Plan your first impression

- This is an audio course, thank you for listening. - Well, I want to hear all about your brilliance when it comes to helping folks with interviews. - I still do coaching on other career issues. But, I think I started out focusing more so on career change, and bigger sort of a career issues. Trying to figure out the next chapter of your career, and I still help people with that. But I found that along with that, a lot of people their biggest challenge was once they figured out what they wanted to do next, okay, how do I get someone to give me that job? And most people are not naturally good at interviewing. And even if they're not terrible, they could be better. And they tend to get nervous. It's a nerve wrecking experience. It's hard I think to look at yourselves objectively sometimes and think about, what do I want to emphasize? What do I want to bring out about myself for this particular opportunity? An interview is kind of a different interaction than anything else we do. And I guess, normal life. So people sometimes have a hard training, or it's just not something that they're comfortable with. But with a little bit of training, a little bit of coaching, you can see people make a huge difference. And getting good at interviewing is a major life improvement opportunity. You can get a better job. You can get a job that you love more, make a lot more money. There's so many things that you can achieve, if you get good at interviewing. - I'd love to hear that. A couple of the gems that you shared during these coaching sessions that made people say, "Yep that was totally worth it." And so I'll get specific shortly. But for now I'd like to go wide open in terms of those nuggets you share that make people go, wow yes that was the thing. - Yeah, well I think there's a couple things that are recurring themes. I think most people are terrible at the whole, "Tell me about yourself." Because it's just an awkward hugely open ended question. And it's so easy to get off on a tangent or to stumble. So that's one I've seen make a huge difference. Just spending a little bit of time together, Thinking about, okay, how do I want to open this interview? You know you're opening in an interview. And almost always that first question is something along those lines. Sort of open-ended, tell me about yourself, walk me through your resume. And so I find just making improvements to that. And how you open. Because it's like how do you position yourself with this person? What's their first real impression of you? What do they focus on? Well, you have some control over that. In terms of what you emphasize and how you describe yourself in that "Tell me about yourself." Now of course you got to cover the key facts on the resume. But there's a lot of different ways that you can do that. So I think that's one of the things. And just being able to give real objective feedback to people about how they're coming across. I think it's very difficult sometimes to know yourself. And often in interviews you don't get real feedback. - Oh right. - You might get a, well we want another way. Or yeah, we really liked you. But you rarely get told, "Hey you could be doing this better and this could be." So I think that's part of it.