Interviewing Safety

The place of the interview is important.  People who are seeking home-based jobs may find that the job interview takes place in a person’s home and may include more than one applicant.

If interviewers ask that you meet with them in their home, you might ask who will be in attendance.  Most interviewers will meet with applicants in public locations such as a hotel lobby, coffee shop, restaurant, or airport arrival area.

If you are meeting in a hotel room, do so before or during regular business hours.  Let interviewers know that you happy to meet with them and to let your family or friends know how the interview went.

Let someone know you are going to the interview.  Schedule a post-interview call with a friend or relative to let them know when the interview is complete.  This practice can protect your safety and help you remember things you learned during your interview.

If you are flying for an interview, learn how to connect with ground transportation before you leave on your trip.  This information can make your transportation safer and save you time and energy during your travel.

Fly early in the day.  Just the eerie nature of a late-night empty airport is reason enough to travel early.

If the interviewer is lewd, profane, threatening, or violent, leave the interview.  Get in touch with friends or family as soon as possible and let them know about your experience.  Beyond those measures, I am not a lawyer.  I can not tell you how to handle legal matters.  If you believe that the interviewer has broken the law or hurt you, you should seek direction from the proper authorities.

You may find that interviewing is interesting, maybe even fun.  Plan ahead. Think about your safety before making commitments.  You will have terrific interviews, and you may even land a great job.

I have written other articles on how to prepare for job interviews and how to prepare for business meetings.  The things that you do to prepare for both meetings are the same.

Once you land a job, you are competing with other people inside and outside your company to keep your job and to progress in your career.

If you want job security and, especially if you want to get promoted, treat each day as a job interview.

Before starting your business day, make a list of five things you want to accomplish that day.  If those five things include business meetings within your own company or outside your company, preparing for those meetings is very simple.  At first, you may find that making these preparations may seem complicated and burdensome.  I know that I did.  However, I found that repetition made these preparations easier and the habit of making these preparations made them feel natural, even necessary.  I also found that when I encountered new situations, these habits made preparation for those situations much easier as well.

Before going to a meeting, write down the following things.

1. The purpose of the meeting
2. Presentations you need to bring to the meeting
3. Names of participants
4. Location, time, and date of the meeting
5. The things you want to accomplish in the meeting

During the meeting take notes.  From your notes you can send follow-up emails and take action on your commitments resulting from the meeting.  You will do a better job for your employer and your peers.

The purpose of conducting an interview is to decide whether an applicant is a fit for the job (1) from the company’s point of view and (2) from the point of view of the applicant.

The best way to get to know an applicant in a short amount of time is to hold the interview in a comfortable setting for a conversation.

Early in my recruiting career, my partner and I recruited for E & J Gallo Winery. At the time, Joe Gallo, son of co-founder Ernest Gallo, was effectively the chief executive officer.

The staffing director at the Winery invited my partner and me to join him, the senior vice president of human resources, and Joe Gallo for dinner in Gallo’s home in Modesto.  There was a member of the Gallo staff who worked in the kitchen.  We ate salmon.  I remember, because Gallo, not the kitchen staff, cooked the fish.

At the dinner that night, I got first-hand experience of how to ask a think-on-your feet question.  The conversation had flowed from one comfortable, general discussion to another as my partner and I got to know Gallo, his staffing director, and his senior vice president of human resources.  Then, in a tone of general curiosity and as I recall somewhat out of the blue, Joe Gallo asked me, “Jay, what is the leading political party in Texas?”

I do not recall my answer, but I do recall how thought-provoking the discussion had become.  The question was about politics, but it was not political.  The question was simply thought-provoking.

I later learned in working with E & J Gallo Winery that this type of question was common for Joe Gallo and was a practice he had learned from his father, Ernest Gallo.  What interviewers learn from this type of question is the conceptual thinking of the people they put on the company’s payroll.   Although it is probably safer to avoid politics in an interview process, asking a typically subjective question from an objective point of view enables an interviewer to learn whether an applicant can analyze and discuss situations objectively and intelligently and stick to the facts.

Many companies make it a practice for the hiring manager to take a management applicant and perhaps the applicant’s wife to dinner as one of the last steps in the recruiting process.  The dinner in Gallo’s home fits in with the common and recommended practice for final stage interviews for making management hires.

