Interview Tips From Sarah Palin

By John Heaney on February 9, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Featured, Interviewing, The Search, Video

Sarah Palin was photographed this week glancing at the palm of her hand while engaged in a tv interview. A closeup of her hand revealed that she had written three phrases on the palm of her hand:

• Energy
• Tax cuts
• Lift American spirits

While some in the media mocked her reliance on crib notes to help her formulate her interview responses, her idea was actually a good one that served as a convenient and reliable reminder of the main points she wanted to make with each answer.

I’ve written before of the importance for job seekers to focus on communicating three main attributes during their job interview. Three things that define who you are, how you work and illustrate the value you bring to an organization. It doesn’t matter what those three things are, as long as they’re authentic, demonstrable and desirable.

For a salesperson, those three things might be: networking, self-directed production and strategic business development. For a software project manager, they could be: organization, project management and team leadership. It doesn’t matter what your three things are, but what matters is that you craft every single response so that one of your three traits is reinforced.

Too many job seekers ramble through their interviews without focus or clarity. The interviewer is left to sort through a random collection of jumbled responses and attempt to divine the candidate’s strengths. Left to their own devices, they’ll make the easy choice and hire the individual who clearly communicated their strengths.

My advice: take a page out of Palin’s playbook and write down the three attributes about yourself that you will focus on with every response. You don’t have to write it on your hand, but have them handy on a notecard or in a readily available note on your Blackberry. Just have them written down and memorized so you stay on message with every answer.