and used with the permission of the author. JOBTALKS Presenting Your Interview Case Indiana University Kelley School of Business C. Randall Powell, Ph.D Contents used in this presentation are adapted from Career Planning Strategies and used with the permission of the author.

Presenting Your Case Know basic rules of the game Homework prepared: you, job, organization Interview types, formats, organization What do you say? Presenting Your Interview Case You now know the interview game and some of the basic rules. The next step is to present a convincing case on why you are the very best job candidate. You know the importance of advance preparation on yourself, the career field, and the specific employer. You have done your homework. You know the basic styles of interviews and the format of the most common interview styles. You can feel confident about what to expect. The organization of most interviews is fairly constant from the initial rapport, probing, evaluation, and the close. What do you now want to say in the interview?

Developing a Convincing Presentation Follow-up decisions depend on your performance What content do you share Present a convincing case Most important speech ever Developing a Convincing Presentation The interview outcome is a decision by the interviewer. The decision is based upon your performance. What you say influences both the objective and subjective parts of the final evaluation. You need to decide in advance what content that you want to share. You must present your case in a convincing manner. Your case must prove that you are a superior candidate and most likely the best candidate that the person will see. This presentation will help you develop a convincing presentation. You are making one of the most important speeches in your life using your background as the subject matter.

INTERVIEW FLOW get as much in as possible employer leads short questions information packed responses give and take Interview Flow In most interviews, the employer takes the lead by asking you a series of short but to-the-point questions. It would be nice if you knew the questions in advance. You could then prepare some information-packed responses only to relevant criteria important to the employment decision. You could figure out a way to give only positive replies. You will find most interviews to be a give-and-take situation. The interviewer controls by asking only certain questions. You control by giving carefully worded replies.

Interview Advice ZAP intro Stories Hold the mike Control Your goal should be to minimize the interviewer's talking so that you can maximize your time in pointing out your strengths. You exercise control by continually moving the conversation back toward your strong points. If negatives are mentioned by the recruiter, you briefly acknowledge the fault but quickly point out two or three other strengths that tend to negate the effect of the fault. You become the person in charge of the interview when you begin to control the flow of information. If you have done your pre-interview research, you don't need much information on the employer for a decision-making process. In fact, you don't have a decision to make until you have a firm job offer. Your goal is, therefore, to keep feeding the interviewer positive information on why you are the best candidate for the position that you know is open.

Probing Questions Designed to reveal Why Where When What How Self-expression Self-confidence Ability to relate Personal qualities Designed to reveal Probing Questions A good professional interviewer is not likely to let you take charge of the interview. The interviewer keeps control by spitting out why, where, when, what and how questions at you. Sometimes the questions may appear to have no relationship to a job, but they do have a legitimate purpose. Probing questions are designed to reveal your ability to express yourself well, to measure your self-confidence, evaluate your social skills, and to determine your personality characteristics. These probing questions are important and useful for you as well, because they give you an opportunity to put forth your assets.

ZAP Interview Technique Z - Zesty (enthusiasm) A - Anecdotal (story) P - Presentation (rehearsed speech The ZAP Interview Technique The best way to respond to probing questions is to use the ZAP technique. Z – A – P stands for Zesty, Antidotal, Presentations. Zesty means a lively and enthusiastic response. Antidotal means a short story. Your presentation must be a well rehearsed and convincingly delivered explanation. The content in your stories answers the probing questions in an indirect manner. Respond to Probing Questions Indirectly

Probing Questions Reveal: abilities skills assets education Probing Questions Reveal Abilities An employer has to leave the interview with a sound understanding of your abilities. Some of these abilities may have been directly or indirectly documented on the resume or application. But since few of us do an adequate job of writing our skills and other assets, it's helpful to verbalize the specifics in the interview. Your skill competencies can be factual by given. Identify in advance, your 5-7 most relevant skills and deliver a short 2-3 minute statement on each of these in the interview.

You Don’t Have to Prove Your Abilities in the Interview But: Identify level of competency and Expound on skills Barber Cartoon You must assist the interviewer in identifying your level of competence. You don't have to prove that you have certain abilities in the interview by re-reading them from your resume. You need to expand on your level of fluency in each skill. Certain educational and work experience backgrounds have a way of building a whole unique set of seemingly unrelated skills. Through skilled probing in an interview, the employer can see how these acquired skills relate to the position currently open.

