Leveraging interview roadmap questions is a critical tool for your professional development arsenal. An interview roadmap focuses your career development on how you are going to fit into the future multi-generational, cross-functional, collaborative and data-driven workforce.
An Interview Roadmap is a set of at least 10 core questions which you bring into any interview. Your 10 interview roadmap questions are all about that company or academic institution (if you are pursuing an academic career track). You are not pitching them on how great or how smart you are. You are telling them what a tremendous contribution you can make to the story of Who They Are and Where They Are Going.
Your 10 core questions are based on continuing, in-depth research about that company or institution and its persona, context, core values and culture. How do those values compare with your own?
My April 25 first article addressed building your initial Interview Roadmap Questions. In this second of my three-part series, I discuss leveraging interview roadmap questions to focus on:
Experiential employment / academic lifecycle value: What quality of organizational or institutional experience will we gain when working with you, training you and teaching you over the course of your tenure?
Evaluate and communicate the value of Employer Experience during your professional tenure.
The recruitment and interview process isn’t a one-and-done experience. In your initial, and subsequent, interviews with a potential employer you have the opportunity to address customer experience: theirs.
Customer experience (CX) describes the nature, quality and value of the interaction of organizations / institutions with their internal customers – employees / students / professors / mentors – and external customers during the duration of their relationship with each other.
The goal of building and leveraging interview roadmap questions is engaging interviewers in a conversation focused on gaining an enhanced depth of mutual understanding. How will you both meet each other’s mutual CX expectations during the course of your tenure?
If you have successfully engaged that employer during your first interview, you are now imagining how you are going to fit into their business and cultural ecosystem.
Leveraging interview roadmap questions anticipates and addresses interviewer skepticism.
The folks interviewing you are skeptical about What’s In It For Them? They are concerned that the company will pour a lot of time, money and resources into employee development and engagement programs. By the time that company recoups their investment in your professional engagement and development, will you still be part of their workforce, regardless of your generation?
Turn the tables on interviewers during your first and subsequent interviews. Anticipate this subject. Focus on leveraging interview roadmap questions on this topic. Enhance mutual customer experience during the interview process.
Familiarize yourself with the following three studies about the future of work. Ponder how your career trajectory is positioned to make significant contributions.
- Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2016. The new organization: Different by design. Are you ready to become part of a network of collaborative teams?
- Gallup State of the American Workplace. Engaged employees and engaged managers are key to productivity and profitability.
- PwC. Millennials at Work: Reshaping the workplace. Consider this: at PwC, 80% of the current workforce is millennial.
Become a whole lot smarter about your value. What type of holistic insights did you glean from reading these reports? Reference – and leverage your insights from – these documents during your interview. Communicate to interviewers that you already are thinking on behalf of their company and their customers.
Leveraging interview roadmap questions creates a customer experience of you.
Engage interviewers. Provide brilliant glimpses of their anticipated experience of working with you inside their workplace. Showcase how you anticipate becoming a valued member of their workforce.
Get a sense of whether this company is receptive to employees who are innovative and creative. Determine whether the interviewers are open to collaboration with you during the interview process. Their behavior and reactions are key indicators of the type of workplace ecosystem you can anticipate working in.
Then evaluate once again. Compare and contrast how that organization’s core values, beliefs, culture, and habits have created your own customer experience about them.
Is this the type of company or academic institution that you will remain committed to engaging and collaborating with during the length of your tenure with them?
Continuously developing and leveraging interview roadmap questions creates a framework and context for evaluating your career. Be honest and truthful about whether you will be in a position to create high –level and valuable customer experience for that employer.
Begin to get a true sense of the value of your employee lifecycle with them. Start to create that company’s customer experience of you. Start by leveraging interview roadmap questions.
Babette Ten Haken is a management consultant, professional development coach, analyst and content creator. She is the Founder and President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC. Babette has one of the most distinctive voices in today’s workforce, professional development and customer success communities. She traverses the interface between human capital strategy for hiring and developing technical and non-technical employees focused on customer success. She catalyzes compelling strategies and processes for cross functional communication and collaboration. She is the author of Do YOU Mean Business?, her playbook of collaboration skills to drive revenue through your organization.
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