Getting your interviewer off the job interview script is essential in the Pain Interviewing process I teach. If you allow the interview to be governed by the goofy script the interviewer holds in his or her hands, you won’t have the opportunity you need to get past the standard interview questions and talk about what’s really at stake.
Your goal is to get your interviewer off the script and into a human conversation with you — not asking you dumb questions like “What’s your greatest weakness?” but rather talking about the real issues in his or her department, and your success slaying similar dragons in the past.
Of course, you must be polite as you gently guide your interviewer out of Zombie Interview Script Land and into Human Conversation Land. You can’t be pushy.
Anybody who begins your interview by asking you standard interview questions is someone who is comfortable with the scripted approach. To get your interviewer off the script, you have to use a little tact and finesse.
You can’t use this approach with an HR screener or a recruiter. It doesn’t work with those guys, because they are not in pain. They have a list of things they want to know about you, and they want to use their time with you to get answers to their questions – period.
You’ll use the Pain Interviewing approach with your hiring manager — the person who will be your boss if you end up accepting his or her job offer. This person has pain. If they didn’t have any pain, the finance person who approves every job opening would not have given permission for your hiring manager to hire anyone new.
Cash is king in every organization.
Tight-fisted CFOs and Division Controllers toss around nickels like manhole covers. They don’t want to waste money. By the time your hiring manager gets a job opening approved, he or she has been lobbying for a new hire for at least six months — nine to 12 months might be more accurate.
Therefore, the hiring manager has pain. It’s not just a question of “Sally retired, so we have to replace her.” If Sally weren’t essential to the operation such that Sally’s departure left a big and expensive hole in it, her job would stay vacant for a long time, or forever. Business people don’t spend money on salaries for fun. They do it when they have to!
Your hiring manager has pain, and your job before the interview is to think about what kind of pain your manager might be experiencing. If they’re looking for a Product Development Manager, you can bet that the company’s last few product releases were late, over budget or both.
Alternately, maybe the recent product launches went flawlessly but the head of Product Development was lured away to a competitor, and now the stakes are higher than ever and the next products must be launched on time and under budget!
Think about the kind of Business Pain that could be keeping your manager up at night. Develop a Pain Hypothesis that you will keep in mind as you walk into the interview and as you prepare for it. Let’s say your hiring manager, Larry, runs the Customer Care department for a software firm.
You are interviewing for a National Accounts Support position. Why would Larry need someone like that? Most likely his company’s national accounts are both very important to the firm and unhappy with their service level. Maybe Larry and his colleagues have noticed that when they neglect their national accounts, nothing good happens.
What are you going to talk about in your interview with Larry? You’re not going to say “I’m an expert at creating strong relationships with customers.” Anyone could say that. You’re going to probe to learn more about Larry’s pain, instead.
You’ll do this by spinning the table to get off the interview script and talk about Larry’s Business Pain the minute you have the opportunity. The opportunity will come to you the minute Larry asks you an open-ended question. Larry brought an interview script with him and he’s already asked you a few questions from the script, but that’s okay.
You answered his questions. You are patient. You are waiting for your open-ended-question table-spinning opportunity! Here it comes:
Larry, the manager: So, can you walk me through your resume?
You: For sure! Well, I’ve been at Acme Explosives for the past three years, but as we talked about on the phone, Acme is about to be sold to Toontown Industries, so I’m looking for a new challenge. Before Acme I was at a dental-floss farming automation company. Say, I don’t want to keep you here all afternoon listening to my bio. Can I ask you a question about the job, so I can be sure my comments are relevant?
Larry: Sure.
You: Okay, thanks. Here’s my question: you are responsible for worldwide customer care and you’ve got a need right now for a National Accounts Support person. I see that you work with FedEx, Hershey and a lot of other huge accounts.
I can imagine that your contacts in those organizations need shipment and billing updates, new product information, training for their teammates and themselves and probably some level of fire-fighting all the time. They need a high level of support. Would you say that this job is primarily based on keeping your largest customers happy and well-informed, or is there another priority I haven’t touched on?
Larry: Great question. We have to keep our big accounts happy of course, but the biggest priority for our National Accounts Support team is to move product information through our national accounts, and they are big companies as you mentioned.
We have to keep our products top of mind for them. We visit their sites and do training, we do remote trainings and demos all the time and we are the product ambassadors throughout their organizations. There is very little customer service in the role. It’s an outbound, “Nice to meet you are you already using our software, or can I show you how?” kind of role.
(This is good information, but where’s the pain? What bad thing happens when customers don’t understand how to use the products or don’t know what the products are? Until you get to the pain, you are just another job-seeker.)
You: Wow, that’s fascinating! Like an embedded training-and-awareness function with a bit of sales mixed in, I would guess.
Larry: That’s right. This role has a base salary and a bonus based on sales — not a huge bonus, but not trivial either.
You: You’re helping me understand the situation and I really appreciate it. When customers don’t get that hands-on support and training, how does that affect the company? Would sales fall off in the next quarter, or…?
Larry: It’s the domino effect. Sales fall, not right away but they taper off, and that’s not good because in our national accounts, sales should be going up every quarter. Our customers are growing. They need to grow their utilization of our software, too, and our salespeople do not have time to be doing the education and evangelizing that our National Accounts Support people do.
That’s why we created the National Accounts Support team. You’d be supporting our Central Sales Region, getting our customers to understand our current and upcoming products and building excitement about them, as well as teasing out additional needs inside each national account.
You: So the connection between this job and each national account’s quarterly sales target is huge. It’s a very close connection.
Larry: It couldn’t be any closer. That’s the reason the job exists.
Eureka! You got Larry off the script and you got him talking about his pain. You can see now why Larry is keen to get somebody smart and responsive like you into that National Accounts Support hole he has to fill.
Now you know which stories to tell Larry, but you’re not through probing for his pain.
Larry is starting to think about how painful and expensive it is to have large accounts sitting out there, lonely and un-serviced and unsupported.
You got Larry off the interview script. He’s already forgotten that he ever had a script. Now he wants to talk about solving his problem. That’s exactly where you want the conversation to be, as well!
Now you know how to get your hiring manager off the interview script, but as you can see, Pain Interviewing is not a handy little job-search trick. It takes practice, and it takes careful contemplation in advance of the interview.
You have to try to see the world through your hiring manager’s eyes.
That’s a very important ability for all of us to cultivate, whether we’re job-hunting or not — the ability to see things from another person’s point of view.
I call this ability Perspective-Taking. Imagine how your Perspective-Taking muscles will grow by the time you begin your new job!
Reprinted from: Forbes/Leadership – www.forbes.com – 4.2.16
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.