Transcription
Within the process of finding three jobs that overlapped perfectly, I had to do and being graced with a healthy dose of the ‘tism. (Rizz em with the tizm) and even asked to conduct interviews at one of my jobs. And the result of this was a tome of knowledge that didn't just make me. It made me what I like to call an. And when this blueprint was applied, I was able to get. And I wasn't even insanely qualified for these jobs, but I was still getting offers from around a third of the interviews that I was doing. Had a lot of people ask for the specific breakdown, how I go about interviewing, but we'll split it into three parts. Pre-Interview, during interview, and post interview.
Starting with the most important part. The part that people mess up the most. Pre-Interview. Now, this is the part that most people brush off. They try to do quickly. And we will spend a majority of the video here. And basically, before the interview, we want to prepare so that we can answer all the questions that come with us without skipping a beat, but then also be able to throw questions at them that make it look like since we were a wee lad, and all of this takes less than an hour.
Now, a common tactic that interviewers will use to weed out the unserious candidates is ask them pretty basic questions about the company. I know that when I was interviewing for Merrill, one of the questions that they had me ask people was literally, "People would beef this question completely. Be a deer in headlights. You could immediately tell that." And then they would stumble through a non-answer. Now, level with me for a second. You've gone through all the time of applying to jobs, which is a painful process. Then you finally land an interview, but then you won't put in a little bit of time to give yourself a leg up.
Now, I think of this as the equivalent of a runner. Let's say you're an elite miler. You've been training for months for the big track meet and the day of, you've got shiny new shoes with a doctor, soles, inserts. You've got your little toupee. Whatever thing you got. Nipple tape. You have everything. And in the beginning, you're off to personal best. But then on that last lap, you decide to walk or even take a nap. That's the equivalent of not doing this prep before an interview.
Now, did I go through all that just to say nipple tape in a YouTube video? Maybe. For every interview, this is what I prepare. Company research. First thing that I care about is the origin story. Meaning, when was it founded? By whom and what were their initial products and who are their customers? And more importantly, who are their competitors? And the competitors is actually a big one that we'll use for creating questions later. And we can find most of this by going to the company website. Now, most of the time, they're big, bulky, and useless. So if there's not much there, then you can always go to their Wikipedia page where it will be structured pretty nicely, and you can dig up most of these things.
Now, when we're talking about their initial products or their current products, it's great to go on to the wonderful platform of YouTube. Do they have any product walkthroughs? Can you actually download their product and go through and use it? So take a few minutes, but it gives you a huge leg up, because I can guarantee you that very few people will actually do this. And we can go through and write all of this ourselves, or we can take all of this, copy and paste it into one long document, every single thing that you can find about the company, and then just whack it into Uncle ChatGPT and use this prompt to pass through it and pull out the relevant pieces of information. Absolute gold mines are earnings. It's a public company. We want to look at social media, obviously. Now, most of the time, it will just be boring and filled with nonsense. But sometimes you can find a specific employee, maybe at the C-level, who's posting actual useful things like product updates, or future product releases. Because if you can reference either what they're doing currently or what they're going to do in the future in an interview, that's complete gold. And another great place to look is Glassdoor, or an equivalent website like Blind. And basically, sometimes actually you can get the specific interview questions that they will ask, or you can get a general feel of what people are asking about, maybe what they like, what they're complaining about, and then use that to craft specific questions for the interview.
Now, again, the point of this document is we're going to do our background research, and then we're molding it into something that we will have on our screen during the interview. Basically, what we want to create is a company cheat sheet where we have some background, we have where they are, where they're going, and then most importantly, we have questions. Now, we want all of this to be bullet points, not long paragraphs. Because again, this is going to be up on our screen while we're interviewing. So we need to be able to parse through it quickly.
