EG #13: Verbal Vomiting
Don't fill yourself up with words & spin around before interviewing.
Reframe
Less is more.
Have you ever been in an interview where you ask 1 question and then the person talks for what seems like 10 minutes straight, no breaks for breath, all monotone?
Bueller?
Half of the time they are not responding to the question you asked.
So you politely wait, rephrase the question and hope it doesn’t happen again.
As a tech recruiter with 15 years of experience, I’ve talked with thousands of people about their jobs. I’ve heard a range of ways people talk about their skills & experience. Noticing the patterns of who gets hired and who doesn’t. This helps me separate what will work for my clients and what will not. Saving everyone time.
The most common mistake I hear people make when explaining their work is verbally vomiting everything they’ve done instead of allowing for conversation. I’ve never gotten feedback from a manager that they are not moving forward with more interviews because the person was too concise.
I’ve heard plenty of instances where the person got too wordy. The worst part? They think the interview went well because it took up X amount of time. Then I hear from the manager that they couldn’t get a word in edgewise. They failed to engage the manager in discussion.
When I first started recruiting, I thought the time it took for an interview was a signal for how it went. Then I found out it was simply noise.
I get it.
As a person applying for jobs, you want to showcase everything you know. You’ve done a lot and it’s hard to distill down to a few points.
Filtering & specificity go a long way.
What does that look like?
Pick 1 thing you’re most proud of accomplishing recently at work. Frame it like this:
What was happening before you started?
What did you specifically do?
How is it working now? Who did it help?
That first part of the interview is usually spent trying to understand your workflow and comparing it to theirs. Seeing if you have an apples to apples or apples to oranges comparison. If it takes too long to figure out, you’re not moving to round 2.
Make it easy for the manager to say yes.
Talk about what the manager is looking to accomplish. What have they tried so far? Have you done anything similar? Have you read about anything new recently that would be useful to hear?
Remember why you are communicating.
You are communicating to be heard, understood, and repeated.
The manager you speak with first will need to tell someone else why you are right for the job.
Don’t create an extra clean up project with verbal vomiting. You may be the best person for the job, but if no one can explain why, you will not get that job.
Keep it concise and repeatable.
Speak to the work you are most proud of so you have a natural positive energy & glow about you when communicating, instead of the monotone grade school class presentation vibe everyone tunes out with eyes glazed over.
Interview with the intent of learning & solving problems, instead of showing off what you know.
Notice how the conversation changes.
NYC
Went to see the Alex Katz: Gathering exhibit at the Guggenheim. I wasn’t familiar with his work before going. He’s known for large scale images of friends & family.
Usually, you see a couple selected works of an artist during a specific period of time that is organized with other artists of that particular style, region, or time period.
There’s also a blurb written by someone else about what the work means. In this exhibit, there was a nice mix of the artist’s own words along with the usual outside framing of his works as a whole.
Katz had the entire inside of the spiral rotunda to exhibit his work, spanning his 70+ year career.
Influences. Methods. Focuses. All changing but staying the same simultaneously.
He attempts to capture moments, movement, sound, light and people. Painting without letting the paint dry. Showing movement in still moments. Taking context of the environment away in some cases and hyper focusing on it in others.
These works in particular stood out to me.
Check it out virtually here
Running
One of the most common errors, even for experienced runners, is starting a run too fast.
This is especially common for a long run of over 6 miles. The pace I run at every day when training is around 8’30”/mile. When I go out for a long run it’s around 9’10”/mile.
It’s easy to start off too fast.
It feels normal.
For this week’s long run at 16 miles, I listened to Frank Sinatra radio instead of the Red Hot Chili Peppers radio. It felt relaxing. The melodic crooning put me in a peaceful frame of mind to focus on the good things happening on the run.
The more you relax, the faster you go.
As physical as running is, it is also mental. When you start putting more miles in, you realize how much the body is directed by the mind. The first time I trained for a marathon, my legs started feeling like concrete bricks around 15 miles. When I felt the slightest sensation of this, my mind automatically went to a dark place of not finishing the run. I thought that if I stopped, it meant the run was over. I failed. I needed to not only get the job done but get the job done in the “right” way without exception.
I had to run straight through without stopping, keep my form perfect, sip water at the right time, monitor my watch, focus harder and do everything technically right for it to be a successful run.
Then I saw my husband not care at all if he stopped for any reason. He’d be trying to tell me jokes during training while I struggled to get my breath in rhythm. I hated how inadequate it made me feel. Making my legs feel even heavier.
Then I learned from it. Little by little, I started to relax more. I let go of the BS.
Looking back, I created artificial mental barriers on what success should look like to stop my own progress.
Once I spotted it here, it became easier to see in other areas of life too.
Then I got a coach & community for my recruiting business to see what else is possible and check what stale thoughts I’d been holding onto.
This resulted in a tripling of business in 2022.
As we head into the Holiday season and the New Year, it’s a great time to reflect on what success looks like to you and what you think is possible.
Sometimes, all we’re lacking is imagination.
Let’s keep moving.
Jen