Your Career: How To Conduct A Pain Interview With Your Hiring Manager…You May have to Ask Several Pain-Related Questions. Even Very Competent & Astute Managers Don’t Always have a Clear View of What’s Working Well & What isn’t. You Will be a Consultant to your Hiring Manager, Even Before you Get a Job! Practice Pain Interviewing & ee if you don’t find what other Job-Seekers have Found: That it’s More Interesting, more Intellectually Stimulating, More Fun & More Likely to Lead to a Job Offer to Talk about Pain & Solutions Than to Stick to the Interview Script!

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Pain Interviewing begins when you shift your hiring executive’s focus from the standard interview script to the actual business matters he or she is responsible for.

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We call it Pain Interviewing because in the same way that a Pain Letter deals with the real Business Pain behind the job ad, a Pain Interview digs into what isn’t working right now in your hiring manager’s world. That’s the meat of the matter.

Who cares what kind of soup you would be if you were a can of soup, or what you think your greatest weaknesses are or what you had for breakfast? An interview is a business meeting, so let’s talk about business!

 

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You can help your hiring manager get off the interview script and begin the Pain Interviewing process.

You’ll do it by answering one of your hiring manager’s questions, often the question “Tell me about yourself!” with a short answer and then ‘spinning the table’ to ask a question of your own.

Here’s a script to illustrate the Spin the Table processand get your hiring manager off the interview script into a human conversation about real business issues.

Once you begin to get off the script and talk about the Business Pain behind the job ad, you’ll find that the conversation gets easier and more interesting. All you can do when you’re being asked traditional interview questions is sit and answer them.

You are not an active participant in the interview process as long as you’re answering questions like a person taking an oral exam or a citizenship test.

You have to get off the script to get to the heart of what’s going on in the organization you’re thinking about joining.

Here are some Business Pain questions you can ask your hiring manager at your job interview. When you ask these questions and talk about your hiring executive’s business obstacles, you’ll be in a Pain Interview!

You have to start with a Pain Hypothesis that you formulated long before the interview, maybe a week or two ago. You researched the organization. You read your hiring manager’s LinkedIn LNKD -1.38% profile from top to bottom. You thought about the question “If I were this manager, what would be keeping me up at night?”

Is it customer service hold times, or the fact that the company has no social media strategy from what you can tell? Is it problems with financing for new product development? You know a lot about your industry and your function. Let’s put that learning to use!

Here’s how you’ll advance a Pain Hypothesis to get the Pain Interview party started!

MANAGER: So, how long have you been using Excel?

YOU: Oh, about five years I guess – I love Excel. I’m a spreadsheet geek, for sure. Listen, can I ask you a quick question about the job?

MANAGER: Sure! (He’s bored with the dumb scripted interview questions, too.) 

YOU: Fantastic. I’m wondering about your product roadmap. You launched the edible nail-polish line about 18 month ago, right?

MANAGER: Give or take.

YOU: And it looks like it’s doing well, but it’s more of a novelty than your other products. I see it in the novelty gift stores at the mall, rather than chocolate shops.

MANAGER: Yeah, that product didn’t really work in chocolate shops.

YOU: But it was a big seller when it launched. I’m curious what your product roadmap looks like now, and how you’re feeling about the new product release schedule for 2015.

MANAGER: That’s an insightful question. It’s one of the reasons I’m hiring a Number Two here in Marketing. I have my plate full. We need to keep coming out with new products.

YOU: What would your ideal release schedule look like?

Now you are talking about something real. You’re talking about what’s working and what isn’t. You are way too polite and professional to point out that when you asked your manager about the schedule for new product releases this year, you didn’t get an answer. That’s good! You love to hear about Business Pain. Business Pain is your favorite topic, because you can solve your hiring manager’s pain.

You can’t ask your hiring manager “What isn’t working here?” You have to advance a Pain Hypothesis and let him or her react to it.

You may have to ask several pain-related questions. Even very competent and astute managers don’t always have a clear view of what’s working well and what isn’t. You will be a consultant to your hiring manager, even before you get a job!

Practice Pain Interviewing and see if you don’t find what other job-seekers have found: that it’s more interesting, more intellectually stimulating, more fun and more likely to lead to a job offer to talk about pain and solutions than to stick to the interview script!

Forbes.com | March 6, 2015  |  Liz Ryan 



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