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How to Show Up as the Ideal Candidate in an Interview, with Janine Esbrand.

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If you head into an interview scared you might say the wrong thing, you might come off as less than confident. How do you overcome the fear of not saying what the interviewer wants to hear? Find Your Dream Job guest Janine Esbrand suggests evaluating your past experiences to reveal exactly what you have to offer. Once you know the value you bring to the table, Janine says it’s as easy as having a few examples of specific experiences where you solved the same type of problem the company is facing. 

About Our Guest:

Janine Esbrand is a career strategist, an executive coach, and the host of the Career Change Maker Podcast.

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 470:

How to Show Up as the Ideal Candidate in an Interview, with Janine Esbrand.

Airdate: October 2, 2024

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

You walk into the interview with high hopes.

But as you talk, you feel it’s not going well.

And later you learn someone else got the offer.

What could you have done differently?

Janine Esbrand is here to talk about how to show up as the ideal candidate in an interview.

She’s a career strategist, an executive coach, and the host of the Career Change Maker Podcast.

Janine joins us from the city of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

Well, let’s get started, Janine. Why don’t many candidates stand out in a job interview? What happens?

Janine Esbrand:

Well, I will say that, for a lot of people, when they are preparing for interviews, they are overly concerned with saying the right thing rather than positioning themselves, their expertise, and their previous experience as the experience that the employer is looking for.

Mac Prichard:

What do people think is the right thing? What impressions do they have that they think are to make them stand out but aren’t actually doing that?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, I think people will think about common interview questions and then try and come up with what answers are going to be good. A classic example is if you’re asked, “What are your weaknesses?” Then, someone can say, “Well, my weakness is that I’m a perfectionist.” And try to make a weakness seem like a strength.

I think sometimes people fall into things that they’ve heard in the past or what they’ve Googled, or what they think they should be saying, rather than looking at their experience and saying, “What is it that this role requires? What are they wanting in a candidate? What impact are they looking to make? And how can I demonstrate that from what I have specifically done?”

I think people don’t do that enough.

Mac Prichard:

Why do candidates do these things, Janine, go back to these answers that aren’t serving them well?

Janine Esbrand:

I think people aren’t really thinking about the bigger picture when it comes to a role. Whenever there is an open vacancy, there is a specific reason why a company is hiring for that vacancy. There’s a reason why they want to fill it or expand their company with this new role. I think people aren’t thinking about the commercials. They’re just looking at the job pick at hand and saying, “Okay. They’re looking for this candidate. Here’s the things on the job spec. I need to try to speak to those things.”

If you have a bigger awareness of the reason why the role is required, it’s easier for you to tailor your expertise and demonstrate how your expertise is going to help them to meet their bigger commercial goals. I don’t think enough people pay that attention.

Mac Prichard:

What stops people from having that awareness? Why don’t they have that mindset when walking into the interview room?

Janine Esbrand:

I think it’s because when you’re working in your role on the day-to-day basis, you are very much focused on the work that you do, the task that has been put before you, what your manager has asked you to do, and often people are in busy roles, in busy organizations, so they’re just wanting to get their heads down, do the job, and tick their tasks off the list.

They’re not in the habit of thinking about, “Where does this flow? What is the point in me doing what I’m doing? Why are they asking me for this?” Because people aren’t used to doing that in their day-to-day roles, they’re not used to doing that when it comes to positioning themselves for their next opportunity.

Mac Prichard:

Let’s talk about how to show up as the ideal candidate in an interview and be memorable. You’ve got seven steps that you recommend applicants follow when going to a job interview, I’d like to walk through each one.

The first one on your list, Janine, is to come to the interview with examples of what you’ve done for past employers. How does this help you show up as the ideal candidate?

Janine Esbrand:

What people often will do is speak in generic terms about what it is that they do. So they might say I organized this event, or I managed this team, or I did…fill in the blank, but they don’t give specific examples, so what they end up doing is telling the employer what they can do rather than showing them what they can do.

If you can bring a real-world example and an example that highlights the types of things you would be doing in this role, you’re showing them what you’ve actually been able to do in the past, including the results that you’ve been able to achieve, so it’s easier for them to see that, “Oh, if we hire this person, they’re going to come in and be able to hit the ground running with the types of tasks that we need them to be able to do.

