Intro Video Transcript

Job Interview Skills – Online Training By John Kogan- CEO of Illumeo This is John Kogan. I’m the CEO of Illumeo the online community for Corporate Finance Accounting, Treasury and related Professionals. I’d like to welcome everyone to today’s webinar titled “Interview Skills” so, congratulations! You’ve landed an interview. Now let’s make the most of it. This webinar will cover the following topics: • Interview Performance • Employed candidate versus in-transition candidate • Road map to the hiring Manager (which covers pre interviewed networking) • Knowing what questions you’ll be asked • Determining what your questions will be Joining us this morning is Mark Richards – who’s the Finance Executive and creator of candidateschair.com Mark is currently helping Success Factors in an immigrated company they recently purchased in Minnesota, while Mark was the consultant CFO. Mark started off in public accounting twenty five years ago and has been in corporate finance roles for the past twenty years. His roles have included being CFO for six start-up companies, an SVP for the Royal Bank of Canada in their U.S. wealth management division and a Director of international finance firm House of Companies. Mark developed candidateschair.com after a job transition and has been chair of a local finance executive group in Minnesota for five years. The site has drawn visitors from over ninety countries, and over twenty five thousand copies of his job search tools have been downloaded from his site. Mark also has two of the most read blog posts ever on Illumeo. So, Mark, thanks so much for joining us here and why don’t I let you take it away. Mark: Thanks John, appreciate it. Welcome everybody. As John said, for me, I started my candidates chair after I had my own job transition. So everything that you see here is really based upon my experience and the experience of my fellow colleagues that I’ve met in my job transition and in my running a local networking chapter and in Minnesota I’ve probably met with a couple of hundred finance executives. So a lot of it is not just my experience, it’s kind of a collective view of all the things that I’ve learned and just put in one place. And it’s really from a perspective of someone that’s looking from the job and not so much from a recruiter or HR person, but kind of what we face day to day looking for work. And also, been working with John at Illumeo the last couple of years and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. So we have a series up there today also on Illumeo. You’ll see that there’s other job search series that we’ve done. That John and I have done together. So a lot of that relates to helping you set your expectations for search and different types of networking that you can do to help you land that job. And as John talked about today, these are very specific tactics on how to improve your interview skills. So, I’m going to talk about my Outline today. The first thing to talk about is your expectations. And when I talk about where you need to be, I’m really talking about being in control. All that’s being interviewed and those interviewed before, what you’ll often find is that people are picking up your resumes, you walking into their office, and so to me, after seeing that several times, I realized that I had a lot more control then I was prepared. And I don’t mean control in a bad way like I’m trying to do something unethical, it just allows me to make sure that I was able to take control and remember everything that I needed to deliver in that interview. So we’ll start there at the expectations and then we’ll move on to which I think is part of your prep work, is matching your skills to the job which is really kind of understanding yourself, the business and really getting down to what’s critical in the role. From there we’ll go into talking about the preparation of your network. Using your network to help fill in any of the gaps you’ve got, find out who you’re interviewing, then if possible start to spread your message inside your company before you even get there. Then we’ll go into what I think is the heart of the interviewing process which are the question, and these are both questions that you’ll ask and questions that you’ll answer, and this to me is probably where if you invest time in this, this is where you’ll really stand out from other candidates. Talk about interviewing strategies once you actually get in there and then lastly coming up with a strong finish for yourself, and I make this coloration between dating and job search which we can talk about when we get to it. Then, there’s always something that doesn’t go right and what’s the best approach if something doesn’t go well in your interview and how to fix that. Discussion Outline: Interview Expectations: • Where you need to be • What you own • Define an outcome Match Skills to Job: • Understand Yourself • Understand Business • What’s critical to Role Preparation with Network: • Fill in the Blanks • Interviewers • Deliver your Message Questions to Ask and Answer: • Match Yourself • Clarify the Role • What’s important Interview Strategy: • Housekeeping • Questions • Close it Down Strong Finish (for you): • Dating and Job Search • Clarify Error • Thanks Hiring Manager (Interview: Googling a Question) So let’s start with... I think its interviewing people that are like Googling the questions, I see people don’t Google answers they Google questions and so, if you take an interview from a Hiring Manager’s perspective, the first thing that they look at from a candidate is:  Can He/ She help succeed? And they don’t say this in an anarchistic way but the reality is they’re looking to have somebody on their team to make them successful. They’re looking to have someone take some of the stress off them or handle some of the issues that they’ve got in the company. So the first thing they’re always looking at is: “Can this person help me succeed?” Then they look for:  Do you have the skills that I don’t have time to teach you? So what are the skills that they want right off the back? They’re going to be looking for very specific things because usually there is some sort of issues that needs to get managed right off the back and so they’re trying to think about:  What are the skills that are absolutely critical to me? And then lastly, when I look at people you know, they say I’m looking for a finance person that has a lot of experience with the Sales Team. So, that’s the type of things that people are talking about, I’m looking for somebody that has a specific type of experience. They don’t look for “I want someone with 3-5 years and a degree in Public Accounting.” That’s not what they want. What they want is someone that can work with the Sales Team. And lastly, they just think about:  Will He / She fit around here? So they’re trying to get a sense of your cultural hit. So, as they’re looking that’s the questions that they have. You: (Personality and cultural background) What you want to offer in return is:  What’s your promise  Skills that support the promise  Experiences that developed your skills And when I look at your set, really the first method you want to give in your promise is “What’s the promise and what you bring to that company.” So for example if you had to say: “In addition to all my typical finance work, I have worked with over a hundred clients during Pricing, Client Calls etc... so I’m great layered on in between Sales and Finance. So that’s what the Hiring Managers are looking for. That’s the promise that you bring, sure you’ve got lots of other finance experience but you want to bring that promise to match up as best you can with what the Hiring Manager is looking for and underneath your promise, that’s where you start to talk about what your skills are and the basis to support it and lastly, What were the experiences that developed those skills? And those are, your skills and experience are what support your promise and then lastly as you share, you talk about what your personality is and your management style, your work style and kind of, where have you worked? Have you work in family owned business? Because you know that’s different than a publicly owned or a very small company or a large company, whatever it is those are the things that you’ll share. So, if you start here, these are the things that the Hiring Manager is looking for. It really provides a good background for where we’re going to go and where you should be studying when you think about how you want to approach an interview.