Acing the Job Interview, Part 1: The SESRV Strategy

The Truth About Many Job Interviews

Here’s an outrageous truth about preparing for a job interview: job candidates are often far better prepared to be interviewed for a job opening than the people who will be interviewing and hiring to fill that opening.

Indeed, the Number One job site in the world, candidates should spend five to ten hours preparing for a job interview. Yet StandOutCV says that “according to multiple studies, recruiters spend 6-8 seconds reviewing a resume before they decide whether it is suitable for a vacancy or not.” Indeed points out that most hiring managers have little or no formal training in interviewing candidates for positions that will report to them.

Many interviewers develop a set of favorite questions that they ask candidates. Often the questions being asked focus on the surface and don’t go deep enough, as we observed in our recent post, The Art & Science of Conversational Job Interviews. For example, if the position calls for someone who is meticulous with details, interviewers may ask questions such as, “How detail-oriented are you?” and “What kind of details did you have to deal with in your last job?” 

Questions such as these leave it up to the candidate to make a compelling case to advance from one of the dozen or so being interviewed to one of the finalists.

Question: What is an effective way for candidates to advance to the next level?

Answer: Employ the SESRV strategy when providing your answer to questions that interviewers ask. SESRV is a highly adaptable approach that enables you to highlight your accomplishments in short story form.

What is the SESRV Strategy?

Let’s suppose your interviewer asked you about how meticulous you are with details. Ways your interviewer could ask about this include:

• This job requires attention to detail. How detail oriented are you?
• Do you like working with details?
• What kind of details do you work with in your current job?
• Do details matter to you in the work that you do? Why?

Your answer should follow the five-step strategy, all in a short story form of two minutes or so:

1. Set Up: Your objective in this step is to define the quality or characteristic that is being asked about, which in this case is detail orientation or being meticulous. By defining it you and your interviewer are aligned. He or she now understands specifically what you mean by the terms detail orientation and being meticulous.
2. Example: Here is where you will be prepared to give one or two examples of how detailed and meticulous you are, as evidenced by how you handled an assignment. This must be an actual story and not something made up.
3. Specifics: Describe the assignment, its purpose and deliverables, what the results were to impact, and similar details. By sharing these details, you are demonstrating many more competencies than just being detailed. You might include something that went wrong to add further depth to your story.
4. Results: Include here not only your deliverables, but why they were important to your employer.
5. Verify: Here is where you will demonstrate what you learned from the situation you just described, which illustrates that you are a continuous learner.

SESRV is Based on Truthful Storytelling

Everyone loves a story! Young or old, from every culture and language, people love stories. The power of the SESRV Strategy is that it relies on telling a short story about something that happened to you, which illustrates that you possess the quality, competence, or experience that your interviewer is interested in learning about.

In addition to answering whether or not you are detailed and meticulous, your answer will also demonstrate many other critical qualities about you, including how you work, how you think, what you do when you encounter a problem, how you relate to others, your understanding of cause and effect, your regard for what is important to your employer, your diligence and ingenuity, and more. 

Answer a few questions like this and you will set yourself far above the other candidates who gave superficial answers to the interviewer’s questions.

Here’s what the SESRV strategy looks like in one chart:

Bottom Line

This is a very assertive way to get a commitment to the final round of interviews, and you will likely be the only candidate this employer will interview who will request this. While it will take extra effort and time to conduct the necessary research and create your plan, you greatly increase your chances of being hired. Once hired, because you took this approach, you’ll place yourself on a higher career trajectory in the minds of the decision makers who will congratulate themselves for making an excellent hire.

In a few weeks I’ll present a powerful strategy to distinguish your candidacy as a finalist and win the position. Stay tuned… powerful stuff!