions. A typical “I” question is, “Let’s suppose we could solve that problem–what would that do?” The “I” stage is the most crucial part of the “SPIN” process because it gets the client to think about problems in new ways, actively consider various outcomes and begin to focus on the right priorities. A response to an “I” question about the problems with distribution, for instance, might be “If I could do something about the number of packages we have to mail every week, I could still keep my most loyal customers and serve the hospital business at the same time.”

“I” responses like this one naturally lead to the last stage of the “SPIN” process–establishing the true “Needs” of the case. In the example I’ve used, this is the moment in the interview when you can suggest that the president’s true “Need” in the case I’ve used is to reduce the number of packages mailed every week–a far different outcome than finding new hospital clients or streamlining his manufacturing or packaging process.

Using “SPIN” can not only help you handle the Case Study Interview more effectively, it is a highly effective tool in the field of consulting. To find out more about it, the link to Neil Rackham’s web page is: NeilRackham.com.

Airport Test

by Helen Cheung

Would you be interesting company in an airport for four hours?

“What was the last book you read?”
“Tell me about the worst team you were on.”
“How did you choose your major?”

Underlying these innocent and common job interview questions is a bigger question that either makes or breaks the deal of a job offer: “What is it going to be like to be stuck with you for a 4 hour layover in an airport?” Your job might not require travel or social skills, but managers would prefer to hire interesting people who get along with others. Also, they want coworkers who fit the culture of the organization.

If you search for “Airport Test” online, you will find tons of great advice for job interviews you can use to help you pass the test. You can also do practice interviews with a Career Services counselor to get feedback on the impression you make on others. However, this isn’t a test you should cram for. You can’t simply memorize some answers and come across as likeable and interesting. You can work on storytelling skills but you have to have stories to tell in the first place.

How do you prepare for the Airport Test then? For starters, practice your team skills in your daily life. Whether coordinating a meal schedule with your roommates or going on a camping trip with friends, you have to deal with people and overcome challenges. Second, you can read widely and live fully. It is much easier to talk to someone who cares about something than someone who doesn’t so get comfortable discussing your interests. Third, learn to be interested in people and learn to make life easier for them. The Airport Test is not just about you; it is about the interviewer, your potential coworker. So, the more you practice caring for others in your daily life, the more you naturally put your interviewer at ease so that they won’t wish for an “eject” button.

Tips for Phone Interviews

by Peggy Curchack and Kelly Cleary

(courtsey of samantha celera via Flickr) — (courtesy of samantha celera via Flickr)

Tis the season for many employers to conduct phone interviews for internships and full-time jobs. Phone interviews, and even video interviews (through Skype and more formal videoconferencing equipment), are becoming increasingly popular with employers since they are a great way to conduct first rounds while saving time and money.

So, how do you prepare? In many ways, particularly related to the content of the conversation, you should prepare exactly the same way you would for an in person interview. That said, a phone interview does call for some special considerations.

First, make sure you have a reliable phone line secured. A land line is ideal but those aren’t always easy to come by since most students have gone completely mobile. If you can’t find a landline, make sure your cell is fully charged and you will be taking the call in a physical space that is quiet and well supported by your mobile network (areas where the be-speckled Verizon guy and his entourage or Luke Wilson and his AT&T postcards hang out.)

Before you receive the call, prepare your space. Turn off the radio, TV, email notification beep, or tea pot. If you have roommates and you’ll be taking the call at home, let them know that you have a scheduled phone interview so that they don’t interrupt you while you’re talking to the employer. Phone interviews are interesting because on the one hand, since employers can’t see you, you can do things like have your resume in front of you, or have a list of things you want to be sure to say about yourself, and the organization. On the other hand, since you can’t see them it makes it harder to gauge their reactions. In general, be sure to keep your answers to the point, and don’t go on and on (that’s good advice for fact-to-face interviews too, but especially important on the phone).

Also, smile. Yes, literally, smile. One can “hear” it over the phone. Since for many people it’s harder to project enthusiasm, poise — your personality — when you have no visual clues to support you, it becomes important to compensate for the lack of visuals. One way to do that is with one’s voice. We’ve all had the experience of talking to customer service people – I’m sure you can tell when you talk to someone if they are just going through the motions, or are really engaged.

If you are contacted by an employer who is interested in conducting an interview by video conference you may be able to use Career Services’ new video conferencing equipment (ISDN and IP options). For more information go to: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/videoconferencing.html

This recent article from Time offers some thoughts on video interviews from the recruiter perspective:

“How Skype Is Changing the Job Interview” http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1930838,00.html

The article also includes a video on How to Ace a Job Interview on Skype