Mac Prichard:

What’s the best way to find and prepare those examples before you walk into the interview room?

Janine Esbrand:

The key is to be looking at the job spec and be looking at what it is that they’re asking for this role. What are the requirements? Then, take the time to reflect on examples of when you’ve done that in the past. It could be in this current role, it could be in previous roles. When have you done something similar, and even if you haven’t done exactly the same thing, it’s when have you gotten a similar result? And highlight those examples ahead of time.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific. Number two on your list of ways to show up as the ideal candidate in a job interview is to understand why the job is open and how it fits into the organization and its needs. You touched on this a moment ago, tell us more about this. Why does this matter to an interviewer, Janine?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, because if you make it easy for the interviewer to see how you’re going to add value from day one, you will position yourself as a candidate that’s different from the rest. If you understand why the role is open, so if it’s the case that someone has left and they’ve left very quickly and they need to fill this role because the company is working towards a big target or launching a new product, they are going to be looking for someone who can hit the ground running.

If you know that, you’re able to make sure that when you’re speaking about your experience, you’re giving them examples of when you’ve been efficient and when you’ve shown initiative, and when you’ve been impactful from the get-go.

You’re understanding of why the role is required means that you can speak to the fact that you’re going to be able to come in and help them achieve their goals much easier.

Mac Prichard:

How do you research this before the interview? What have you seen work with the clients that you help to understand why the role is open? What kinds of research methods have helped?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, so it depends on how the role comes about. Say, if I were a recruiter, you can ask the question, “Why is this vacancy open?” Or, “When did it come about? What’s the reason that it came about?”

You can speak to people who already work at the company and find out a bit about what their current strategic objectives are and what are some key things that have happened within the organization recently. You can also leverage LinkedIn and other social media platforms, mainly LinkedIn, to do your research about the company and pay attention to the updates. What updates have they been sharing about what the company is doing?

If it’s a company that’s in a season of growth and they’ve just advertised that they have had an investment round, then you know that they are going to be growing their teams, and so this role may be open because they’re expanding. You’ve got to do a bit of detective work with this, but it’s possible for you to really be paying attention to what the company is doing that’s probably leading them to hire right now.

Mac Prichard:

Some candidates might only see a job posting online and they haven’t had a conversation with the recruiter. They don’t have any contacts inside the company, and they could do some online research, but would you recommend that they also try to speak to someone inside the organization, even if they don’t have contacts there? What’s the best way to do that?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, even if you don’t have contacts there already, you can still reach out to people. LinkedIn is going to be your friend with this, and it makes it so easy for you to look up a company, look up their employees, you can look up the different people that are in roles, perhaps in the team that you’re going to move into or the department that you’re targeting. You can reach out to people. You can ask them for a few minutes of their time just to have a conversation about their experience working with the organization.

With this, it’s really a numbers game. There are some people who may not respond to you, but there are plenty of people who are willing and open to have discussions, and so if you frame it as, “I just want 5-10 minutes of your time to have a conversation.” You’ll get people who will be willing to speak to you.

Mac Prichard:

Well, terrific.

Let’s take a break, Janine.

Stay with us. When we come back, Janine Esbrand will continue to share her advice on how to show up as the ideal candidate in an interview.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Janine Esbrand.

She’s a career strategist, an executive coach, and the host of the Career Change Maker Podcast.

She joins us from the city of Surrey in the United Kingdom.

Now, Janine, before the break, we were talking about how to show up as the ideal candidate in an interview, and you’ve got seven recommendations for how to do this. We talked about the first two in the first segment.

Let’s talk about number three on your list for how to show up as the ideal candidate. Your suggestion here is to be clear about your career highlights. What do you mean by this, Janine?

Janine Esbrand:

What I mean by this is, what are the things that you’ve done in your career that really help you stand out? What are the things that you’ve done that are talking points? So often when I work with clients, when we’re doing this type of work, and we’re trying to uncover what their experience is, people will always overlook interesting things, to the point where I have to say, “Hold on, wait, you said what? You did what? With who? When?”

