How To Crush Any Interview

One of the moments in your life where you are absolutely going to want your confidence and your charisma to be on point is when you are sitting in an interview chair. Because when you've arrived there, they've decided that you have what it takes to get this job. But you still have to show the person across from you that you're someone that they like, that they could work with, and that you can communicate the skills that make you a good fit. Which is why in this video, I want to show you exactly how to prep for and crush any interview. That includes answering specific questions like, tell me about yourself. What's your greatest weakness? And tell me about a time when fill in the blank. So we're going to jump right into it. I got a lot to say. The first piece is on mindsets. The number one thing that screws people up when they get in interviews besides having not prepped and you're here, so congratulations for that, is that they just get tongue tied. Their confidence is gone because they're putting so much, much pressure on the situation. And in order to alleviate this, what I recommend you do and that they do, is to zoom out. Imagine yourself at 90 years old. You're looking back at your life. You see the successes, the failures, the happy moments, the sad ones. And I promise you, as you do that and you scan for the most pivotal moments in your life that were hypercritical, you will not see the interview that you have coming up. There's no chance. It's just not going to crack something that absolutely changes the inevitable course of your life. There will be setbacks, jobs you don't get, jobs you do. But this isn't one of the top 10 most important moments of your life. And things won't end if you don't get this job. Now, I tell you that just so you can relax a little bit, so that your confidence can come out when you're actually sitting in that chair and you realize, I would like this job. It's important to me, but the world won't end if I don't get it.

Got it.

Cool. The second piece is now we're going to try to crush it with that. Understood. We still want to do the best job that we can and put our best foot forward. So we need to prep to answer these questions that they're probably going to ask in the most interesting, engaging, fascinating way that shows them you're someone that can handle the job. But there's a zillion questions they could ask. So how do you handle all of that? Complexity. What I recommend doing is this. This is going to be a framework that will enable you to answer any question. Start by going through your professional career and write down the 10 or so most pivotal, interesting moments. And if you're a student, this might mean just going through your teens, up and through college, the moments that made you interested in the industry that you're going into, or some of the times where you demonstrated leadership. Once you've got those next to each thing, one, write a couple of adjectives that might be relevant to the position that you're in. So what does this show about you? So if you are that student and you had a lemonade stand, for instance, when you were little and you're going for a sales position, you might write, this shows that you are eager to sell, comfortable with selling, always had this sort of entrepreneurial spirit. But there might be some things that went wrong in each of these as well, which means include some of the adjectives that, if you wanted to tell the story this way, would highlight perhaps negative aspects of your character. So maybe you were disorganized in handling the money and you hired a bunch of friends you didn't know who had earned what, and they all revolted and the business shut down. Right. So that's the time where you could highlight I am disorganized. If you choose to. When you're done with this, what you will have is a series of 10 or so things that have adjectives next to them. What I want you to do now is go through and pick the three to five most interesting ones, particularly the ones that have adjectives that are going to show that you are a good fit for this job and that have negative adjectives that show that you are self aware but that you're working on those aspects. So if you're disorganized, that you found ways to compensate for that, once you've got those three to five things, these are gonna be what you are driving towards in the interview, and we're gonna turn these into stories. Now, I wanna pause for a second. We're in an interview. A lot of people presume that, what. The most important thing you can do is just tell them why you're qualified. That's your resume. They already have that. They're looking to connect with you.

Right.

I just talked to someone who is a partner at Deloitte who has done tons of interviewing, and he said, by the time they get to me, I'm just looking to see if I like them and if I can work with them, because I know that they have the chops. So this is why stories become so important. If you can tell these in an engaging way, that's going to make them like you. So write down for these three to five things, the setting, the problem, the solution, and then the result. So I'm gonna give you. We're gonna go to that lemonade stand one, but you can use this for any project or whatever it is that you were on. In fact, I'm gonna actually take a real one that I used for my first job, which is I started the ballroom dance club at my college. I'll tell you why later.

Right.

So the setting is that I went abroad and I was interested in salsa dancing and wanted to come back and do more salsa dancing in the United States. The problem was that I went out to find this club and there was no salsa dancing club. I went to start the club, and I couldn't get the funds together or the amount of people interested in order to do it.

Right.

So we got a little bit of drama here. The solution is that while I was researching this and sitting in on meetings or how to start clubs, I heard that there was another student that was interested in ballroom dancing that had more students interested in it and that had a little bit more funding. So I was able to partner up with him. We worked together to find an instructor that would give us a discounted rate in exchange for being able to advertise when he came to our meetings. And we set up these lessons once a week. And the result was that we had, I don't know, 30 to 50 students come out for ballroom dancing where they learned all these different things. This instructor did very well, and it was a fun time.

