Nov

2

Preparing for an Interview: 5 Capabilities with Success Stories

November 2, 2007 |

When you are applying for a job, the hiring manager and/or interviewer has two main questions on his / her head:

  1. Can you do the job?  Do you have the skills, experience and know-how?
  2. Can I work with you?  Do you have a personality that is compatible with the company culture and with the  interviewer’s own personality.

On this article we focus on the first question.  And when you prepare for an interview you should spend a good amount of time thinking how to address that question.  Many job applicants make the mistake of going to an interview and recite the contents of the resume, rather than convincing the interviewer that they can do the job. You should spend a good amount of time thinking about  how to present your skills in a way that they convince the interviewer that you can do the job.

To help this process I have prepared the diagram you see below.  It maps a thought process that you may want to follow.  In this process you:

  1. Requirements - Identify all of the relevant requirements for this position.  Requirements are often posted on the newspaper or online add.  However, not all of the requirements are relevant.  For example, a requirement that says that you must have a car or must be authorized to work in the US is easy to answer — you do not have to spend hours preparing to answer those requirements.  A requirement for “good interpersonal skills” or “fluent in a particular language” is not something you have to map on this step — either you can show them or you can’t.  The kind of requirement you want to list on this map are those that need to be proved during the interview process.  Think about unwritten requirements:  things you know are needed for the position even if they have overlooked them when writing the job posting.
  2. Capabilities - Now think about how you meet these requirements.  You should thing what skill, knowledge, or ability you have that will help you meet those requirements.  Sometimes the same capability makes you meet two requirements.  Find the top 5 capabilities that you possess and that will help you meet the most requirements for this job.  Remember that two candidates may be able to meet the same set of requirements with different sets of capabilities.  The hiring manager is not looking for someone who meets the posted requirements in a particular way, he/she is looking for someone who can do the job correctly and in a timely manner.
  3. Success Stories - A claim is easily dismissed if you do not have any proof of it.  Write down a set of success stories (challenge, what you did to address it, and a quantification of how successful you where).  Make sure they prove your listed capabilities.  Remember that the same success story may prove two capabilities, or you may have more than one success story that proves the same capability.  Keep a few in hand, minimum of five success stories.  A success story is a lot more convincing than any claim on capabilities you may have.

5 Capabilities

Making it all work

Once you have your job requirements - capabilities - success stories mapped, you should be ready to answer almost any interview question.  Most of the question are trying to answer the top two questions we presented at the beginning of this article:  1) can you do the job? and 2) can I work with you?  A good success story can cover both, as the success story proves you are capable of doing something and gives you the opportunity to explain how you worked with other people to accomplish the objective.

A question that asks you if you can do a particular task should be answered with a solid “yes! I can do the task.  For example, I did that when <insert success story here>”.  A simple yes wouldn’t have helped in any way — as the doubt of when ether you where telling the truth/exaggerating or not remains.   However, a success story dispels any doubt.  Many interviewers have also started to ask questions in the form of “tell me about a time when you had to do <requirement>”.  The success story is exactly what they are looking for.  You want to answer as many questions as possible with a success story: even if you have to repeat or remind the interviewer of a success story you have already told.

You always want to present a relevant success stories to a question.  If you suddenly start talking about something unrelated to what the interviewer has in mind, your story will be dismissed.  That is why you want to prepare the requirement-capability-story map. That way you know what capability to prove and what story to provide when you are asked about your ability to perform a particular requirement.

Give this a try.  And give me some feedback as to how it works for you or what could be added to this kind of thought process.


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