Insights
to Supercharge your career
Give yourself the edge
Make sure you stand out from the crowd and tip the odds in your favour
If 50 people apply for your dream job, how will you stand out from the crowd? What can you do well before the interview to make a good impression?
The good news is, there are a few things you can do.
Make contact with the recruiter, meet them if you can. Find out what is important to them, what their values are and what keeps them awake a night. If you know someone else working there, quiz them too. If you can arrange a site visit, that is a great investment of time.
Use these opportunities to influence and inspire. View them as the interview before the interview and make a great impression. If you manage to meet face to face, treat it with respect and think about what you’ll wear and ensure you are punctual.
Influence & inspire
Whatever you can do to influence & inspire before the interview is highly valuable.
Impressions
Leave a good impression - listen well, make notes and ask great questions.
Victory in vulnerability
Do you have any faults, any areas to improve and any gaps to address?!
If you have answered ‘no’ to that question, you are either lying or have never asked the right people the right questions! All of us have areas to improve, but very often we haven’t taken time to consider them or asked those that know us best for feedback. Asking for feedback makes us feel very vulnerable but is the gateway to rich information that we can use to set us on our way to victory. Find some trusted, honest people and ask them:
- What's my greatest strength?
- When am I at my best?
- When did I perfom well?
- What's my blindspot?
- What would be 'even better if'?
- What do I need to work on?
Edison never failed
Viewing 'failure' as feedback is a vital shift in mindset
Thomas Edison was an American innovator, inventing many things including the light bulb, the phonograph and the camera. A vital factor in his success was how overcame things going wrong. Edison once said “I have not failed 10,000 times – I have successfully found 10,00 ways that will not work”.
‘Failure’ is feedback and plays a significant role in helping us continually improve and grow. Let ‘failure’ shape and mould you, we learn the best lessons from when things don’t go to plan.
Forwards or backwards?
'Failure' should drive us forward, not drag us back.
Valuable lessons
We learn our best lessons from when things don't go to plan.
Write it down
Supercharge your goals by writing them down.
To really supercharge your career and give yourself the best chance of progressing and developing, you will need to identify some goals. These need to be realistic but create a stretch. Too tricky will demotivate you and too easy won’t stretch you.
Successful people write their goals down. There has been lots of studies on this, with some stating that people with written goals are over 40% more likely to achieve them, compared to those that don’t. There are other benefits too:
- It focuses you
- Increases accountability
- Improves motivation
- Engages the brain
- Easier to track
- Helps prioritise
Every mile brings you closer...
What does success look like?
When you apply for a job and are called for interview, what does success look like? At this point, you have experienced an element of success by simply being invited for an interview…so far so good. But what about the interview itself – what does success look like?
This might sound like a silly question. You make the effort to complete an application, you carefully consider how you demonstrate that you meet the essential criteria and you spend hours swatting up ready for the grilling. But is getting the job the only measure of success? In other words, if you weren’t successful, is that a failure?
I think it is really important how we frame interviews and their outcomes. I have supported lots of people who have applied for multiple jobs over a significant period of time and either not been called for interview or the interview didn’t go well. Others have gone for interview and been ‘pipped at the post’ by an individual ‘stepping down’ from a higher banded role. In these examples, it would be too narrow thinking to consider the only worthy success as being offered the job.
I read a great quote recently posted by ‘The Running Week’ on Facebook that said this:
“Not every run will be your best, but every run makes you better…even the hardest runs serve a purpose…But every mile…brings you one step closer to your goals”
This is it! You want the new job and the promotion but success is bigger than that. Success is feeling as confident as ever, as you enter the room. Success is knowing that you have prepared thoroughly and left nothing to chance. Success is walking out of the room knowing that you gave it everything and managed what was in your control. Success is progress, when compared to the time before. Reframe your thinking!
Being offered the job is the ultimate success but don’t overlook the other successes on your way. Each interview brings you one step closer to your dream job.