How to win an interview.
Greg Wyatt • October 9, 2023
A little while back, I helped a candidate prep for her interview.
She asked me, "What can you tell me about their interview style?"
I said, sure I can tell you what you need to know, but do you mind my asking, why is that important to you?
She'd been looking for a new role for a while and had been pipped to the post for a number of roles. Very frustrating and confidence-sapping.
She wanted to give her best and align her approach with that of the interviewers.
In principle a fine idea; however not one I agree with.
I advised her to not worry about their style and instead focus on two things:
- be your best professional self
- give them the answers they need to understand how you can help
Both elements are in her control, rather than trying to influence their perception, which is not.
Besides, I said, what happens if you do align yourself to their style, get the job, and then the culture isn't right for you?
Just be your best professional self, and what will be will be. And if you do get the job, it will be for the right reasons and you're much more likely to be in an environment you'll enjoy.
It proved something that helped her, and as a consequence, I believe, it took some pressure off her shoulders to sell herself.
It was a really strong shortlist, surprisingly so, given many of my roles have few suitable candidates available.
She got the job, on her own merits.
If you ever thought 'outcome-led' was a pretentious headline for a recruiter, it's also how you should think about your job search. Welcome to the 50th edition of Jobseeker Basics. As well as sharing advice that - hopefully - helps you navigate our mercurial jobs market more easily, there's always been a separate utility to these newsletters. I use them to update chapters in A Career Breakdown Kit , so that I can ensure it is always as current as possible. People who've bought the Kindle edition will get an automatic update when the 2027 edition is released in January/February. Paperback owners are invited to contact me for a free digital update. For this newsletter, I've tightened some of the language around accepting job offers - pretty boring update, but maybe necessary for fringe cases. I often talk about outcome-led recruitment. While it might sound pretentious there's a simple reason, which underpins everything I do. Begin with the ending, work back and find the right path. In recruitment this means flashing forward 12 months. What did a successful hire look like? What problems did they solve? What separated excellent from good from adequate from inadequate? What were the outcomes you needed for it to have been a successful hire? Nail these points down and you work backwards. What good actually looks like in viable candidate profiles. What needs to be communicated to them to encourage them to take a step forwards. How we find them - whether in a headhunt, an advert, networking or other. I also talk a lot about why a job search should be the inverse of how that vacancy might be filled. And so it is that the outcome you want in your job search should inform your strategy to find that job. Ironically, On Job Offers is Chapter 31 in A Career Breakdown Kit, slap bang in the middle of the book on page 162. With good reason, given you may find yourself needing to look for work again in future, sometimes by choice and sometimes by the other. All the more reason to have a strategy you can replicate and improve on, time and time again: 31 - On job offers At some point you’re going to get a job offer. It’s helpful to be clear on what this should look like at the start of your job search. Because, if you don’t know your destination, how can you be sure which path to take? Here are the main points to consider. Identity At the start of any job search, remind yourself of your career identity. This may be at the point of an unexpected redundancy, when you’ve decided your current job is no longer right, or if a recruiter contacts you out of the blue with a compelling proposition. Try this once a year, even when gainfully employed, because it’s easy for the path of employment to diverge from where you want your career to go. What is your current context, personally, with family, in life? What do you need and how does work reflect this? What are your core values? The ones that underpin who you are and who you want to see in the mirror. How does work reflect this? What are the things you enjoy, are neutral about, or dislike in your career? What does this look like in your current job? How has your employer changed in the past year? How has the world changed? How does this reflect you as a person? Who do you want to be as a person, family member, friend and peer? What impact do you want to make? How much do you need to earn and by when? These answers aren’t fixed and can change quickly with a change in circumstance, as you change over time, or for reasons out of your control. Clarify what you want and what you need, and therefore what this looks like in your next job. This identity informs your job search strategy, part of which is the roles you go for, part of which is the approach you take, and part of which is what an acceptable job offer is. Total compensation & opportunity cost It's common to see salary as the most important factor in a job offer negotiation. It's better to look at negotiating total compensation and opportunity cost. Total compensation is the overall financial value of a role. It includes: Salary Pension contribution Bonus Commission Car allowance RSUs Some benefits are salary sacrificed or tax efficient - their value goes beyond what they appear on paper. A great pension scheme will save you 20% or 40% on tax payments in the UK across the salary invested. It might even, at a higher salary level, improve access to child benefits. On the other hand, opportunity cost is the consequence of taking an offer, compared to what you might have