Okay. Now we're into the most important part. The questions. And this will both prepare us for the questions that are asked, but then also the questions we're going to be asked. Because, you know, at the end of every single interview, they will play a trap card, some form of, "Do you have any questions?" And if you say no, actually, you answer them all. We're all good. You're going to get rejected immediately. Good luck living in that hole. Instead, we want to play our spell card. As any good Boy Scout would know, we want to come prepared. Now, I never actually played Yu-Gi-Oh, for reference. I'm not a nerd, but did I play Magic The Gathering and win a local tournament? Who knows? All I know is that we're going to craft some great questions from the research that we did. For instance, from the origin story, we can ask questions like, "I read that your company started at X before pivoting to Y. How does that original DNA still show up in the company?" Or, "I saw that your core product is aimed at segment. Are you seeing any demand shift towards different segment? Which customer group for specific product do you think has the most untapped potential?" Honestly, they probably won't have any answers to these, but they make you look like an insider.
From our brief competitor research, we can come up with questions like, "I noticed competitor recently launched new feature. How does your team differentiate from that?" Or, "What do you think competitor gets wrong and we do differently?" Or from the recent news, product launches, or earnings, we can ask questions like, "I saw you guys had a new product launch, feature update, whatever. Congrats. How is that going and will that have any effect on my role in the following six to 12 months?" Or, "What is the biggest surprise since rolling send feature out?" Or, "On the last earnings call, executive mentioned metric. Does this affect how your team is doing work at all?" Again, the point of all these questions is to make us go from sounding like tourists to sounding like an insider.
And when we're doing our prep, we need to make sure that we're not forgetting about the interviewer. Because when we're getting a meeting invite for that interview, it usually comes with the email of our interviewer. Now, if it doesn't, don't fret. You can always ask the hiring manager or whoever you are in contact with to give you the info of the interviewer. This isn't the case if you ask your friend for their sister's number. They have no reason to safeguard it and will almost always tell you. It shows initiative, like you're trying to get ahead and that you actually care. Now, I'm sure you know how to internet stalk people. Basically, we're going to do a fat Google search and then see if they have any social videos. Do you have any blogs, site businesses, anything that we can use to ask them a question about? Because people's favorite topic is them. So even if we can throw one question that specifically targets them, we'll increase our chances. And again, here are some threads. And they're not super polished because they will have to be for that specific person. This is just to get the brain cooking. So you move from previous company to here. What made you make that jump? Or how does the culture compare? Or I noticed that you post about topic on LinkedIn. How do you see that playing out at your work here? Or you can even address it being kind of weird up front. "I know this sounds a little weird, but I did a little research about you and found out that we both like something." A good rule of thumb is that everyone is interesting if you look hard enough.
So now we have a taste of the company's background and crafted some specifically targeted questions that we will ask. Now, later in the video, I'll go through my template questions that I ask in almost every single interview. But we can still fall flat on our face when they're asking us questions, so we need to protect ourselves. If you've attended any interviews in your life, you know that you will be asked the same questions over and over and over again. It's kind of similar to when you meet someone for the first time and they'll ask you, "What do you do? Where are you from? How was your weekend?" Not too long ago, I would have preferred being waterboarded over an onslaught of questions about my day, because I thought that they were shallow and pointless until I realized that's the exact point. That really small talk has one goal, and that is to be the connective tissue between shallow and deep conversation. And the reason that conversation with close friends is more interesting is because we skip over the small talk and jump right into deep conversations, because the connective tissue is already there through your years of knowing each other. So me being undermined, I would give one-word answers to all of these questions, and then I would be surprised that the conversation never graduated into a deeper level.
In this relates because the best interviews are just conversations. Say that again for emphasis. The best interviews are just conversations. And my favorite conversational hack for a little autistic gremlin like myself was found in a book, The Fine Art of Small Talk. And it's simple. Instead of making up bad answers on the spot, these one-word answers that I was giving. If we know that there's a high percentage chance that we will be asked these questions, then we can craft more engaging answers to them ahead of time. For instance, instead of saying, "I have a boring 9-to-5" when people ask what I do, instead I change my answer to, "A boring corporate job, but shrunk my workload down to two hours. And now I use that free time to pursue other interests." And the best part of this is that we can have it lead to obvious follow-ups. "What interests? How did you do that?" Or even, "What's the corporate job?" And basically, all of these are things that I want to talk about, so I can use my answer to both get them to ask questions and make it about things that I'm interested in. See, that's what I never understood. Was it small talk is combing the surface, looking for mutual interest, and then we can go deeper on. And if we find ourselves cranking out about small talk, it's usually not them. The fault is normally on us. And generally, in interviews, there are five or so questions that we know we will be asked. So let's craft some engaging answers that invite follow-up into something we're interested in.
