Page 50 - Oscar Adler - Sell Yourself in Any Interview_ Use Proven Sales Techniques to Land Your Dream Job (2008)

SELL YOURSELF IN ANY INTERVIEW

CALL ATTENTION TO YOUR
FEATURES AND BENEFITS

Before you send out a single résumé, you need to know who
you are and what you have to offer. What are your features
and benefits?
During a job search, you may interview with more than one
person within a company: the human resources representative,
a potential coworker, the immediate supervisor for the job in
question, as well as that supervisor’s boss. The features of your
work experience, skills, and background will not change dur-
ing these separate interviews, but each of these individuals
will have different needs and therefore will respond to different
benefits. It is your task to determine those needs and address
them with an appropriate benefit. You must learn to think, act,
and talk in terms of what is important to the interviewer.
This means that you need to practice your own set of fea-
tures and benefits so that they flow smoothly during an inter-
view. You should review every aspect of your résumé, your
skills and experience, and develop a variety of benefits for
each one. Don’t feel that you have to memorize your answers.
This will make you seem stilted and uncomfortable. It is more
a matter of becoming so familiar with everything you have
to offer that you can choose the benefit to suit the needs of
the interviewer.
You may ask, “How do I know what is important to the
interviewer?”
The first step is awareness. Let’s take a simple test about
interviewers’ needs—see Exhibit 2-7. Stop now and check
the needs that you believe may be important to a potential
interviewer.
If you checked all the boxes in Exhibit 2-7, then you have
a new awareness that every interviewer has basic needs that

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