Martin Yate - Knock em Dead Job Interview: How to Turn Job Interviews Into Job Offers

A S YOU WALK IN THE DOOR FOR YOUR NEXT INTERVIEW , I guarantee that hiring manager is thinking, Please let this be the one I can hire so I can get back to my real job. How well you perform in job interviews determines the jobs you are offered, the money you earn and, to a degree, the life you enjoy outside of work: You want to do this well. Your job search is a sales campaign, and job interviews are sales presentations. Whatever you do professionally, for the duration of your job search you have another job title: You are a salesperson selling the professional youa unique portfolio of skills, experience, behaviors, and values wrapped in a living, breathing package that qualifies you to do a specific job particularly well. You are selling a living product: yourself.

At job interviews, you display your product for potential buyers. These buyersyour interviewerscompare your product to the others they have seen. How effectively you pitch your product and differentiate it from the others will determine whether or not you get the job offer.

The ability to turn interviews into offers is built from the following components:

• Understanding how your customers make buying decisions
• Understanding what your customers want to buy
• Identifying what you have for sale that they want to buy
• Tailoring your sales pitch to your customers needs
• Selling what you have to offer

Preparation is half the work: Prepare properly and succeed; or dont, and fail. To differentiate yourself from other candidates, youve first got to understand how your customers make their buying decisions. This is especially important because the criteria employers use to make hires are the same ones they use to decide who gets the raises and promotions.

No employer wakes up in the morning saying, Its a wonderful day in the neighborhood; I think Ill hire an accountant. Staff is only ever added to the payroll for one reason: to help the company make money. Whatever your job title, that job is a small but important cog in the complex moneymaking machinery of the corporation.

Your cog has its own set of responsibilities and contributions to make, but it must also mesh seamlessly with other cogs in the department (and elsewhere in the company), working in harmony to execute tasks beyond the scope of individual effort. Your job title is only added to the payroll when the costs of hiring and paying you are outweighed by your contribution to the bottom line, through bringing money into the company, saving money, saving time, or otherwise increasing productivity.

There are five criteria that hiring managers apply to every hiring decision to ensure these goals are met. These criteria are applied when hiring for any job, at any level and in every profession. Understanding these five secrets of the hire will change the way you think about your work, revolutionize your performance at job interviews, and can power greater success in your next job and throughout your career.