Those are the things that, if they’re making me stop and say, “Hold on, can you rewind?” That’s the impact that it will have on an interviewer, and we’re talking about showing up and being memorable. Showing up and being memorable is about highlighting the things that actually make you different, highlighting the things that not everybody who’s applying for this type of role will have, so you need to make sure that you’re really thinking about, what are some of my career highlights so that I make sure I let them know what I want them to know about me by the time I leave the interview.

Mac Prichard:

What’s your best advice for how to pick the best career highlights? Especially if you’re mid-career or further along, you might have a long list. How do you narrow it down?

Janine Esbrand:

I recommend narrowing it down to three, and I would say, first of all, just brainstorm them all out. What are the things you’re most proud of when it comes to your career? Then, think about which of these would be most relevant or helpful, or impactful for this particular role.

Which of these would be the most impressive, and then pick that way, so that you’re really thinking about the role that you’re applying for and then saying, “If I were an interviewer, what would I want to know that would make me think, ‘Yes, we want to learn more about this candidate.’” And then pick those ones.

Mac Prichard:

The fourth item on your list of seven steps that you can take to show up as an ideal candidate in an interview is to know how to speak the employer’s language. How do you do this, Janine, and why does it help you in the interview room?

Janine Esbrand:

It helps because you want them to be thinking, “This person gets it.” And when we’re thinking about any organization, the goal of an organization is to make money.

Even if it’s not for profit, there’s a goal, and so if you’re thinking in terms of, what is the organization trying to do in order to increase revenue, to reduce risk, to make more impact, those are their priorities. If you go into the interview and you’re really speaking about results that you’ve gotten and how those results link to what is important to the employer, then they know that you’re an employee that they’re going to trust to come in and actually do work that’s going to make an impact.

Mac Prichard:

What’s the best way to get clear about an employer’s priorities before you go into the interview?

Janine Esbrand:

Well, depending on the size of the company, if it’s a big company, you may be able to find out from their website, have they got a recent presentation that they’ve done for investors, have they got some updates in terms of what their strategic objectives are? You want to be focused on what they’re really working on right now.

Their website is probably the first place to go with that, but then again, if you’ve had conversations with people, then in those conversations, ask specific questions about what is the company’s priority right now. What are they focused on in this quarter, for this half year, or for this year? That’s going to give you a clue as to where you’re going to want to be focusing when you’re discussing your expertise and the results that you’ve been able to help other companies achieve.

Mac Prichard:

Another way you say you can show up as the ideal candidate in an interview is to understand and address unspoken objections. How do you figure out what concerns an employer might have about you?

Janine Esbrand:

Well, often, you kind of have them yourself. If you’re feeling a lack of confidence around going for a role because perhaps you feel like you don’t hit all of the requirements, speak to it. If you feel like there’s something that’s missing, rather than just hoping that they’re not worried about that, you can just mention, “You know, I don’t have specific experience in here. However, I do have experience with this, and this is going to help me to help you.” I think instead of just ignoring things that you know they might be concerned about, talk about it.

Mac Prichard:

Are there ways you should talk about the possible doubts that can both hurt or help you? In other words, should you try to be positive? What have you seen work or backfire when candidates try to address unspoken objections?

Janine Esbrand:

I think that you want to be positive about it. I think that if you can weave it into how you’re answering the questions, so if they ask you for a particular type of experience and you don’t have it, rather than saying, “I don’t have an example of that,” you can say, “Whilst I haven’t specifically done that thing, I have done this, which is either similar or which demonstrates that I do have the ability to achieve this particular outcome.” Then you’re speaking to it, but you’re not speaking to it to the point where you’re just stopping at the point that you’re lacking that particular skill set.

Mac Prichard:

What should you do, Janine, if you leave the interview room and you ran out of time or perhaps there was a doubt that was hinted at that you didn’t address? Should you take action after the interview?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, absolutely. I think what can make a candidate stand out is really what they do in the follow-up to an interview, so you can go away and you can always send a follow-up email to the interviewer. Just say, “Hey, I had a great conversation today. I’m just reflecting on a particular question that was asked. There was one thing that I didn’t manage to mention and that I wanted to share with you.” And you can send that in a follow-up email that’s coupled with a thank you for their time.

Mac Prichard:

Your sixth recommendation for showing up as the ideal candidate is to research the interviewer in advance. What kind of research do you recommend?