Probing Questions Reveal: What Makes You Tick Values Beliefs Feelings Concerns Tick Probing Questions Reveal Values An interviewer will also frequently want to collect information about what really makes you tick. Are you a hard worker? Will you relate well to others? Are your attitudes and beliefs consistent with those of co-workers and external contacts of the employer? Is your level of maturity appropriate to the level of responsibility that might be given? All of these questions and concerns are relevant for a professional and managerial position. It is very difficult to respond directly to these questions without appearing somewhat uncomfortable. A few short stories drawn from your experiences quickly allow the interviewer to see your values, interests, and personal qualities.

Probing Questions Reveal: What Activities Turn You on What are your interests? Probing Questions Reveal Interests Your interviewer has a serious task in determining if you will fit into the current work team. Questions about your interests can be quite informative about potential long-term success in your chosen career field. What are the fun factors in your life? What activities turn you on? Work centered behaviors can rarely be sustained with a work group without common interests. You need to prepare a series of ZAP techniques that discreetly reveal your interest areas.

Work Group Commonalities (Football Cartoon) Probing questions tend to be somewhat subtle. Your ZAP approaches are also an indirect answer. The thrust of these questions, though, is to get you talking about your life experiences. It is frequently the small common interests that turn an initial relationship into a growing long-term work experience. The interviewer is searching for commonalities. Opposites can quickly create conflict in the work setting. Your carefully worded ZAP responses provide the required results.

Probing Questions Reveal: Personal Qualities VIPs - P is most important Issue: "Can Do" vs "Will Do" Personality to motivation Avoid insincere statements Use ZAP techniques Probing Questions - Personal Qualities Your skills, values, and fun factors often match up perfectly but one important aspect of your background that can override these are your personal qualities. The central issue is not that you can do the job but that you will do the job. Your personal qualities run the gamut from personality to motivation. It is very difficult to discuss these “Will-do Factors” in a direct manner. Direct statements like “I have a great personality” and “I am a hard worker” have an insincere ring. Yet, recruiters need answers. The ZAP interview technique is your best ally. Just let these many episodes in your life reveal your will do factors that probing questions are designed to elicit. (The issue is not CAN you do the job, but WILL you do the job.)

Probing Questions Reveal Motivation Probing questions often reveal things about your basic motivations. What makes you behave in a superior manner? How can the employer motivate you to perform difficult tasks and work under pressure and long hours? Different employment situations offer different rewards. Most employers want to make certain that their motivational methods are consistent with your needs. These probing questions tend to provide important hints as to your suitability for a given employer. Motivation related questions are the most powerful questions available to an interviewer. If you are not prepared to address these, it is nearly impossible to succeed in the interview.

Most Common Interview Questions Tell About Yourself What Are Your Short- and Long-Term Goals? Why Do You Think You Would Be Successful In This Job? What Are Your Strongest and Weakest Personal Qualities? Most Common Interview Questions There is a basic set of questions that employers tend to ask. Based upon your background and the requirements of the position, you can determine the questions most likely to be asked of you. The four most common probing questions are these: Tell me about yourself. What are your short and long-term career goals? Why do you think you would be successful in this job? What are your strongest and weakest personal qualities?

Most Common Interview Questions Why are you interested in this type of job? Why are you interested in us? Why did you choose your area of study? What did you learn from your work experience? Common Questions (continued) Of course you will not hear these questions stated so simply. There will often be some prefacing statement that uses material already given on your resume. The prefacing is an interviewer's way of softening the impact of this type of probing questioning. You can also bet that these four questions will also be somewhere in the list. Why are you interested in this type of job? Why did you elect to interview with us? Why did you choose your major in college? What did you learn from your work experience?

Twenty Questions Know in advance and be prepared Twenty Questions It would not be difficult for you to write down 20 questions that you believe an employer is likely to ask you. You might miss a question or two but chances are good even then that you would have the gist of one of the questions. The Career Planning Today text lists hundreds of potential questions most frequently asked. You do not need to memorize your exact response. All you need is to have a rough outline in mind. When asked a similar question in the interview, you can then give a very reasoned, logical, point-by-point answer. In college, students spend hours studying for an exam. The most common technique is to try to anticipate the instructors test questions. In the most important test of all, the interview, the questions are provided to you in advance. All you need to do is to prepare your responses before you get to the interview.