So the most common question that we will be asked, "Tell me about yourself" or "Walk me through resume." Both of them have a similar answer. And instead of just repeating exactly what's on our resume, instead we want to craft a narrative. Give them a story that they want to listen to. We're just reading off a resume that's basically the equivalent of creating a PowerPoint with a ton of text, and then just reading directly off it. Nobody will pay attention but be bored out of their mind. And again, it won't offer follow-up questions. So for this answer, I would always say something about how I grew up in New Jersey under the shadow of Genius Twin, which initially made me resent school. Until halfway through school, I was on a walk with a friend and had a stark realization that I was dumb, but more importantly, that I could also change it. So I noticed that a common thread among smart people was reading. So I started to read voraciously, yada yada yada yada, basically giving them something interesting, telling them more about myself, and offering very obvious jump-off points for follow-up questions. And basically, if you give them an answer that doesn't lead to a follow-up question about your answer, like meaning they just go on to the next question in their interview, that means that you need to come up with a different answer because then you're not having a conversation.
Another common question is, "Why here? Why do you want to work at this job?" And I really wish you could just say to make money, but obviously that's not going to work. So this is where we'll lean on our company research. What about the company specifically interests you? Basically, this is one of those stupid questions. Is he if you even did your research? For me, I would always come up with a hyper-specific answer about how I came across this job specifically. For instance, Fisker, the electric automotive company, had maybe one of the best interviews in my life, and I talked about how I was on a walk. I saw some solar panels and realized that I actually didn't understand how solar panels work. So I went home, researched them, and then came across Fisker Car because they had solar panels on the roof, and I'm a car guy. So I looked deeper into them and noticed that they were hiring for a job that was basically the same thing that I was doing at Merrill Lynch, which is way more interesting than the common answer that they will get.
The next common question is, "Why you?" Basically, what makes you unique? This is your elevator pitch. You want a single, memorable idea that ties together your answer and shows how you provide value. If you can add in a story on top of that. My my central idea always for this question was, "I'm a bridge." Basically, that product roles live in the gap between business and tech, and that I was the bridge that connected the two of them. Because I've started many businesses and studied finance while also studying computer science and being well-versed in technology, so I can speak both and get them both to play nice and pair that with being easy to work with. And I don't just connect departments, I make collaboration painless. Bam! Who wouldn't want to hire that guy? Basically, what is your USP (unique selling proposition)? Take some time and really craft it. Everyone has one. And usually, if you want to be really tactical, you can tell from the job description what specifically they really value and then tailor your answer for that specifically. For instance, if I saw that they value writing, then I would say something like, "I am a product guy who writes like a marketer, but things like develop."
The next common question: "What are your strengths and weaknesses?" Don't be the guy that paints your weaknesses as strengths. That's tired. Interviewer will smell right through that. And this is basically a question where they just want to find something interesting about you. And instead of just listing them out, we want to make sure that we're showing them, not telling them, for each one. So we're providing examples and a little bit of color into each one of those. And for the weaknesses, if we can provide some proof points to show how we've recognized it, and we're maybe trying to turn it into a strength, that can be a good way to go about it, instead of just painting the weaknesses at strengths like, "I'm a perfectionist." In the description, I have some answers to some more common questions like these, but we can literally write out the answers to these questions. But obviously, we can't be reading off of a script in the interview, so we want to practice saying them out loud and then reduce those answers down into a few bullet points so that when we're asked a question, we can control F in our document, take a second, think, "That's a good question," read our bullet points, and then we know what the flow of our answer is. Generally speaking, people can tell if you're reading off a script. It's going to be stilted, it's not going to go well, and your brain will do this funny trick where if you mess up a word or you're going in the wrong direction, it will completely freeze and then you're screwed.