Janine Esbrand:

I would say look the person up and understand who they are within the organization and where they sit. I really like using LinkedIn, the activity feature on LinkedIn. If you go into somebody’s profile and they are an active member of LinkedIn, you can go to the activity section of that profile and see what that person has been liking, what they’ve been posting, what they’ve been doing recently in their professional life that they’ve been sharing.

That can sometimes give you a real flavor for the person. It might tell you that they recently went to a conference or they recently won an award. Those are good things to know that you can potentially bring up in conversation to show that you’ve done your research.

Mac Prichard:

Aside from referencing what you might have found online about someone, are there other ways you can apply that research in the interview room to stand out?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, I think if you’re finding out things that the company has done recently, or maybe there’s a particular initiative that has been run, you can frame your questions using what you’ve found. If you’re interested in extracurricular activities or charitable things that the company is getting involved with, you can say, “I noticed from my research that you got involved in this particular thing recently. Is this something that you typically do regularly? Is this something that someone in my position would be able to get involved in?”

It’s you looking for ways that you can really demonstrate that you’ve done your research, framing it in a question is always a good way to go with that.

Mac Prichard:

One more question about this: sometimes you might be invited to an interview but not told who you’ll be talking with. What’s the best way to find out the identities of your interviewers, because there might be more than one?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, there could be. I think that if you want to be proactive about it, you can ask. Whoever it is that you are liaising with, who’s setting up the interview, you can ask the question, “Who will I be interviewed by?” I don’t think there’s any problem with asking that question. It shows that you are being proactive and you are really thinking about how you’re going to position yourself in the interview.

I would recommend asking whoever you’ve been liaising with.

Mac Prichard:

Your final tip for showing up as the ideal candidate in an interview is to make yourself memorable. How do you do this, Janine?

Janine Esbrand:

Show a bit of your personality. At the end of the day, once you’re hired and you have to do the role, you’re going to be working with people, and people like people, or they don’t like people. Really think about the human element. When we are trying to remember someone, we’ll often relate that person to a particular fact that we know about them, so why not share that?

I had a client not that long ago, who used to be a professional international hockey player, and she mentioned it on a coaching call and I said, “That is something that you want to make sure that you’re sharing.” Because when they have all of the candidates out, and they’re discussing the candidates, you want to be the one that they say, “Remember the girl who was the international hockey player?”

You want something that makes you stand out, and it doesn’t have to be work-related. It can have to do with your hobbies, it could have to do with your interests. See how you can weave that into the conversation so that they don’t just forget you when they’re thinking about all of the different candidates that they’ve seen in a day.

Mac Prichard:

Well, it’s been a terrific conversation, Janine. Now, tell us, what’s next for you?

Janine Esbrand:

Yeah, for me, I’m involved in lots of projects at the moment. One of the things that I’m most excited about is my recent email series that I’ve started, and I’ve been sending regular emails out to my community that are action-packed in terms of telling them what they need to be doing to make moves in their careers and give them strategic advice and tips and strategies that they can implement so that they can set themselves up to make the next best move in their careers. That’s really exciting at the moment.

Mac Prichard:

Well, terrific. I know we’ll include the link to that series in the show notes and that listeners can learn more about it by going to careerchangemakers.com/preparetopivot.

I know also that listeners can learn about your podcast by going to careerchangemakers.com/career-change.podcast and that you invite listeners to connect with you on LinkedIn.

Now, Janine, given all of the great advice that you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want a listener to remember about how to show up as the ideal candidate in an interview?

Janine Esbrand:

The one thing that I want listeners to remember or to know is that before you can sell you to somebody else, you have to sell you to yourself. Taking the time to really think about, what is the experience that I have, what is the expertise I already have, and how can I make it relevant to the person that’s interviewing me so that I can make them see that I will add value. That’s where you want to spend most of your time when you’re preparing, and that’s what’s going to move the needle for you.

Mac Prichard:

Next week, our guest will be Leigha May.

She’s a career coach for high-achieving professionals.

Leigha helps you earn more money, get promoted, and manage job transitions.

Looking for work takes time and energy.

And along the way there’ll be highs and lows.

Join us next Wednesday when Leigha May and I talk about how to avoid job search fatigue.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.