Sincere Response Required Advance preparation required Prepared situational reply Avoid rote memory Sincere Response Required If your interview is to come across positively, you need to leave the impression that you are well-prepared. Preparation means having your answers well thought out in advance. Few of us think of well-conceived responses on the spot. Consider a president's news conference in the question-and-answer phase. Have you ever noticed how many times the president gave an answer to a question that was not asked? Most people probably thought he answered the reporter's question quite well. The president had an answer ready for a related question that he thought a reporter was going to ask. We are not suggesting that you sidestep questions. You will be surprised, though, how many times a prepared response can be used to answer several related questions.

Beer Cartoon Your interview question responses must be more than superficial replies. An interviewer wants a well-reasoned reply. Giving a terse answer is tantamount to a yes or no reply to a question. The interviewer wants to give you the opportunity to do most of the talking. And you want that extra time since minutes and seconds are precious to you. If the question is one that can be answered with a ten second reply, try to figure out the interviewer's purpose in asking the question. If it appears that the purpose is to get you talking about a certain topic, take the clue and thoroughly discuss the topic based upon your pre-interview plans. Do not restate the obvious. Expand on the topic in a 2-3 minute reply. “Do you have any reasons for working in a brewery other than you like beer?”

Prepare Responses Concise logical Organized INTERVIEW Point 1 . . . . Point n . . . . Concise logical Prepare Responses The topics to be covered in an interview are fairly easy to figure out in advance. If you cannot determine all of the exact questions, you can surely figure out the topic in your background that would be most relevant to cover with an interviewer. The major topics probably will follow your resume, but you don't want to simply restate the resume. You want to expand and clarify the brief points mentioned in your resume. For each major topic, you should prepare a point-by-point response. Covering these points in a concise, logical, and organized fashion will cause your interview to come across in a very positive manner. In many instances, you are dealing with professionally trained interviewers. These people are trained to see through artificial, shallow, and unprepared applicants. Some of the telltale signs of a lack of preparation are excessive use of words like “well,” “okay?,” and phrases like “well, let me see,” and “if you know what I mean.” Organized

Interview Responses test revise evaluate Practice Makes Perfect You now have the questions, topics, answers and responses written down and the outline memorized. You should test your responses, evaluate them, and then make the necessary revisions before you try them in a real interview. To avoid a rote memory sound, you need to practice with a friend or a tape recorder. Practice allows you to come across as fully informed and candid. evaluate

Hire Me Today Cartoon An interview is a sales situation: the product is you and your credentials. You have to be convinced that you are right for the job. You can't sell a product you don't believe in. An interview presentation must be convincing if you expect the employer to follow up with a firm job offer. You do not need to offer the employer an incentive. Most want to fill the opening as soon as possible. This is your soapbox and you must make the best possible presentation that you can.

Interview Content goals education skills work experience activities Interview Concept It is obvious that the interview is a solo event and if you don't toot your own horn, there is no one else with you to carry forth. How do you do it with poise? You are going to talk about five basic topics. They are your goals, education, skills, work experience, and activities. These are the same topical headings on your resume. You must expand into much more depth. Under each topic, you can easily anticipate some probable questions and prepare effective responses in advance to each of them.

Interview Content personal approach I want I did I can I will Your personal approach on covering these points can be a brazen, direct approach, or a subtle indirect approach. But regardless of the approach, you must clearly state these four points: I want, I did, I can, and I will. It is nearly impossible for one of your competitors to outperform you in the interview if you have prepared replies to each of these statements. You will outperform the unprepared competitors every time.

Diploma Cartoon You undoubtedly have many significant achievements of which you are justly proud. There are some subtle ways of getting your message across without trying to blow the interviewer over with your credentials. You also want to do more than simply read these from your resume. You get your points across through examples. You discuss a situation where you gently display the characteristics that you wish to leave in the interviewer's mind. You must expand on the resume's “can-do” factors. You never want can-do factors to stand without your adding credible “will-do” characteristics to them.

Responsibility Responsibility Regardless of the job, every interviewer is trying to size you up as a responsible person. Few of us have the gall to come out and say, “I consider myself to be a highly responsible person.” But you must get that point across. One way to do that is to use an example. Bring out several episodes in your life that shows responsibility.