if you stayed. For example: Moving to a three-day hybrid, compared to full remote. What's the cost of mileage or time commuting? What's the cost of heating your home when fully remote? Or - a role that offers more money now, with no progression in future. Compared to a role that pays less now, and will leapfrog in future, while giving you skills that support career growth. Are these contractual and likely to happen, or are they empty promises? Look for evidence such as a track record with other employees. It's entirely possible to accept an offer with a higher salary and find yourself worse off with take home pay. Establish all the financial implications of an offer. Impact Impact goes both ways. The impact you can have in your new role, and the impact your new role will have on you. A high paying job that takes you away from a young family might be a solution or a problem. A brilliant job that’s an unsustainable commute won’t work long term. Does that matter to you? A well paid job that gives you a good balance at home yet will only be a cog in a machine - a dream for some, unfulfilling for others. Impact also includes trajectory. Are you someone who wants to do the same job over time, in a structured way? Someone who wants regular advancement and career development? Both, and others are fine. Make sure you know what you are getting yourself into. Culture & People It’s at least partly true that people leave bosses, not jobs. While decent people can become bad bosses for various reasons, some of which relate to the environment they manage within. The problem is that people are on their best behaviour in interview processes, while culture as it’s pitched doesn’t always reflect the culture experienced. The interview process should be there for you to gather facts as much as possible. Do your research to get a sense of a company’s values, principles, how it treats its people, and all those other elements that will affect a career with them. This is research to be done at interview stage or before. Ikigai (with a little i) A wonderful Japanese concept. In its original form it means ‘what you get out of bed for’ or ‘those small moments we take pleasure in.’ Rather than the westernised Venn Purpose Diagram many are familiar with as Ikigai (with a big I). If you ask people in Japan what they think of Ikigai they may well say something along the lines of ‘huuunnhh?’ ikigai is a helpful principle when considering a job offer. It’s those qualities unique to you (often defined by your career identity) that you take pleasure in, while others around you may not get it. Sometimes this is gut instinct. Important to listen to, important to challenge. It’s at least part of your decision in a job offer. Even if everything else might be just alright, ikigai in your offered job might be good reason to take it. Or it might be the company’s purpose and what they are doing to improve the world. ikigai is unique to you and it makes everything better if you can find it. Those are the key points to look at if given a job offer. There’s no right or wrong, only right for you and the people you support. Negotiating salary There are a lot of moving parts in any salary negotiation, both at your end and with the employer. There are two main elements. The first is your place in the market - do what you can to find the range of fair pay available to you right now. The second is compensation philosophy - how do companies reach an offer? Both come down to asking questions and research. Assume nothing. I would err on the side of boldness in a salary negotiation. At final interview stage, I’d ask for the top end, based on what I’ve learnt - if they see me as the best candidate, why wouldn’t I? If they offer a little lower than I expect, I’d be positive about it and ask what else they can do to improve their offer. It’s unlikely you’ll lose out on an offer by being clear and respectful. If you want to drill deep into negotiations, I recommend reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. His advice on deep listening, calibrated questions and price anchors are directly relevant to salary negotiation. Negotiating is highly contextual, so you should be careful if following opinion-led advice on what works for that individual. After the offer As with a salary negotiation, the post offer process and run up to employment is different from employer to employer. You can indicate that you're happy to proceed and ask the employer to issue the formal paperwork. Be aware that accepting an offer, even verbally, can create a legally binding contract. If you're not ready to commit, make that clear and reserve your formal acceptance until you've reviewed the written terms. In practice, the legal risk of withdrawing before starting is generally low. Most employers will have little commercial interest in pursuing someone who no longer wishes to join, particularly where they have suffered no demonstrable loss. However, contractual obligations and reputational consequences are worth considering. Treat the Offer Letter as a formal proof of your new employer’s offer of employment. If something isn’t right with the Letter, ask the employer for clarification. Once you've accepted the offer, signed and returned the letter, and any conditions have been satisfied, you can resign and agree a start date with your new employer. Aim to understand their onboarding process. Is there anything helpful you can do before your start date? Make sure you know when, where and any arrival instructions for your first day. As for your wider job search - you should withdraw from other applications when you formally accept an offer. It’s your choice whether you keep your cards close to your chest, accepting a suitable offer with the prospect of something better coming up. You can cross that bridge if you come to it. While this is not something I recommend, a tough job search is as good a time as any to look after number one.
