Writing Your Way to a Better Job Interview

We’ve talked a bit in this space about the importance of writing to your career. That’s a major theme of this blog. At the same time, I’m sure most of you know how important a well-written résumé and cover letter can be to your attempts to land a job interview. Few people, though, have considered how valuable writing can be to them in preparing for the interview itself.

Katharine and Dr. Randall S. Hansen have considered it, and they’ve concluded that some pre-interview writing can enhance your performance in a job interview. You can read their article – “Promising Interview-Prep Technique: Composing Written Responses to Interview Questions” – so I won’t rehash it here. (For those academics out there, you can find the study upon which their article is based here.)

What I do want to say is that I think they’re right.

As a writing teacher, I’ve read a number of the studies about “Writing to Learn” that they cite in their research. Moreover, I’ve seen the results in the classroom. Writing – not to produce a polished final product, but to discover what you think and to make connections between ideas – is a powerful learning tool. As such, it is a very useful tool for self-discovery.

As an employer who has conducted a number of interviews and as an employee who has had to interview for a number of jobs, I can say unequivocally that interview preparation is one of the least emphasized aspects of the job search. Let me qualify that.

Some interviewees – usually people who have been through the interview process for multiple jobs – do the requisite research on the company with whom they are interviewing. Most good career and job counselors cover this aspect of interview preparation. However, most people do not spend much time preparing to talk about themselves.

I know that seems counter-intuitive, but potential employees rarely think deeply about their experiences. This is even truer for younger workers who don’t think they have a lot of experience to talk about. Of course, this makes it even more important to do some self-reflection before the interview.

As a prospective employee, you should spend time learning about the company with whom you are interviewing, but you should also identify those skills, abilities, and experiences that make you valuable to the company. You need to find effective ways to articulate your value to the company, to create what many businesses refer to as your “value proposition.”

Some of this work should have been done when creating your résumé and cover letter. Instead of just focusing on job titles, you should identify the tasks you’ve performed, the skills you’ve developed, the problems you’ve overcome and how you’ve done so, and the results you’ve produced. The résumé and cover letter is the place to demonstrate the value you brought to your previous jobs; the interview is where you get to make your sales pitch about the value you will bring to your new company.

The job interview is the main process by which employers determine whether you will be a good fit for their company. Employers are trying to determine not only what skills you possess, but also what type of person you are, how you communicate, and how you think on your feet. By taking the time to write to discover these details and hone your responses to their questions, you not only improve your ability to respond articulately in the moment, you actually practice the kind of preparation that can make you successful in other aspects of the job.

Interviews can be anxiety producing events – yet another reason to do some writing to prepare for your interview. By identifying your skills, uncovering your own personal success stories, and preparing answers to the questions you anticipate being asked, you can make your next job interview both more productive and less stress-inducing.

Writing: Practice for Your Career

I love sports. When I was younger, I played all the time, but I rarely took part in organized sports. Why? I hated to practice. Practice wasn’t like playing; it felt a whole lot more like work. If you’ve played any kind of organized sport, been in a band, a play, or any activity that required practice, you know what I mean.

Practice always entails activities that don’t seem like they have much to do with the game. I never played a single football game that required me to step through a tire, or a single concert where I had to play scales, but I had to do it in practice. Playing is free-flowing and fun while practice seems tediously prescribed and planned. You end up doing the same things over and over. What’s it all for?

The answer is that practice prepares you for the real thing. Repetition of plays, lines, or notes ensures that you can execute in the game, play, or concert without thinking about what you’re doing. Practice allows you to master your craft, creating a sea of calm in the midst of the ocean of chaos that is the competition or performance.

Why am I talking about practice? Because writing is great practice for your career. Not only are you likely to do a lot of writing in your career, but there are other aspects of the work world that writing mimics rather effectively. For example, even with the growth of the service industry, many jobs – especially those in the engineering and computer science fields – require you to create some sort of product.

Typically, there is a process for creating the products your business sells or uses. This process is often referred to as the Product Development lifecycle. To ensure the efficient completion of the product, this cycle must be managed. That process is called Project Management. These two disciplines can also be found in and developed using the writing process. The writing process yields the product of a final draft. In this way, the writing process parallels the product development lifecycle. Similarly, you need to employ project management techniques in order to complete your writing assignment on time.