How well does that recruiting method work?  The people who work at E & J Gallo Winery come from the best schools in the country.  Many of the managers who work for the company have had earlier experience and advanced quickly through the ranks at competitive, major consumer packaged goods companies.  The Gallo method of sourcing and interviewing top management talent has enabled it to stay the world’s largest family-owned winery and the largest exporter of California wine.

The approach that each company takes to conduct its interviews can vary with a number of factors.

• Culture of the company
• Stage of development of the company
• Resources of the company
• Stage of the interview in the process
• Level of the position being staffed

The purpose, however, remains the same:  to decide whether an applicant is a fit for the position (1) from the company’s point of view and (2) the point of view of the applicant.

Dress in business attire.  Standard business attire includes a dark-gray or navy-blue suit or skirt and jacket, a white shirt or blouse, and black shoes. Wear those things to your interviews.  If you are interviewing with people who wear casual clothes to work, they will not fault you on your attire. However, if you go into an office where everyone wears business attire, and you are wearing jeans, you will probably have eliminated yourself from consideration for the job.

Interact and observe.  Whenever you enter a place where you are interviewing, you are under everyone’s eye, whether by design or incidentally. Be patient, thoughtful, courteous, and personable with the people you meet. Be confident and natural.  Breathe in the ambience of the environment. What do you see on the walls and around the offices? Is this a place where you want to be each day? Putting yourself in this frame of mind will help you be alert and learn and be proactive in your meetings.

Move forward.  As you meet people and as you make your way through offices, face the direction you are doing. Move towards people as you meet them and extend your hand.  There only one handshake. Firmly, briefly grasp the other person’s hand as you look them in the eye, and remembering to say the person’s name, say “Betty/Bill, very nice to meet you.  Thank you for meeting with me.”

Be prepared.  Prepare your agenda and use it. Give each interviewer a copy of the material you would like to cover: an outline of your questions, accomplishments, and what you can do for the company.

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

Say Nice Things About Yourself.

In an earlier post about effective communications, I discussed the importance of positive direction.  Only tell people what you want them to do.

People remember what you tell them.  When speaking about yourself, if you can not say anything nice, it is probably better to say nothing at all.

The most common example of keeping comments about yourself positive is the advice on handling the interview question regarding your greatest weakness.  The conventional advice is to give a positive that you may need to reign in a bit.  For example, when someone says that is your greatest weakness, you might say you can get a little impatient with people who are giving less than 100 percent of their effort.   Then you can go on to say that you have learned to use that trait as a management tool to provide direction to under performers.

Also, begin to see yourself as a person who is interested in continually extending your skills and knowledge.  Keep a self-improvement program in progress and discuss this program with people who share your interests.

When I worked at Procter & Gamble, I joined a local Toastmasters group that met for breakfast once a week.  Each week a couple of the members would speak.

I signed up for the Toastmasters meetings just out of curiosity, but the fact that I was participating in a self-improvement program got a lot of play within Procter & Gamble.

Some of the things that I have more read recently include the following, more challenging books and manuals.

• James Joyce: Ulysses
• Homer: The Odyssey
• Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• Alan Roth: The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
• Lisa Sabin-Wilson, et al: WordPress 8 Books in 1
• Thomas Cahill: How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe
• Steven M. Schafer: HTML, XHTML, and CSS
• William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, and others

During a period when I spent a lot of time on an exercise bike, I found that audio tapes were great for learning new ideas and concepts.  I completed following audio series and others:

• Forty-eight-hour diplomatic series for French studies
• Zig Ziglar:  See You at the Top and Secrets of Closing the Sale
• Tony Robbins series Personal Power

Podcasts are easy to find and many are free.  NPR has a nice library of podcasts including The Ted Hour.  There are countless other podcasts.  I have also found do it yourself training very helpful.

I began studying website development on W3Schools.com and still find that website handy for website development reference help.  I completed the New Boston series on Javascript and have completed around sixty of the New Boston series on PHP.  You can find the series on YouTube.com.

There is new group of writers I follow.  The philosophy of these writers is that less is more through nutrition and better life choices:  Mark Sisson, Leo Babauta, Tim Ferris, and others.

It is better to discuss areas of self-improvement as attempts to become more effective than examples of your overcoming your shortcomings.  Any mention of your shortcomings may work against you in the future.