I've had a couple of conversations with job seekers recently where their common sense has contradicted their professional knowledge. It's so easy to do when there's such a huge volume of information out there that seems to paint a picture. Such as the recently redistributed ragebait about a hiring manager rejected by his own ATS for having the wrong keyword - from a burner account on reddit which has since been banned. It matters not that this story is patently anti-fact, because now its out in the wild. It's the kind of 'insight' job seekers start to believe, such as these two. One a senior HR practitioner who was instantly rejected alongside a shortlist, all presented by an agency. The assumption being it must be AI - though I believe it's more likely someone clicked a mass-reject button at the other end, based on my research of ATS use. I'd love to look inside that black box to see what actually happened, to hear what ATS they used, to look at the track record of hiring decisions from the employer, because anything else is assumption. The second was more pernicious. A Talent Acquisition Manager, those who legend say deploy AI to mass reject candidates. He and his team had their roles made redundant. They all had significant experience implementing, configuring and managing ATSs. All were starting to believe the auto-rejection narrative, despite actually knowing how they work. These are both examples of mental heuristics - rules of thumb - where we try to fathom complex problems with the minimum of energy. Understandable given how draining a job search is. Yet, here's the rub, the longer a job search, the more likely you are to believe apocryphal nonsense - because of the continuous ragebait exposure favoured by social media, and an unfathomable job search. It's where what feels like common sense, yet you must push against it, because counterintuition, and the courage of your first convictions, might be your best tool in your job search tool kit. The truth remains more grim than automation designed to reduce adminsitrative burden - human decision making vs too high a volume of candidates, many of whom use AI to optimise their search. The same humans corrupted by overwork, cynicism, corporate solipsism, naivety, laziness, poor capability or simply a system stacked against them. 24 - Counterintuitive Here's a common journey many people take when a job search that proves tougher than expected: steps that might actually move you further away from your goal and make you part of the problem. Career grief Pick yourself up and decide this could actually be an opportunity for a new start Update CV with most recent job Hit the job boards and contact agencies Pleasant surprise that there’s more out there than you thought Apply, apply, apply Many of these jobs prove: closed, fake, ghosts, scams Not getting much traction, agencies aren’t replying Maybe you’re being too picky Widen the net: more senior, less senior, different industries, roles that use transferable skills Realise you need to customise, but that’s becoming really hard with the volume you’re applying to. ChatGPT? How else can you automate? With all these applications, there must be a reason I’m not getting through. What’s this about the ATS? Is AI really blocking me? The worst-case scenario here are those upsetting posts we read about people applying to 2,000 jobs and not even getting an interview. I expect many people will read these posts and worry they are on the same path. Some may even defer to that possibly Einstein quote, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of madness.” And as a result they stop applying to jobs and try other measures instead. A TV analogy to illustrate your job search If you were selling a £300 TV who would you sell it to? Possibly too ambiguous a question. First-hand, second-hand? What features does it have? Who should be the buyers for this type of £300 product? Is there any point targeting people who want £1,000 TVs? What about £10,000? What about people who want £300 monitors, not TVs? It’s impossible to know without starting out on the right strategy: Define the product Research the market of ideal customers Set the right price point Sell where the customers will buy from But if things aren’t going well, you shouldn’t simply broaden your horizons and increase your sales approach across demographics that will never buy from you. Instead, you re-evaluate these first principles to make sure you have the right product, for the right people, at the right price point, sold in the right places, with the right message. So, yes there is iteration to do, but it’s your input that needs changing first to generate the output. You shouldn’t only change the steps you take. You might know your TV works perfectly well as a monitor, indeed better, because of its specs. However, if you're marketing a monitor to TV buyers, how well will that go? The problem here is one of definition. Who is your product actually for, and do they understand why yours is a contender? You shouldn't assume they can see your monitor qualities - show them. You might argue that the £1,000 budget holder could benefit from your transferable skills - same size TV, same resolution, pumps out sound, in colour. But if they want OLED when you offer LCD, or if they want a 100w speaker, while yours offers 30w, it’s likely to be a non-starter. Can you show how your 'features' apply for their demands? Do your features actually apply? What if instead you sold at a discount, with your additional features at the same cost as the competition? The difference between people and products is that products won’t change their mind. If an employer doesn’t need the features you offer that are enhanced, these can be seen as a risk, not a benefit. Does this mean you should stay in your lane? Yes and no. It means first you need to understand how your lane reflects the race you are in - your specific jobs marketplace. You should clearly understand what you need and what you offer, while balancing what the market offers and the other good people interested in those offers. But if you apply for vacancies in a domain where you can’t show the applicability of your offering. Or if you apply for vacancies that are too junior or senior, without a clear argument for the specific benefit that employer will have in hiring you. Then you will compete against candidates who have direct skills and experience. These are typically more aligned to the needs of that vacancy. Worse, you become part of the problem, taking oxygen away from more suited candidates who deserve fair consideration - without improving your own odds. It’s unfortunately a simple truth that if everyone didn’t apply for vacancies they weren’t suitably qualified for - everyone’s experience would be better. This may seem to blame you, but consider the opportunity cost, with time and energy better spent on other activities - which might even just be taking a break. I say this from a place of compassion, not criticism. Think about that TV analogy above - when you search for TVs on Amazon, how quickly do you filter out products you will never buy? Do those products make it harder to identify what you do need? I'd wager the answer is always Yes. Why not try that as an exercise now? Write down what you need from a TV, then try and find it without any bias towards brands. Rather than compromise to spread your bets, keep going back to first principles and make sure these are both fit for purpose and clearly communicated. Rather than hope others will see your transferable skills will apply, or your higher level of experience will help - show them how and why it matters. If you can’t, spend your energy on better activity. As for that Einsteinish quote further up. This is only true when the matters outside of your control don’t change. Those steps at the top are a common sense approach to a job search that involves systemic dysfunction, terrible job adverts, overburdened hiring processes, discrimination of all sorts and the simple disaster of too many qualified candidates for too few jobs. Matters which we have no control over. In the changing and mercurial nature of your jobs market, its potential to improve suddenly may be the only change you need to get the job you want. Such as the job seeker I spoke to, who went from 0 interviews from few applications, to having to turn down interviews and choose between multiple offers. Debbie said that she refocused on her expertise, and why it mattered, using that to inform what she applied for and how she communicated. Points in her control, with a changing market that helped.