Eric Verzuh, in his excellent book entitled, The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management, breaks the product development lifecycle into four stages:

1. Define product requirements
2. Design the product
3. Produce the product
4. Release / Operate the product (24-25)

These stages closely mirror elements of your writing assignments. Usually, your teacher defines the product requirements for you. Your paper needs to be on a certain subject, needs to be so many pages, etc. Similarly, your teacher usually prescribes the design of your paper, often requiring you to follow a certain style guide. Even without a specific style guide to follow, your teacher may prescribe a format for your paper to follow – put your name here, use a staple, leave 1-inch margins, etc. Your job, then, is to write the paper (3. Produce the product) and turn it in (4. Release the product).

So every time you write a paper, you are taking part in the product development lifecycle. The difference is that in your career, you might have more authority to shape the product’s requirements and design. In fact, just as in the classroom, the design and production of a product are often handled by different groups of people. The definition and design are where the decisions are made. If you like theory, analysis, and talking to customers, you’ll like the definition and design stages. If you’re a hands-on kind of person, you’ll most likely enjoy the production part of product development.

Developing the product is only part of the equation, however. The other part is managing the project. According to Verzuh, the project lifecycle has four linear stages:

1. Definition
2. Planning
3. Execution
4. Closure (20-21)

That looks a lot like the product development lifecycle above, and indeed, there are similarities. Just as a product has defined requirements, so too a project requires definition. This definition usually involves identifying not only what the project is, but also what resources (human, financial, and material) are available to complete the project. Just as the product needs to have a design to follow, a project needs to have a plan to follow.

In the planning stage, you identify each task in the project and allocate resources to accomplish those tasks. In a writing assignment, you will usually be the only human resource. However, you might anticipate the need for feedback from your teacher, tutor, or someone else who might review your work. You should identify these people in the planning stage so you can let them know you’ll be asking for help. This will help you to make out a schedule for your project, a key component to the planning process.

A schedule helps you estimate the time you will need for each task. Just as importantly, it helps you identify which tasks might need to be accomplished first and which ones can perhaps be accomplished relatively simultaneously (for example, you might conduct further research while your teacher reviews and provides comments on an early draft).

It’s very important to think ahead. The more complex your project is, the more advance thought you need to give it. JetBoy made this same point in his post at writing.bytes. Talking about outlines – a recommended project planning step for any writer – he wrote, “spending twenty minutes jotting down a rough outline of my paper saved me boat loads of time. I know where my paper is going, and I know how it's going to get there.” How right he is.

As important as it is for you to plan your own writing, it becomes even more important when you are employed in a project working with other people. When business projects are poorly planned – or not planned at all – other people suffer. Co-workers, customers, and the company itself can suffer huge consequences. How huge?

An entire methodology for ensuring quality by identifying defects, called SixSigma, has been developed to address the issue. According to iSixSigma.com, a content provider for users of the SixSigma method, the Systems Sciences Institute at IBM found that the cost of fixing a software defect was more than six times more expensive after implementing the software as it was to fix the same defect during the design phase. Once the software product was actually being used by customers, the cost to fix the defect was one hundred times what it would have cost to fix during the design phase. While these figures relate to software defects, the same principle is true for any kind of product creation from building a house to creating a fighter jet to writing a paper. When JetBoy says twenty minutes of planning saved him “boat loads of time,” he wasn’t exaggerating.

The third stage of the project lifecycle is execution. This parallels the product lifecycle’s third stage, producing the product. In the project lifecycle, however, what you are executing isn’t the product, but the project plan itself. Usually this means following the schedule you set up and making adjustments to it as certain tasks are accomplished more quickly or slowly than anticipated. In this sense, a project is a living thing, constantly in need of attention and maintenance.

Finally, the project is ready for closure. As with the product release, this fourth stage of the project usually means you are finished. However, the project can extend beyond the completion of the product. Once you turn in a paper, for example, your project really isn’t complete. A good project manager waits to receive feedback on the project. So, for example, your writing project might not conclude until after you get your paper back and you get the opportunity to see how you did. You can then assess not only how well you did on the paper, but learn from the results whether or not your project plan was effective.

