Peggy Klaus (11 page)

For any job interview, make sure to also prepare yourself for those zingers—the concerns that employers or headhunters might have about you and your career record. Develop responses that address a spotty job history, how your skills translate from one field to another, lack of experience, or those inevitable questions such as “Tell me about your weak points.” Finally, on a separate piece of paper, write down everything you know about the organization and the people who will be at your interview— even if it requires lengthy online research, calling the human-resources director, or contacting a friend of a friend who might have the inside scoop. Check to ensure that your bragologue hits the target. Are the things you plan to say going to be exactly what the interviewer is likely to want to know about you? To help you out, the rest of this chapter is devoted to eye-opening stories of bragging bloopers and successes at job interviews and the lessons learned along the way.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK

“It was awful! They questioned me about things I hadn’t even thought of.”

Donna, marketing director for a Seattle-based health clinic, thought her interview for the position of development director for a prominent community arts center would be a cinch. After all, she had helped turn around a fledgling clinic, and patient enrollment was now at an all-time high. In addition, some fifteen years earlier she had been involved in the development of a well-known performing arts center in the Washington, DC, area. Shopping for a new skirt and pair of heels for the big interview day, she breezed over in her mind her history and accomplishments, and felt comfortable that she would do just fine.

When she walked into the interview room, she was surprised to find the organization’s six key players gathered around a conference room table waiting for her. Instead of one person interviewing her followed by another, the human-resources director explained, scheduling conflicts meant this was the only way to guarantee everyone who needed to meet her saw her. Like a storm approaching from afar on a sunny day, a feeling of dread quickly replaced Donna’s easy attitude. Was this going to be an interview or an ambush?

Donna believed she got off to a good start as she outlined her marketing and sales successes with the health clinic. When they pressed her more, however, on how her health experience translated to increasing traffic and interest in the community arts center, things began to unravel. One of the directors pointed out that with lives on the line, people were more apt to invest in health care, whereas art was an entirely different matter. He reminded her of the center’s slim operating budget. “I didn’t realize that,” she said, quietly berating herself for not digging out these details beforehand. When asked for some of her development ideas for the center, she continued, “Well, I’d really need to know more about your funding situation before I could discuss that. I was hoping we could do that today.” Her comment was met with chilly silence—one that said “Our purpose here today isn’t to spend our time educating you, but rather to be enlightened by you.”

Donna quickly redirected the conversation to her past experience in the performing arts, recalling some of the hurdles she overcame as the first assistant director at another center and a two-year stint as manager for a group of artists where she raised $500,000 in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. That was all fine and dandy, but someone remarked that the world of fundraising was vastly different today from fifteen years ago. The NEA had become politicized and controversial, fallen victim to some huge funding cuts, and had become a very unreliable source of funds for smaller organizations. They had learned long ago to place their bets elsewhere. This person asked her whether she knew other private foundations in the region that could support the organization. Someone pointed out that the first two she mentioned as potential sources were already contributors, something she had read on the organization’s website but had forgotten. As she stumbled through the rest of the meeting, she looked out on a sea of glazed stares and thought “How could this cinch of an interview have sunk so low?”

To her credit, though, instead of skulking away and hiding under the covers for the next two days, she called back one woman on the interviewing committee whom she knew from a board they had once served on together. Admitting that she was not happy with the interview, Donna asked if she could come back and present a full-fledged development plan. The woman agreed and Donna took advantage of her second chance not only by crafting a bang-up development proposal but by getting all her bragging ducks in a row.

DON’T LET YOUR RÉUMÉ SPEAK FOR YOU

“Why should I have to I tell them? It’s already on my rßsumß.

Last year my nephew Max, who had just graduated from college, returned to Philadelphia to look for a job. His days were devoted to the hunt, while evenings he worked as a bartender. Before he contacted me for advice, he had attended eight informational and four actual job interviews but had come up empty-handed. I was surprised to hear this. Max had been an excellent student and had completed two high-profile internships a few summers before, one with the mayor’s office. Something wasn’t right. At the urging of his increasingly nervous mom, he called Aunt Peggy before his next important meeting with a prospective employer.

When he finally reached me, I suggested we try a mock interview, which I opened up by asking, “So tell me about some of your work with the city.”

“Well,” said Max, “two years ago, I completed a summer internship with the mayor’s Business Action Team, his personal arm of the commerce department. I got to do some different things in helping the city retain and attract businesses.” End of story.

“Max, is that it? Or is this just a bad cell phone connection?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s about it, Aunt Peggy, at least for that question,” he replied.

“But … what I did was really nothing. I don’t want to come off like I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Okay, you might think it’s nothing, but III bet a lot of others would think it’s something. Don’t sell yourself short by underestimating the value of what you do.

“Really? I remember you telling me about a whole bunch of interesting projects you were doing for that commission. Why don’t you take me through them?”

“They’re on my rßsumß—do you want me to shoot you a copy?” he asked.

“No, Max,” I said, “I want you to talk about them and bring them to life.”

“Well, here, I’ll read it to you,” he said, proceeding to robotically recap his résumé. And therein lay the problem. Max, like many other college graduates, had sunk hundreds of dollars into getting his résumé just right. He had devoted all of his job preparation to the written word. As a result, he assumed his résumé should do most of the talking. I asked, “If all employers wanted was for you to read your résumé to them, why do you think they would bother to meet you?” I reminded him that employers weren’t psychics, and explained the purpose of an interview was for them to get to know him, see what he was like, and hear the story of his accomplishments. I added, “Your résumé doesn’t have your sparkling personality and energy, You need to show employers how you would be a great asset to their firm because of the experience you’ve had and your enthusiasm for the position.”

