You Majored in What? (37 page)

CREATING STORIES AND OTHER RESPONSES TO TYPICAL INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

While there is no definitive list of interview questions, it is likely that you will encounter at least half of these as you go through the interview process:

1. Tell me about yourself.

2. How would your friends describe you?

3. Why are you pursuing this position?

4. Describe the accomplishment of which you are most proud.

5. Why do you want to work for_?

6. What makes you different from other candidates?

7. Why should we hire you?

8. What strengths/weaknesses do you bring to this position?

9. How did you select your college and/or your major?

10. What would you like to be doing five or ten years from now?

11. Your background doesn’t really fit. Why do you think you can do the job?

12. What would you like me to know that’s not on your résumé?

13. What books, magazines, or newspapers do you read regularly?

14. What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

15. Have you ever failed at anything?

As you read through this list, are any of the questions particularly hard to answer? Those are the ones you should tackle first. Which of the questions most lend themselves to a story for you? For some people, the question about what friends would say about them might be answered with a short response, such as “My friends always say I’m the creative one because I have so many ideas.” But for you, that question might be the start of a story about the time you were challenged by your friends’ behavior and how you handled the resulting awkward situation.

PREPARING FOR THE INTERVIEW USING A SWOT ANALYSIS

You already know the value of the SWOT analysis from Chapter 9, where you used a SWOT map to develop your cover letter. Now you’re going to work with a simple SWOT diagram to help you quickly identify how prepared you are for an interview.

Here is a basic SWOT design with some questions to get you started on your analysis:

As before, you have four areas to work with: your personal strengths and weaknesses, and the external opportunities and threats. When you’ve completed your SWOT analysis, go back and focus on two factors related to the interview: (1) how you’re going to accentuate your strengths, and (2) how you’re going to minimize any weaknesses or threats. The positive factors you want to stress are your strengths (S) and the opportunities (O) available with the company. As you analyze these, you’ll want to think about connections between the two. How do your strengths fit with what the company is seeking? How can you make an interviewer see the connections?

Minimizing the weaknesses takes some more planning. If you complete a SWOT analysis early enough before the interview (that is, not the night before!) you might have time to diminish some of your weaknesses (W) or outsmart the competition (T). For instance, suppose you’re interviewing for a position that sounds really interesting, but the description indicates that one of the skills the company is seeking is experience with Excel worksheets, and you’ve never used Excel, so your lack of Excel experience is in your W box. What could you do between now and the interview to become familiar with Excel? Could you get a book on the basics of Excel? Perhaps you could try creating a simple Excel worksheet. Within a few hours, you could become familiar with the typical components of Excel worksheets, the typical tasks you could use it for, and even some basic entry guidelines and formulas.

Then when you’re in the interview and the interviewer asks you about your skills with Excel, you have a choice. You can simply say, yes, I’ve worked a little with Excel and I’m sure I could learn it quickly. Or you could use the marketing technique of asking questions and telling a story, as in, “Can you tell me how Excel is used most often in your company?” Once the interviewer answers, you can then say, “You know, I didn’t have any experience with Excel, but when I discovered that it was part of the job I decided to quickly learn it. I took an online tutorial and I set up several spreadsheets to experiment with. While I’m not an expert, I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I’ve already learned how to. . . .” You can finish the story as it fits your experience.

Opposite is a blank SWOT diagram which you can fill in (or simply draw on a piece of paper). Take an interview you have scheduled or expect to have in the future and try doing a preliminary SWOT analysis. If you can’t fill everything in, then you know what you still need to research or learn about the field. If you can fill it all in, then you have the beginning of a plan for impressing your future employer at the interview.

WISDOM BUILDER

CORPORATE STORYTELLING: WHY YOUR EMPLOYER WILL CARE ABOUT YOUR APPRECIATION FOR STORYTELLING

Storytelling is used daily in corporations, government and nonprofit agencies, and even in entrepreneurial small businesses. Because storytelling has such a strong ability to influence, control, and even manipulate behavior, it can be an indispensable tool for an organization. The most obvious use of storytelling is in advertising, marketing, and public relations, which help organizations build their reputation and convey their carefully constructed image and identity to the public. Storytelling can convey a large message in a small package: an illustration of a loving mother holding her smiling infant with an image of a jar of baby food superimposed on a lower corner of the illustration tells a complete story without saying a word. Millions of dollars are spent developing brands, logos, and other marketing pieces with the idea of conveying a story to the customer or client.

