Challenges and Solutions
March 10th, 2010
How many people do you suppose go into an interview with solutions to the challenges that your prospective company is facing? Or the challenges that the person conducting the interview is facing? Now having solutions would presuppose that one also knows what those challenges are. Yet imagine, how powerful the interview presentation would be if one knew the challenges and had the solutions going into an interview. What kind of leg up would that give you?
Knowing what the challenges are.
Well, we have talked before about the virtues of applying for a job through the help wanted or online postings versus jobs identified through networking and research. Well, that discussion is not relevant here. Because regardless of which avenue you took to get the interview, you have gotten the interview. Congratulations. Now a whole new phase of work begins. Once an interview is set, you need to go into research overdrive, but you knew that, right?
During this research, you need to do a business analysis. As best as you can, you are going look at the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For the interview preparation, you are going to really focus on the last two. The opportunities and threats that the organization, or department, is facing.
As for the strengths and weaknesses, that knowledge will be helpful but during an interview, it seems to me that hitting on strengths would be gratuitous and spending time going over an organization’s weaknesses self-defeating.
Understanding the opportunities and the threats, though, can demonstrate that you are forward thinking and a solutions-based individual. And that is what you want.
So, what is your solution?
Here is what the interviewer is going to love hearing. Your solutions. But not some pie in the sky imaginings. You must have a solid and reasonab Read the rest of this entry »