Taking great liberties as his aunt, I continued, “Moreover, you sound like you are snoozing your way through this mock interview instead of schmoozing. Your energy is low. Your voice is a monotone. Your sound bored with yourself, and you’re boring me. So get up off your tush and pump up the passion. Start walking around the room and get some blood flowing to your brain. But before you start telling me again about this fabulous experience you had working with the mayor, I want you to say to yourself in a very exaggerated manner:
I am so excited to be here. I can’t wait to tell you about my experiences, and you would be absolutely crazy not to hire me!”

There was a long pause. “Okay, Aunt Peggy, give me a moment,” he said. (I told you he was smart, didn’t I?) He then launched full throttle into a very detailed story about his summer internship with the mayor’s special arm of the commerce division. He talked about helping small businesses cut through the red tape at City Hall for services, and about how he was part of a team that enticed three large companies to relocate to the city, adding millions in tax revenues. Barely stopping for breath, he bridged that experience to his most recent summer job, dropping the name of his boss, a well-known commercial developer acclaimed for his urban work reviving two depressed downtown neighborhoods. He delivered additional brag bites about his research scouting out large abandoned lots for revitalization and their impact on communities and the environment. Max ended by saying how exciting it had been to report his findings to the developer and how he had even played Ansel Adams, taking stunning photographs of the depressed sites ripe for renewal and incorporating them into his various presentations. His knowledge, his wit, his passion for urban renewal came through loud and clear. I wasn’t surprised when he called me the next afternoon to say he had been asked back for round two. One more interview after that and he landed the job. I considered taking 10 percent of his first year’s salary, but Max swears he’ll take care of me in my old age.

GET CREATIVE

“I have no experience—who would ever hire me?”

Aileen, a soon-to-be economics graduate from Wharton, came to me for interview coaching. She was concerned that she had no corporate experience to land a job on Wall Street. I had to agree with her on that score. Fortunately she was graduating from a highly regarded college where she had excelled in her studies. Her grade point average was high, and two of her economics professors had written letters of referral praising the research she had conducted for her senior thesis on the emergence of microcredit in underdeveloped nations. She could certainly draw on her successes from college, but what was missing was the hook for her story—the reason she had a passion for the financial side of business to begin with.

“Why are you interested in Wall Street?” I asked her.

“I’ve always liked working with numbers” was her response. Imagining how far an answer like that would get her on a job interview, I said, “Aileen, isn’t there
anything
that sparked your interest in the financial side of business, like running a lemonade stand or something?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so,” she said.

It all started with my grandfather, who founded and ran one of the largest retail stores in the Southwest. From the age of twelve, I spent my Saturdays and summers working for him until I went to college. I would have gone back to work with him more, but he passed away and the business was sold. When I first started, I did small jobs like stocking the shelves, sweeping the floors, and showing customers where to find what they were looking for. By age fourteen, I was running one of the registers, and a year later, overseeing all the clerks. Eventually I moved on to inventory—taking it and figuring out how much we had to order each season based on previous years’ sales and the local economy. My grandfather taught me accounting, and by the time I went to college I was already doing much of his bookkeeping. Come to think of it, I was really a financial analyst even back then.

Now we were getting somewhere! So in her next interview Aileen said this:

My passion for economics and the financial side of business started at the ripe old age of twelve. I worked in my grandfather’s retail store on Saturdays and during summer breaks. It was quite a large operation in Tucson that sold everything from panty hose to peanuts. I started with stocking the shelves, moved on to the register, and then inventory control. By the age of sixteen, I was pretty much handling the accounting and bookkeeping. I was a financial analyst in the making. My grandfather taught me everything. He would have been so proud of me graduating from Wharton with a degree in economics with honors.

Something must have worked. Aileen got her first job on Wall Street two months later.

ZAP THOSE ZINGERS

“If you’ve been so successful on your own, why would you want to work for someone else?”

Bernice, age fifty, has spent the last twenty-five years working for herself as a management consultant for family foundations. Although highly successful, she wanted to return to a more traditional job in the corporate world. On one of her first job interviews, she found her heart stop when one of the partners asked her point-blank, “If you’ve been so successful on your own, why would you want to work for someone else?” This is when she felt herself slipping into defensive mode and, as she tried to justify her success, her responses became increasingly curt.

“What was the real truth?” I asked her. She told me that it was simply because working from home had allowed her the flexibility to care for her children, while at the same time earning a living. Now that they were grown, she was ready to spread her wings again. Together we worked on a good way to answer the question so it no longer stopped her in her tracks. The new bragologue went like this:

I have been working in the field of philanthropy for twenty-five years. When I had my last child seventeen years ago, I realized that my job demanded too much travel and too many late nights for a mother of three. So I left the company and went out on my own, to have more control over my schedule. I had planned all along to return to a firm when the youngest left home. D-Day is about to happen this fall, so I am taking the step that I always knew I would. I have really enjoyed running my own business and have learned a lot of things about myself, my values, my boundaries, and of course, managing profit-and-loss statements. I’m lucky to have been successful while enjoying each and every one of the families and foundations I’ve worked with. Now I want to use my skills on a broader stage, which I think a larger organization will give me. Believe it or not, I am actually looking forward to the travel. Isn’t that ironic, given that most of my friends have been on and off planes for the last twenty years and are ready to stay at home?