That's enough prep. Have a cheat sheet. What about the actual interview? So almost all interviews nowadays will be conducted over the internet, and a lot of people overlook how they're appearing on camera. And I'm not just talking about what you're wearing. Who's looking good on camera really comes down to one thing: lighting. So here's a quick crash course for looking good on camera. So if you don't have an external light, we can use the sunlight. Find a window. Natural light is perfect, and we want to position ourselves to where we are either directly in front of it or at a 45-degree angle. Now, generally speaking, don't record right up against a wall. If we want to get that beautiful blurry background, we need some depth. So if you are in a small room, you can actually record from the corners because that will give you the longest line of sight instead of recording in the middle where it's shorter. Now, generally speaking, the camera that you're going to use on your computer, it's pretty bad. So if you can get an external camera, either there's one laying around the house or you get a webcam, that's completely worth it.
Now, your background is important. You want something that people can comment on immediately. For instance, having a book tower or some interesting posters, sports equipment, whatever it is, just don't have a blank wall. And in the background, we want to have an accent light. For instance, you can see the difference if I turn off these lights, and how much more boring we. See? Look at that way. Different. Way worse. Accent lighting is big. And on my interviews, I was using basically a professional setup. I was using $3,000 camera, two external lights, and since these are both Philips Hue lights, I was changing the colors to make it very interesting. And one big issue was it actually looked too professional. I found that actually using the professional camera, but then toning down the background and making it look like I didn't actually put that much effort into it was much better. For instance, I would hide the mic, I'd remove the backdrop so you could see the doors. There's a concept in fashion called "sprezzatura," which is basically the art of studied carelessness, meaning if you can make something look effortless, you spend hours carefully designing your outfit, tweaking it so that it sits just perfectly. But when you go outside, it looks like you just threw it on in a second. Have you really want to be professional with the lighting? You can use either a 2 or 3-point lighting setup where you have one large light source, which can be the sunlight shining at you at a 45-degree angle, with then a second light source on the other side to fill in the shadows. For instance, if I get rid of this one, you can see there's more shadows. And then if I was to turn off the main source, this is what it looks like without the main source. And then this is what it looks like without the other one, completely dark. We would turn on just the main one. This is what it looks like. Looks pretty good, but there's a very harsh shadow on the left side, so that's why I have another light just to fill it in. And then I also have a light above me to separate myself from the shadow. But that's completely unnecessary.
Okay, so let's assume now that we look great on camera. But one thing that people mess up is eye contact. And in an online interview, eye contact is made with the lens. So a lot of people go through the interview and they're looking at either themself or the interviewer, which means that they're never actually making eye contact. And you can tell. For instance, I'm looking at myself right now, and it just feels a little bit weird. You can't actually connect in the same way. So this is going to be strange, but you're going to need to one, turn off your own video feed so you're not tempted to look at yourself, and then two, only talk directly to the camera, not them on screen. And what I like to do is sometimes I find it hard to just listen to people without being able to read their lips. So I'll make the screen as small as possible and move them up so that they're right below the camera so I can look at them and have it still look like I'm staring at the camera. This is kind of the equivalent to where if you look at someone's forehead, it looks like you're making eye contact with them.
So during the interview, we know that there are a number of questions we're not going to be able to prepare for. So these are typically known as deep behavioral questions. So let me walk through a framework that I use to crush these questions. One commonly taught method for interviewing is the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Which is fine, but honestly, it's kind of boring. Instead, just tell them a story. Drop them right into the moment. For instance, a common one is, "Tell me about a time when you had to step up as part of the team." And the key for all of these behavioral questions is take a second. Pause. This will feel like an eternity for you, but for them, they won't even notice it. And they would much prefer that you took 10 seconds to think of and craft a good answer, then you're starting to verbal diarrhea all over them.
So let's answer that question. "It's 4:45 on a Monday. I'm about to log off when I get a Skype message from my team lead. 'Hey Wilson, do you want to join our Innovation Day team?' Now, I said yes because this is not someone that I wanted to disappoint. Now, normally I wouldn't do these things. It's too many people and it's too loud. And little did I know what I was getting myself into." Innovation Day was a yearly competition where internal teams would form and then present ideas for products and services that the bank could use in the future, and these ideas would be presented in front of the entire organization, about 7,000 people. Following day, I joined the team meeting, and it became readily apparent that they had done nothing outside of just a one-liner for what their ideas were. At the end of the meeting, they asked me to present it now. Yada yada yada. That story continues on, but imagine if you're the interviewer in that situation. You want to know what happens next. No, I just pulled you into my world. And the main thing that I did was presenting the stakes. If something goes wrong, what is being risked? In my case, I was about to present an unfinished presentation to 7,000 people.