Supervision & Authority Supervision And Authority Most positions to which you aspire may eventually lead you into management assignments where you must supervise others. You want to get across to the interviewer that you have the ability to manage. Management is basically a skill that can be learned. It is easy to say that you possess this skill. You need to prove that you do. One excellent way of proving this is to draw upon some recent experiences where you were involved in supervision or management. Keep the story short and always emphasize how you were in charge of the situation. Your short story does not have to be from a work environment.

Ability To Work With Others There is no job for which you will apply that will not involve working with other people. An employer must evaluate your ability to interact with others. Most people consider themselves socially well adjusted, so it is difficult to convincingly tell a recruiter how well you work with others. The only effective way of doing this is to draw upon past experiences and explain them to the interviewer. The interviewer is looking for your ability to relate to others. You need to build a brief presentation around some group event in which you took a semi-leadership role. Ability To Work With Others

PERSEVERANCE Keep on Truckin' Perseverance Every job has its drawbacks. Things do not run smoothly all of the time. Some professional jobs are nothing more than one crisis after another. How do you respond to pressure? Perseverance is a quality that you can only demonstrate by example. You can't just say that you have perseverance. You have to show it. There are undoubtedly examples in your life where you found yourself in an uncomfortable situation. You want to tell an interviewer how you took an adverse situation, stuck with it, and turned it into a good learning experience. Many people will use examples that draw upon factors such as grades, illness, accidents, family problems, and other adversities. Keep on Truckin'

Present Your Subjective Traits Be Proactive Convincing Presentations ZAP Technique on: responsibility supervision team player perseverance Present Your Subjective Traits Every interview that you take must address your subjective traits. Rather than allowing these traits to just emerge, you need to be more proactive. Your convincing presentation must include some zesty anecdotal presentations that reveal your responsibility level, your supervisory potential, your level of ability to work with others in a team, and your perseverance.

Ask Telling Questions Initial Assignments Advancement Company Information Ask Telling Questions You want to provide most of the information in an interview, but it is supposed to be a two-way communication. A recruiter would not be impressed if you left an attitude that you already knew everything there was to know about the organization. Interviewers will expect you to ask questions about various aspects of the position and the company. At the same time that you are asking a question, though, it is possible to be telling the interviewer what you already know. Preface your questions with comments related to what you already know. Ask them to expand on what you have already read. This lets them know that you are sincerely interested. You have done some homework already. Most of your questions will relate to the assignments, advancement, and more detailed information of the firm. You may focus on training, travel, and specific duties. You may ask about the advancement policy, timing of promotions, geographical moves, appraisal criteria, and so on. One impressive approach is to locate recent news articles about the organization and ask for more detailed information about what trends that this might suggest.

Don't Ask About Salary and Benefits Salary And Benefits Questions One question on your mind is likely to relate to pay. You want to know what the employer thinks you are worth. There is a time and place for salary questions. The initial interview is not normally the proper place to ask these questions. Wait until you perceive a strong sincere interest by the employer before you bring up salary. It normally will not come up until there is a positive indication by the employer that you are the right job candidate. Be prepared for the question but don't initiate it.

The Closing Stage 1. Further Questions 2. Follow-up Procedures 3. Termination Closing Stage We have covered the introduction and background discussion stages in the initial interview. The last stage is the close, which can often be awkward. You will recognize the termination when you hear the interviewer asking if you have any further questions, glancing at the time, or standing up. When the end is in sight, make sure you quickly switch to closing questions. Make certain that you understand the next series of steps. Then, terminate the interview with a firm handshake and a note of appreciation for the time extended to you. The stage is now set for you to begin an effective follow-up strategy.

Presenting Your Interview Case The convincing story What and how you say it Speech about your credentials Be prepared: 30 minutes, non-stop An essential presentation Presenting Your Interview Case What you say in an interview provides the criteria for the interviewer to evaluate you. Only a convincing story will get you moving along in the employment process. How you say it is also important in presenting your case to the potential employer. Equally important is what you say. Your interview is a presentation with your credentials as the subject matter. You should always be prepared to make a presentation about your credentials that will last at least 30 minutes; non-stop. “Presenting your Interview Case” is designed to help you create this essential presentation.

If you would like to learn more, Career Planning Strategies textbook will supply additional information on this topic.