CEO’s and other leaders use storytelling to convey the organization’s mission or meaning to employees, board members, customers, clients, and stockholders. The stories they tell will capture the imagination of the audience, using both reason and emotion, and present themselves as credible and reliable and competent, perhaps even visionary.

Storytelling can help workers better understand the value of their work, bring them closer together, and build community. It can be used to help convey the beliefs or customs of an organization, and even to control or influence employee behavior. The new employee who is told the story of a former employee who expressed her dislike of her job in an elevator, not knowing the president of the company was standing behind her, quickly learns to be quiet in an elevator or in any setting where she doesn’t know who might be listening. The supervisor could have simply said, “Watch what you say about the company,” but the story carries an emotional impact and gravitas that compel the listener to absorb it. Other stories can help workers know how the company prefers to solve problems, how willing they are to hear alternative points of view, or even whether the employee needs to be at work exactly at eight o’clock or whether it’s OK to wander in at nine. Stories have power, and a smart new employee (you perhaps?) listens closely to the stories the workers and the managers tell and carefully reads the stories in the company’s public relations material—a gold mine of knowledge and information exists in those stories.

The Classics at Work:

ARISTOTLE MEETS WALL STREET AND ENRON

Think your classes on Greek myth or narrative structure are a little obscure? Think again. Greek dramatic structure is alive and well in fiction and in real life. The movie
Wall Street
follows traditional Greek narrative style as it presents a fictionalized version of money-obsessed 1980s investors, corporate raiders, and stockbrokers like Ivan Boesky, Donald Trump, and T. Boone Pickens. The lead character of
Wall Street,
Bud Fox (played by Charlie Sheen), follows the path of the flawed hero of Aristotle’s tragedies. He falls at the end but not without learning valuable lessons and changing his life forever.

Fast forward twenty years to a real-life Greek tragedy played out in the news by executives of the Enron Corporation in Houston, Texas. The documentary
Enron
:
The Smartest Guys in the Room
proves that in the twenty-first century C.E., just like in the fourth century B.C.E., human beings fall prey to the same errors or mistakes, bringing about their own downfall. The next time you see a scandal in the news or watch an individual’s fall due to misjudgment, error, or character flaw, remember Aristotle. His teachings can help keep you, and your employer, from making a similar mistake. Storytelling is invaluable on many levels in the workplace.

FINAL QUESTION

What could you do in the next twenty-four hours to be better prepared for your interviews than your competition?
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YOU MEAN THE CHAOS CONTINUES?

In the last week I’ve uprooted myself from my home of fifteen
years, moved all the way across the country away from everything
I care about, and plunged myself into a frightening new career. In
the first few nerve-wracking moments, I walk in here and find my
producer lobbying to get herself transferred to another show.
Abe Lincoln had a brighter future when he picked up his tickets
at the box office.

—KELSEY GRAMMER
AS “FRASIER CRANE” IN FRASIER

Lisa, a medieval studies major, came into her appointment with a worried look on her face.“It’s September,” she said “and I still don’t have a job. This is really frustrating. I totally blew the last interview I had, which would have been the perfect job if I had gotten it, and I have another interview this afternoon, but it’s just for a part-time job, so I don’t even know why I’m bothering. The worst part is all my friends have moved on and they’re starting these really great careers.” She pulled out her résumé and cover letter and asked me to look them over (again) to see if they could be fixed.“I really have to get a job,” she said as she slumped back in her seat.

If you’re like most recent graduates, a new form of culture shock has occurred. Some of you are experiencing the jolt of entering the workplace, with all its changes from the academic culture you’ve been in for at least sixteen years. You suddenly don’t have your summers off, and the people you work with are all older than you (after being surrounded by a sea of faces your own age in school). You’re trying to negotiate the strange new world with different expectations, less feedback (no more grades for better or worse), and an unclear future (at least when you were in tenth grade you knew you’d be in eleventh grade the next year).

Or you could be experiencing a different kind of shock: that sudden wide-open gap of time with nothing to do. Some of you have understanding parents who will let you cruise a little while you get your bearings, but others are starting to feel the pressure.

I’ll bet the conversation and the anxiety have switched from
THE QUESTION
to
THE JOB:
that relentless pressure you’re feeling inside or from your parents, society, and elsewhere to now “do something,” and it had better be the “right” something. You know that you want to do something that has meaning in your life; you certainly don’t want to be doing your own version of
Office Space
and wearing too much flair. But time is running out because graduation is here, or already passed, and you still haven’t made a move. It can all feel pretty paralyzing. Maybe it’s time I told you my story.