By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
EP 3138 Being great at your daily job doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t know how to play the interview game. Most people walk into the room blind to the actual rules and sabotage their own chances before the first handshake by falling for early salary traps and giving robotic, canned answers. This episode breaks down the exact mistakes costing you offers and gives you the hard-hitting frameworks to prove your value, put the hiring manager at ease, and get the money you deserve.
This is No BS Job Search Advice Radio, Episode 3,138. On this show, I’ll be talking about several ways you may be shooting yourself in the foot. Okay, let’s just start with this right here, because this one sentence, it’s everything.
You can be an absolute genius at what you do, a total rock star, but if you don’t get good at the completely separate skill of interviewing, well, you’re never even going to get the chance to prove it. So many candidates end up sabotaging themselves without having a clue. So this explainer is all about teaching you the skills you need to win the job search game.
We’re going to kick things off with that fundamental problem, then we’ll dive into some huge money mistakes people make right at the start. After that, we’ll talk about controlling the conversation, how to provide undeniable proof of your value, and we’ll wrap it all up with a total mindset shift about the person sitting across the table from you. Alright, so section one, the two skill problem.
Look, to win any game, you have to know what game you’re playing. And that’s what this is all about, breaking down the fundamental challenge that every single job seeker is up against, whether they realize it or not. Here’s the core issue, right? Being amazing at your job has almost nothing to do with being amazing at interviewing for it.
The interview is a performance. It’s a game with its own unique set of rules. And if you don’t know those rules, you’re basically walking onto the field with a massive disadvantage from the get go.
Okay, let’s move on to our second big point, early game money mistakes. This is all about how to protect your negotiating power. Let’s take into one of the first and honestly, one of the most expensive mistakes you can make.
And it usually happens right in that initial phone screen. You know the question, it always comes up early. So what are your salary expectations? Answering that directly is a total trap.
The second you give a number, you’ve just set the absolute ceiling on what you can possibly earn. You’ve lost pretty much all your leverage before you’ve even had a real chance to show them what you’re worth. The fix is to completely flip the script on them.
So the key is to turn that question right back around. You ask them for their budgeted range. Now if they really push you to go first, do not give your personal number.
Instead, you offer up a researched market range. You can frame it something like this. You know, based on my research for a role with these kinds of responsibilities, the market rate seems to fall somewhere in the X to Y range.
I’m really confident that if we both agree this is a great fit, we’ll be able to land on a number that’s fair for everyone. All right, section three. This is a big one, controlling the conversation.
The goal here is to be proactive, not just reactive. Once you pass that initial screen, you have to master the art of the conversation itself. Remember, this is not an interrogation.
It’s a dialogue that you need to help guide. Let’s start with a really common mistake. Using those generic scripted answers you find on some top 10 interview questions website.
Come on, interviewers can smell a canned answer a mile away. So what’s the fix? I call it the best friend test. Just imagine explaining your answer to your best friend.
That’s your real authentic core answer. Then you just polish it up a little bit for a professional setting. Now, when you’re giving those awesome authentic answers, you have got to be mindful of the clock.
Seriously, people’s attention spans are short. You’ve basically got about 60 to 75 seconds to make your point before their mind just starts to wander. So you want to aim for concise and impactful.
And here’s a crucial little vocal cue. You have to signal the end of your answer. Don’t just trail off and create this awkward silence.
Instead, you end your sentence with a clear downward inflection in your voice. It just sounds final and confident. It’s a tiny little change that makes a huge difference in the flow of the conversation.
But okay, beyond how you finish your answers, let’s talk about how you can guide them. The single best way to control the conversation is to be proactive. Don’t just sit back and wait for questions.
You guide them to your strengths. For instance, when they hit you with that classic, tell me about yourself, you use this magic phrase to bridge your past directly to what they need right now. So now that you’re guiding the conversation to all the right topics, you have to deliver the goods.
It is just not enough to say you’re good at something. You have to provide cold, hard, undeniable proof. Look, saying I’m a hard worker or I’m a great team player is completely useless.
It’s a generality. And generalities are forgotten the second you say them. What you need to do instead is use specific quantities.
We’re talking percentages, dollar amounts, numbers of things. And you tell compelling stories. Specificity is what sticks in their brain.
It’s what makes you memorable. In a really simple, powerful way to structure these stories is the SOAR framework. You just describe the situation, the objectives you were aiming for, the actions you took, and this is the most important part, the results.
You have to live in the R section. What was the actual, tangible impact of what you did? But, you know, what about when they ask you about something negative, like why you were laid off or about a bad boss? For that, you use the ABC tool. First, A, analyze why they’re asking.
It’s usually a test of your emotional intelligence. B is for brevity. Keep the negative part of your story under 40 seconds.
And C is for circle. You surround that little negative fact with a bunch of positive learnings or outcomes. But listen, frameworks like SOAR and ABC are only going to work if you practice them the right way.
And just thinking through the answers in your head, that does not count. You have to see them out loud. Better yet, record yourself on video.
Then, you have to actually watch it back. You’ll immediately spot any weird, distracting habits, and you can check if your energy level is where it needs to be. And finally, let’s talk about the interviewer’s secret fear.
Understanding this, well, it requires a complete mindset shift about who you’re really talking to in that room. Because spoiler alert, it is not just about you. You probably walk in thinking all the pressure is on you to perform, but the reality is the interviewer is often just as nervous, if not more so.
And why is that? Because hiring managers are, as it’s put here, institutionally scared. They are terrified of making a bad hire. And here’s why they’re so scared.
A bad hire is an absolute disaster. It’s expensive. It’s painful.
It costs the company a fortune in lost productivity, recruiting costs, training time. You name it. But even more than that, it makes the hiring manager look terrible to their own boss.
They have a lot of skin in this game. So if you take one thing away from this whole thing, let it be this. Your most important job in an interview isn’t just to answer questions.
It’s to make the interviewer feel safe. Your job is to give them the evidence, the stories, and the confidence to prove that hiring you is the smartest, safest, lowest risk decision they could possibly make. That is how you win the game.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers
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He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3100 episodes.
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