Life Lessons in How to Win at Conversational Interviews

Let’s do some mindset work today. 

Imagine yourself going into an interview. You got the hair done, the nails done, a new outfit, and you are looking fire! 🔥

But, not only do you look the part, you have prepared for the interview as well. You went to Google, LinkedIn, blog posts, etc. You have scoured the internet and have prerecorded all your responses to all the questions in your mind and are ready to fire them off. 🤓

You shake everyone’s hands, sit down, and then, all of a sudden, you are no longer in an interview, but, rather, an interrogation. 🤯

Sound familiar?

Well, sis, let me share with you the number one strategy for positioning yourself as an expert in interviews: shifting the conversation from an interrogation to a conversation.

An interview should be a conversation. An interview should be an opportunity for you to position yourself as a problem solver, as someone who understands the company, someone who understands the organization, understands the institution, understands what their most pressing issues are, and understands how to articulate how you can solve that organization's problems.

But too often candidates go into interviews positioning it as an interrogation. We go into the interview and let the interviewer ask us question after question. We are left feeling overwhelmed and frustrated because we didn’t even get the opportunity to ask our questions. 

And then, we walk away from the interview feeling like we bombed. 💣

The interview should be a conversation. The interview should be a dialog between you and the interviewer. Both of you are knowledgeable in your area of expertise, in your industry; and an employer is looking to hire an expert.

The problem with interviews today is that we prepare for them like they will be an interrogation. We sit down and get all our notes out, but we don’t want to look at them too much because we need to make eye contact. We are thinking about how we are sitting, how we are coming across, focusing on not saying “um” too much, right?

But the truth is that focusing on all these things makes us nervous, which in turn makes us frustrated. 😣

And then at the end, the interviewer asks, “Well, what questions do you have for us?” And you're like, “What are the next steps? What's the salary? Is this a team environment?” 

But you're not really asking impactful or thoughtful questions. It is just whatever comes to mind because you don't really know what to ask. And so it becomes a really overwhelming experience.

This is exactly what we will cover in the Mentor Me Accelerator, how to transition your interviews from interrogations to conversations. I teach my mentees how to shift you from, Oh, you're going to ask me a bunch of questions, and I'm going to answer them for you to how can I quantify and articulate that I'm a good fit for this organization?'' 

We will identify the problems of the organization from the job posting and share with the interviewer exactly how you are going to solve those problems. 

You don’t have time to go into an interview, answer all their questions, and then have them offer you some lowball salary that is way less than others in the industry. 🚫

You don’t have time to go into an interview and beg and plead with them to select you for the job, for less money than you deserve. 🙅🏾‍♀️

You should spend your time learning strategies for interviewing, salary negotiation, and articulating your skillset as the expert you know you are. This is exactly what I teach in the Mentor Me Accelerator. 

Schedule a Mentor Moment with me today and I will teach you how to win at conversational interviews.