During an interview for a promotion at Polaroid Corporation, the supervisor conducting the interview asked if I had any weaknesses.  I told him that I conscientiously had to focus in on conversations when people were telling me things that I already knew.

I received the promotion.

About a year later, the One Step Camera™ sales had begun to falter through a worldwide inventory glut, and this manager was under a lot of pressure.  During a conversation on sales in my area, he asked me if my inability to concentrate might be contributing to the sales progress of my team.

The manager had drawn on what I thought was an incidental comment I made about how I dealt with long, boring conversations to bore in on issues with my team’s performance that were in reality consistent with the company’s worldwide performance.

I told my manager that I certainly remembered making that comment, but that I was paying attention to him now.  Then I laid out for him my strategies going forward.

So say nice things about yourself.  You do not need to brag.  Just keep it positive.

The more difficult interview questions are also the more common questions interviewers ask.

Preparing for these questions can help you in a number of ways.

• Make you more comfortable when interviewers ask the questions
• Help you anticipate what you need to know and perhaps need to  research further
• Enable you to review your career highlights and your career challenges from an interviewer’s point of view

During my sales training at Procter & Gamble, I learned to anticipate a buyer’s objections and research and prepare my answers.  Preparing for interview questions works much the same way.

“The World’s Most Noble Headhunter”

The Most Important Interview Question You Will Ever Be Asked

I have read that the most important interview question you will ever be asked is what is your greatest accomplishment.

To me that is akin to someone’s idea of what is Mozart’s greatest work and Babe Ruth’s greatest game. Each person will have his or own idea of greatest anything. The most important part of interview preparation is to check your accomplishments along with a great deal of other material before going into an interview.

Then take a deep breath and be flexible. Interviews are like major league baseball. Who knows what pitch is coming next? Hopefully it is not a wild fast ball going straight to the ear hole in your helmet. Often the pitcher does not know where the next pitch is going until it gets there. So prepare. Take a deep breath. Stay loose. Trust yourself.

Be extraordinary: you will do a great job!

When I worked at Procter & Gamble, I took a sales training course that included a presentation model that works for any situation.  Procter & Gamble titled the model the 5-Steps to persuasive selling. Xerox had actually developed the original course as the 7-steps to professional selling (PSS).

Let’s say that tomorrow you have a meeting. This meeting could be a job interview. The meeting might be with your board of directors to discuss a new direction for your company.

Here how the process works.

PREPARE FOR THE MEETING
The night before your meeting, you review the material you will present. You might have a few notes on your laptop or you might have a slide presentation. The important thing is that you have prepared what you will need for this meeting.

SUMMARIZE THE SITUATION.
When your turn to present material begins, you greet the person or people in the room. Perhaps thank them for meeting with you. During this part of the presentation, you introduce your subject. Your audience has a certain need or problem, for which you have a solution. The subject of your presentation is a summary of the need or needs they have. You might provide them with some additional information on your subject. While you want to gain acceptance of the ideas you are presenting, the most important thing is to demonstrate that you have their interest foremost. You are there to help them.

STATE THE IDEA.
In a brief, easy-to-understand statement, you give a recommendation for a solution to their need. Allow your audience to participate. Ask questions. They may have objections to your idea. Let them get comfortable by raising objections. Treat the objections as questions and provide answers.

EXPLAIN HOW IT WORKS.
You might provide a schedule of events, prices, and who will do what. Help your audience see that your plan is thorough. Give them the details they need to know. Help them be comfortable that they can trust that your plan will accomplish the goals you have established.

REINFORCE KEY BENEFITS
“Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” This part should have no more than three statements as to how your plan gives your audience the benefits of solving their problems. Keep it brief.

SUGGEST EASY NEXT STEPS.
This is the close. This is where you request approval of your plan. I recommend that you layout easy steps that may provide options, and do a trial close on an assumptive choice.   For example, you might say, “Should we start to work this afternoon or first thing tomorrow?”

FOLLOW UP
This part may require a little bit of discipline. When you have left your meeting, you should do a personal review of the meeting. Review any notes you have taken. Write follow up correspondence. Schedule the next steps you need to take. Notify others who might be involved of what you accomplished in the meeting and what they can expect going forward.