Right?

That's it. You're doing this for every single story. What this enables you to do is to. For the question, Here we are. Tell me about yourself. These are going to be like skipping rocks, right? If you've got a group of interesting things, you can start talking about yourself and you can just touch momentarily on interesting things about yourself.

Right.

If they want to go deeper. The good news is that you can dive into any one of these in a story mode. That's got a little bit of drama, and that is going to show, because we prepped this, these interesting things about yourself. So my ballroom dancing story might show that I can solve problems. It might show that I know how to work with other people and lead them and that I can think outside the box. Now that we've got this, we can answer just about any question you want to talk about. Your weaknesses, Boom. Go to a story that's got a weakness, talk about it. But the result is going to be something where you find a way to work around it. Same thing with strengths, Same thing with a time that you might have struggled to get something done. You've got a story prepped for that. This kind of background is going to prep you to get to the interview. So do this. And now we're going to talk about interview day. On interview day, put everything that I just talked about away right an hour before the interview. I don't want you thinking or doing any of this. I want you getting into a good mood. The worst thing that you can do is still be preparing your DCF analysis. As you're walking into your investment banking interview, thinking about, what am I going to do? And ignoring the. The receptionist, ignoring the secretary, ignoring the other people who are there in the waiting room. What you don't realize is that in an interview context, it starts as soon as you enter the building. I've seen this multiple times where the interviewer comes out, all the interviewees are gone, and they walk up to the secretary and say, what'd you think? And they'll tell them, oh, that guy was weird. This guy was cool. I really like this girl. Whatever it is, you need to make sure that you are being personable in that moment. Now we have an entire channel on this, but if you're interested in the best material that I have, we have a course on first impressions. And I'm gonna put that in the description below. It's how to make an amazing first impression on anyone. I've talked about it previously, but quite frankly, I think it's perfect for an interview scenario, not to mention the rest of your life. So I'm not gonna harp too much on this. Just know the interview starts immediately. When you do get called into the interview room and you shake hands, you look the person in the eye, you give them a big smile, you sit down. What I want you to do is to open up your body language. So you're not going to sit like this, you're going to sit like this. And you might even turn your wrists out a little bit, take a deep breath, slow things down. And then when they ask you questions, drive them towards the stories that you have prepared that highlight these things about yourself, because that's going to communicate the organic, interesting things about you without saying, I'm a really hard working person who knows how to get the job done. As a creative problem solver that tells me nothing. But when you tell Me the story about the time that you had this project and somebody got in the way and you were able to work with them in order to create a more interesting solution. Now I know those things implicitly and I believe them more importantly. So that's why you want this process to be kind of a storytelling mode. And I, and I recommend one of the things just this is a little thing at the end of Tell me about Yourself. I always threw in something that I thought was personally interesting to me that they might like. So if it was a guy, I might talk about an interest in mma. If it was a woman who I got the sense might be into dancing, I would mention the ballroom dancing club. I would throw in one little personal thing that would give us a chance to connect outside of the purely professional. Sometimes they didn't pick up on it. I was wrong. But sometimes that drove the course of the interview and it's like what they referred back to throughout the rest of the interview. So that can be helpful. Interview goes, you answer your questions, you do your technicals, you get to the end, they say, do you have any questions? There's a ton of fantastic questions you can ask, but I recently did a video on five phrases or six phrases that are incredibly persuasive. And by far the one that people liked the most was this for the interview scenario. My dad actually used it when he was out searching for a new job and he got this job. So the question is this. You say, alright, so let's assume that things went really well today and I do wind up getting this position a year from now. What will I have to have done so that you look back and go, that was an awesome decision and this person was a fantastic analyst. And the reason that this question is so good is because it forces them to think about A hiring you and B, having that been a brilliant decision. Not to mention that you're asking for the metrics, because this is a great question. Generally, how will I know that I've done a good job? So they have to sit there and think about you doing a great job in this position, them thinking about it a year from now. And most employers love this question and it makes them like you a ton. Generally speaking, any question that you are genuinely interested in that gets them associating you with positive feelings is going to work fantastically here. This is just one. So that is it. I highly, highly recommend, if you are still wanting more, that you check out our course on making an amazing first impression. I believe it is truly fantastic for life, but quite frankly, in an interview process, you've got like three, three or four first impressions that you're making right away that are critical to your job success. So if you want to see that, click the link in the description below and check it out today. That's it for this video. I hope you liked it. Hope you guys decide to subscribe. If you want more on interviews, let me know. Otherwise, next week I think I'm going to be getting back potentially to an Avengers video, a Deadpool video, maybe another one on Jordan Peterson. We will see. So let me know in the comments if one of those piques your interest. That's it for this video and I will see you in the next one.