My over 30 years experience in technical and engineering recruiting has taught me that the most important part of landing a job is selling yourself during the interview process. Unfortunately, most candidates do a very poor job of marketing themselves during their interviews. This applies to not only the engineering, scientific and technology talent our technical recruiting firm represents, but also most jobs applicants. The result is countless highly qualified candidates not landing the jobs they deserve!
Therefore, ten years ago I developed a novel interviewing training system to help my technical and engineering candidates perform better during their interviews. Up until recently, this system was disseminated on a one-to-one basis by either my recruitment team or myself. It helped our R&D, scientific, engineering, IT, technical and manufacturing candidates to outshine a multitude of competitors during the interview process.
Recently, I hired e-learning experts to redesign this interview preparation system into an easy to apply, online video to help a wider range of job candidates to perfect their interview skills. This is the story of this remarkable new interviewing tool, The Real Benefit Exercise℠.
Good Interview Performance Difficult For Technical Candidates
The interview process is a centered on a sales and marketing presentation. Unfortunately, job candidates have a limited amount of time to promote their jobs skills. As a result, performing well in interviews is very difficult for anyone.
This is especially true for the R&D (research and development), scientific, engineering, technical, IT (information technology) and manufacturing candidates my recruiting firm specializes in. That is why I developed The Real Benefit Exercise℠ to help our candidates perform well during their interviews.
Research Behind This Interview Preparation Tool
Since sales people are by definition experts in sales, I commissioned a study of top sales persons to uncover what they do right in closing the deal. It was based upon the premise that the interviewing process is a sales presentation.
One major revelation we discovered during our research was top salesmen talked in terms of benefits to their customer. They did not try to shove their products or services down the throats of customers. Instead, they listened carefully to what the customer needed and then tried to offer solutions in terms of benefits to the customer!
Additionally, our research tried to focus on only those sales behaviors that were easiest to replicate by non-sales people. That is the case because the R&D (research and development), scientific, engineering, technical, IT (information technology) and manufacturing candidates my recruitment firm focuses on generally have little or no sales acumen. As a result, this technical and engineering talent generally does a poor job in selling themselves during interviews. This includes both: a) not taking into account the needs of the hiring company (their customer during the interview) or b) talking in terms of benefits of their accomplishments to the hiring company.
Interviewing Guide To Million Dollar Interviews Evolved Over Time
Initially, our recruitment team only used The Real Benefit Exercise℠ (i.e. the information from the study of top salesmen) to individually counsel our top R&D (research and development), scientific, engineering, technical, IT (information technology) and manufacturing candidates. Though the principles really helped each candidate, we were limited to teaching this interview preparation tool on an individual basis.
A few years ago, I decided to create a video from the principles of our interview preparation tool so that we could help a wider range of job candidates. The first offering was a DVD.
Recently, we recently redesigned this video into an online, e-learning tool that can now help a wider range of candidates anywhere in the world. For more details, visit The Real Benefit Exercise℠ home page.
Success Story: Case Study How The Real Benefit Exercise Helped
In next week’s installment, I will detail how The Real Benefit Exercise℠ helped one of my job candidates land a job with one of my top clients over ten years ago. This was when we only offered the system one on one. He has since gone on to repeatedly use the principles our interview preparation system to land many other jobs since. He has also used the new, online version and found it to be a lot more robust and easier to adopt than the earlier version I taught him ten years ago!
