Chapter 1

The Necessary Basics

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

—Marcel Proust

If you’re reading this book, you’ve taken a major step to becoming one of the elite few who’ll have a unique level of understanding about the interview process. Through my experience as a top-level recruiter, I can offer an insider view that isn’t available to guidance counselors or career coaches. There is no book on the market, no system other than this one, that actually offers insight into the minds of hiring managers from leading companies and gives you strategies to make those insights work for you.

Insider Secret #1:

Self-sabotage is more destructive than any external factor. And it’s more common than you might think.

Most career coaches have never spent time inside an actual corporation as a recruiter. As such, most of their information is outdated and learned from external sources rather than direct internal experience. The advice most colleges and career placement agencies offer is similar to what they offered fifteen years ago. In other words, it’s not current, either. These colleges and career places mean well and do their best. Often, though, they can’t give you more than the basics.

If you’ve been interviewing for some time without results, you may be battling feelings of discouragement. If you haven’t yet dipped a toe in those waters but are contemplating a change of position or career, you may be anticipating the interview process with some degree of fear. Either one of these states can sabotage your success by undermining your confidence. If you follow the prescribed plan in this book, you’ll begin to learn how to manage your emotional states and look within to conquer fear and doubt. You’ll also discover that by practicing the methods in this book, you’ll alleviate your fears and actually become energized and excited at the prospect of an interview, rather than fearful.

However, when you don’t visualize success and practice enough to feel confident walking into the interview, you’ve sabotaged yourself before you’ve even begun.

Defiance, the Subtle Sabotage

You need to be willing to do a thorough job of interview preparation and show up as your best. If you’re arrogant, defiant, or feel you can take shortcuts with the process in this book, then you fall into a group of people who often sabotage their own success. Subtle defiance is when part of you feels like doing less than necessary to succeed.

Some people employ subtle defiance because they don’t like to be told what to do. Others do it because they’re afraid of failure, so they create it in order to feel in control. Some people do it because they’re afraid of their own success.

Usually, subtle defiance is unconscious. Showing up late, going out drinking the night before a big interview, not keeping agreements, and not practicing are ways to guarantee failure and help keep you in your safe zone. But your dream job and the interview process that gets you there are all about stepping outside that safe zone.

I once interviewed a recent Harvard graduate for a sales technology role. He was late for three interviews and wore knit booties and sloppy clothes to all of them. Each time he showed up he was more unshaven and his hair was greasier than the time before. He actually smelled of body odor. Amazingly, he’d actually won some technology contests at school, which is perhaps where he got his overblown sense of self-importance. The hiring manager commented to me that he had never interviewed someone who was so ill-prepared. I had the feeling that this young man arrogantly thought he was going to be the next Bill Gates. More power to him. He may have been hired elsewhere, but his attitude cost him a six-figure job at our firm.

Cracking the Code: Getting Inside the Mind of the Interviewer

Hiring managers have unconscious questions they need to have answered by each candidate. These unconscious questions fall into different categories: results and achievement; process, creativity, or working style; relationships; aggressiveness and energy; and likeability. Here’s the interesting part: most managers aren’t even aware they’re doing this! They’ve prepared questions to ask you during the interview, but often the things they really want to know are a secret even from themselves.

Unfortunately, most managers also receive very little interview training. Often they’ve been given the wrong diagnostic tools or questions to really determine if a candidate is a good fit for the job opening. Sometimes they’ve been given no tools whatsoever.

Here are a few of the types you’re likely to meet in the course of your job search:

The Power Tripper: Disorganized and Uninformed

These managers are extra hard on candidates to prove their own intellectual prowess. They want to demonstrate their brilliance by stumping the person they’re interviewing. Some make it an intellectual game to beat down candidates, or make them completely uncomfortable to see how they react. In sales, it is important to know how a candidate will react under pressure from customers. Unfortunately, unfair management interview practices sometimes take this tactic too far or apply it to positions for which it has little relevance. If you stay on the path I’m going to lay out for you, you’ll be able to keep calm and stay focused even in the face of such an onslaught.

The Defensive Croucher: Motivated by Fear

Mediocre managers can be threatened by people they fear could do their jobs better. By applying the methods in this book, you actually control how managers see and feel about you, to dissolve their fears and reduce the chance they’ll see you as a threat. They’ll feel confident in you when you follow the proper steps in sequence and keep returning to those steps after answering each of their questions.