Managing a project isn’t just about checking all the boxes in your plan and getting the project off your desk. As Eric Verzuh notes, “The definition of project success is that a high quality product is delivered on time, and the project concludes on budget” (17, emphasis added). Translated into writing terms, it means that your writing met or exceeded the criteria (measured by your grade), got done on time (usually also a criteria) and didn’t take you more time, effort, or materials than you thought it would.

Practice can suck, but it also prepares you to succeed. Like practice, writing is sometimes arduous, tedious, and can seem unrelated to what you really want to do. The reason is that writing is practice, not only for other writing, but for learning product development and project management skills that can help you succeed in your chosen career, whatever it may be.

Trick-E-Mails

One of the trickiest business writing tasks is the art of sending a good e-mail.

In the “good old days” before e-mail, much written business communication took the form of letters, if the correspondence was going outside the office, or memos, if it was an internal communication. Both letters and memos had their own special formatting requirements that visually identified the communication as either a letter or a memo. These correspondences had to be typed or printed out on the computer so both the process and the formatting gave the writing of these communications a sense of formality. It was easy to identify letters and memos as business correspondence. Not so with e-mail.

As the name implies, e-mail (short for electronic mail) is simply a faster way of sending a letter or memo. Not only do e-mails arrive at their destinations faster than postal or “snail mail,” but e-mail applications come with their own formatting making the production of the e-mail faster as well. E-mails become so easy to put together and the expectation of speed is so enticing, that writers often do not edit or proofread their messages before they send them. Similarly, the speed with which an e-mail can be sent, received, and responded to has led to the use of e-mail as an electronic conversation tool.

The same technology that makes e-mail such a fast way to communicate has led to newer forms of communication like chat rooms, instant messaging, and text messaging by cell phone or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). These additional technologies with roughly the same purpose have greatly blurred the line between formal business communications and informal personal communications. Text messaging, specifically, has led to the development of a number of acronyms and shortcuts because of the difficulty of typing on most cell phones. In combination, all of these factors have led to a more informal brand of communication.

Further complicating matters is the element of audience. I may be at work, but I may be sending an informal message to one of my colleagues, someone who might also be a friend. The message may even pertain to work, but because of my more informal relationship to my colleague, I may find that an informal e-mail is appropriate. In this type of communication, the standard rules of business writing and etiquette may well not apply. However, all of these factors may make it more difficult for me to shift gears when it comes time to send a more formal message to, say, my boss.

Without the traditional cues telling us that we are engaged in a business activity that requires a more formal writing approach, e-mail communications require business writers (which is almost anyone with a job) to be even more alert to the purpose of their writing and the intended audience. What makes the stakes even higher is that e-mail communication is easily duplicated and sent to a mass audience, many of whom may be people you don’t know or never intended to communicate with.

This situation happened to me recently. I had sent a colleague an e-mail about a proposed meeting. Since I was merely asking for information and since the colleague and I are friends, I included a stupid play on words in my e-mail inquiry. It wasn’t offensive or anything, but it wasn’t something I would have written for a mass audience. It was simply a silly, throw away comment that I knew my friend would find amusing because it was “so me.” To save time answering my question, my friend forwarded my inquiry to a group of colleagues with whom I did not have a close relationship. Since the request I was making was of a professional nature, I was appalled that my side comment to my friend was now being transmitted to other people to whom I would not have sent the comment had I contacted them myself.

The above example is not the only way in which an e-mail you might consider “private” can become public. E-mails may appear to be ethereal in nature, but each time you send one, a copy is made on the server that receives it. In other words, there may be numerous copies of your e-mail existing on your company’s e-mail server and the computers of people outside of the company as well. In a very real way, e-mail communication is not private communication.

The simple act of composing an e-mail is fraught with hidden consequences. This common and seemingly innocuous form of communication is one that requires a great deal of thought. It is important to be aware of the potential for public duplication and sharing of your communications.

In many ways, writing an e-mail is even more of a serious, professional and business writing task than business letters and memos used to be. Use care when composing your e-mails. Don’t merely think twice before sending it, think thrice.