Establish Your Value Propostion When Interviewing

During my 23 years of helping people with career management and transition issues, I consistently see candidates interviewing for jobs go into the "sell and tell" mode far too quickly before they have established their value proposition to the potential employer. Like one would do going into a transactional sale, job seekers all too often want to represent the features and advantages of their experience versus their actual benefits to the employer. They almost literally tell everything about themselves chapter and verse when the interviewer wants only to identify the applicable details that relate to why the job is available; in other words "their pain". So what is the correct approach to demonstrate your value proposition?

First, let's clarify the differences between a feature, advantage and benefit. A Feature is an attribute that is nice to have but are not necessarily critical to the problem, challenge or opportunity a company faces. Just like the many features on a DVD camera, some are critical, some are nice to have, and some are of no use at all. An Advantage is a feature that on occasion may prove to be helpful. A Benefit however, is an attribute that meets an explicit need expressed by the buyer; in this case the hiring manager. So the question becomes "how do I identify the explicit needs a manager may have"; and "how do I then communicate my value proposition as I begin to uncover them"?

I'll suggest a simple four step process that some of you in sales may already be familiar with called S.P.I.N Selling. The S.P.I.N. selling technique was the brainchild of Neil Rackham who authored a book of the same name in 1988 after surveying 35,000 sales calls and analyzing what techniques were most effective. Basically S.P.I.N. is a line of solution based questions that uncovers explicit pain and the solutions required to address the pain. The questions are comprised of:

Situation Questions: deal with the facts about the buyers existing situation.

Problem Questions: ask about the buyer's pain and focus the buyer on this pain while clarifying the problem, before asking implication questions. These give Implied Needs. Problem questions should also include exploring challenges and opportunities facing your buyer.

Implication Questions: discuss the effects of the problem, before talking about solutions, and develop the seriousness of the problem to increase the buyer's motivation to change.

Need-Payoff Questions: get the buyer to tell you about their Explicit Needs and the benefits your solutions offer, rather than forcing you to explain the benefits to the buyer. Getting the buyer to state the benefits has greater impact while sounding a lot less pushy. What these questions do is probe for explicit needs. These are often called "what if" questions.

Basically the fours stages during an interview or sales call are The Opening Stage, The Investigating Stage, The Demonstrating Capability Stage and The Obtaining Commitment Stage. The Opening sets it all up and is very critical. During The Opening Stage one should build relationship by building credibility as well as likability. Smiling and engaging in peasantries is fine, but soon transition the conversation by asking for permission to ask questions throughout the interview so you can be free to ask your S.P.I.N. questions. You often times can demonstrate your value proposition by asking good intellectual questions than by offering pithy stories or statements about yourself that do not relate to the pain being experienced by the buyer or hiring manager.

As an exercise create a Problem scenario that a company may have where you, and your experience and skills are the solution. Develop a line of S.P.I.N questions that flow on top of one another down to the point where you ask Need/Payoff questions followed by discussing possible solutions that emanate from your knowledge and experiences. Try this out on someone else that is willing to help you.

Successfully mastering this simple technique will help you build your value proposition and insure you are right for the job and the job is right for you. I can address structuring these questions in a future posting if readers would find it helpful. Happy Hunting!