A few helpful storytelling notes: One, every story needs change. A good story needs to capture a single moment of change. Actually, it doesn't matter how small the change is, and even sometimes the smaller, the better because they're more relatable. You can tell one story, doesn't have any change because they're boring to listen to. These are these are travel stories. I went to a place, did a thing. Drinking stories, and these are basically anecdotes. So on how we turn it from an anecdote into a story is by just identifying that moment of change. And a great way to actually craft the stories is to work backwards. Start at that moment of change where you're presenting it to a large crowd of people, and then just work backwards. Take the opposite. And that's the start of the story. Generally speaking, we want to skip the back story, meaning we want to drop them right into the moment that it's happening. We don't need to tell them a lengthy back story. This is equivalent of a movie starting off with like four minutes of narration where you realized that they could cut all of that and then just show them exactly what's happening and have us piece together a little bit ourselves. One good thing to always keep in mind is not to use "and" instead. If we just change every time we say "and" to "but" or "therefore," can hear you thinking. Go to a lot of people about this, they'll immediately come back, "We'll send, I don't have any stories." And that's completely not true. It usually just means that you are comparing your stories to other people's more grandiose versions, when actually the best stories are just little tiny moments of change. You have a tiny realization, and you'll notice that once you start to think about the stories that you have, write them out, and speak them, that suddenly they'll start to bubble up out of everywhere. And even a poorly told story in an interview is far better than someone just bumbling through a non-answer. And I say that because I truly believe that storytelling is one of the most important skills that you can learn. Besides, writing in interviews is a tremendous place to practice this. Every single question they ask can be formed into a story.
Now, at the end of the interview, again, we have to ask questions, and we have that list of company-specific questions. But I also have a basic template for questions that I will ask almost every single time, and some of them being finely tuned to figure out if a job will work for over-employment or not. So here they are. "Can you walk me through a typical day on the job?" And if they don't mention meetings, you can always ask specifics of what the meeting culture looks like. And my second question is about the onboarding process, where I'll ask something like, "What does the onboarding process look like? And will I have a mentor?" And this one is great because we're having them picture us in the role and makes it seem like we're really serious. Third one, this is sometimes answered on the typical day, but, "What departments will I be working with?" Next up, I love this question. Is, "The biggest pain point that I will be solving at this job is incredibly important." This will end up being your core workload, and you can use it to identify if something is outside your scope or inside. And then another good one to get them to picture you in their role is the team structure. So something like, "I'm curious how the team that I would be working on looks like. How big is the team? What are the different roles, meaning like how many developers, how many QA, or whatever?" Six. This is a great one. "What would success look like in this role in the first 90 days, and how is it measured?" To maybe, maybe actually my favorite question in the whole thing. Another good one. "Typical career path. What is the typical career path in this role look like?" "Biggest challenges? What do you think the biggest challenges that I could face in this role are going to be?" "If you could change one thing about how the team works, what would it be?" And this is very similar to the pain point one. And finally, "Current projects. What are some current projects that the team is working on?"
And if you have giant cojones and you want to ask a question that could potentially save the entire interview, it's done it for me at least two times. You can ask the following question. "Just curious, was there anything that I said or there was in my resume that makes you think that I'm not fit for this role?" Now, every time I've asked this question, interviewers are impressed. It shows that you really want it, and it gives you a chance to clear up any misconceptions that there might be. Then always end, no matter what, with, "What are the next steps?" This gives you a clear idea of what is coming, maybe what you need to prepare for, and gives you firepower for the email that you're going to send after.
Because now we're into the post-interview. And after your interview is simple. Send a follow-up email within 24 hours from the time I mentioned the role, and sometimes even I mention the time of the meeting, just so that it's crystal clear about who I was. And then you can even highlight a specific point from the conversation to show that you were engaged. Then we can say that we're looking forward to that next step in the interview. And then finally, after we send that email, keep applying. Don't let the momentum slow. Even if you think that you crushed the interview, only when you have a job offer in hand that we're going to accept, are you going to stop applying? And hopefully, if you apply everything in this interviewing video, you'll have one soon. Thanks for watching.