The Method Man: Relying on the Latest Interviewing Trend

In an effort to organize the interview process and identify strong candidates, some companies have adopted practices that involve looking for candidates to respond in a specific manner to specific questions. One popular example is known by the acronym STAR: Situation, Task, Action, and Result. For example, “I needed information for a trade show (Situation), so I had to do this (Task). The Action I took was this, and here was the Result.” Managers who use this type of script and others like it feel that they’re getting concrete examples rather than mile-high answers. Once again, if you’re following the methods in this book, you should be able to answer a lot of those questions before they arise.

The Rogue Agent: Following a Secret Agenda

Many managers who haven’t had specific interview training also do what I call “rogue” interviewing. This is where they base the interview on untested logic or idiosyncratic factors. These managers are the most dangerous kind because they bring judgments into interviews that are unfounded, unrelated, or copied from someone they deem knowledgeable. Some managers will look down on people who attended a certain school or certain type of school, grew up in a certain town, even practice a certain hobby, like golf or violin. They may have had one bad experience with someone from a certain background then generalized that experience to all people with that background. They also may have heard a generalization such as “Golfers aren’t tenacious; they’re more relaxed,” or, “Runners aren’t playing a team-oriented sport, so they’re lone wolves.” I’ve seen senior vice presidents ask a candidate if he was a “beer and Porsche guy or a Bentley and Champagne guy.” I knew a CEO who believed you weren’t working hard enough if you had time to play golf. Never mind that leisure activities are necessary for a healthy, balanced life, his attitude ignores the fact that many deals are cut on the golf course. With these managers especially, if you are not directing the interview, they’ll grasp on to anything to make a judgment. They’re often doing the best they can and may be great people; however, they want to feel safe that they’ve made a knowledgeable decision and will often attach to unproven logic to accomplish that.

If you allow this type of manager to direct the interview, you open the door for the hiring manager to fall back on faulty logic in determining your worthiness. You can’t control someone else’s unconscious prejudices, but you can be so persuasive, impressive, and confident that those illogical biases are swept aside.

Because of this and many other factors, candidates need a plan that works in rough going. This plan must differentiate you, build rapport, connect with a manager’s unconscious mind-set, and address problem areas before that manager goes on the offensive with questions designed to disqualify you.

What if you could answer all of the hiring manager’s unspoken, unconscious questions without them knowing you were doing it? You’d be doing them a huge favor. If you could cover all their critical areas through statements you offered unprompted and respond to the occasional questions with appropriate answers, you’d have 90 percent of the interview won.

How do you do that? With an eight-step plan that goes by the acronym REAPRICH.

This is more than a road map; it’s a science. No matter where you are in your career, this science applies to you. The proactive strategy of REAPRICH has become the foundation for the most successful candidates interviewing today (some of whom will be competing with you for the same positions). It’s a formula for becoming an enlightened, advanced, strategic, and proactive candidate. Employing REAPRICH will enable you to acquire the monetary gains, intrinsic rewards, personal growth, and ultimate satisfaction that comes from having your best career. This book is designed to help you get yourself that career.

Testing and Validation of REAPRICH

If scientific proof is achieved when results are both measurable and repeatable, then REAPRICH qualifies as the proven science of interviewing. I’ve tested it on C-Level executives (the highest-ranking corporate chiefs) as well as salespeople, engineers, sports medicine therapists, medical professionals, life science researchers, financial services workers, and many others. This includes vice presidents and senior vice presidents from all major industries and people of all ages, demographics, and cultures, whether they’re skilled experts or interviewing for their first jobs right out of school. They’ve graduated from Harvard, MIT, the University of Massachusetts, Johns Hopkins, Salem State College, and many prestigious universities and vocational schools across the country.

These diverse professionals all have one thing in common: they worked to assimilate the lessons in this book, applied them to their own experience, and used them to win career-defining interviews.

Earlier, I said that REAPRICH would get you 90 percent of the way to the winner’s circle. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about that other 10 percent: avoiding commonsense mistakes that can sink even the most qualified candidate.

The Necessary Basics Worksheet

1. On a separate piece of paper, write down three times in which you self-sabotaged your own efforts. Sometimes the mere act of identifying your own past habits can help you identify and prevent them in the future.