Katie McIntyre is a career coach and the co-owner at CareerSprout, which bills itself as helping tech professionals land job offers in the $200K to $500K range.
McIntyre recently posted on LinkedIn about her takeaways after listening to over 700 interviews.
While McIntyre doesn’t sit in on the interviews herself as they’re conducted, she said she receives a recording of the call and reviews it afterward. (Business Insider did not independently confirm the total number of interviews or their contents but McIntyre showed BI records of hundreds of interview recordings.)
In her LinkedIn post, she said people who consistently got jobs spoke “extensively” about a couple of topics.
They also only spoke half the time.
McIntyre said her company encourages a “happy, humble, hungry” approach, and a lot of that boils down to dropping the perfectionist approach in the interview. While you should be direct about what you can contribute, you should also avoid being a know-it-all.
These are her suggestions for getting an offer.
Give credit where it’s due
McIntyre told BI that successful candidates talk about mentors during the interview.
She said at one point in an interview, there’s some version of a question that asks candidates to tell the interviewer about themselves. Typically, she said her clients will talk about their work experience and drop in that they’ve been so lucky to work with or learn from “incredible leaders at companies like X, Y, Z.”
During that part of the conversation, the candidate can specifically talk about what they did, learned, or were able to accomplish. McIntyre said this both ties in what the candidate learned to the role they were in and shows recognition that they don’t know everything and still have an interest in learning.
“What’s understood is, part of what you’re getting today is all of these lessons that I’ve already learned,” McIntyre told BI.
Talk numbers
McIntyre told BI being able to talk about metrics and how they drive revenue for the business is another key factor.
In roles such as sales, revenue is tied to how much you bring in, but other types of roles indirectly contribute to the company’s bottom line. That should be brought up too, McIntyre said. That could include saving time, increasing efficiencies, or fueling internal growth through helping people get promoted, she said.
“There’s all these other metrics that aren’t just revenue but directly tied to revenue,” McIntyre said.
Those who don’t get offers often fail to bring up how they measure metrics and bring revenue to the company, McIntyre said.
Make it a conversation
McIntyre said a key interview pattern of candidates who get offers is their ability to speak 50% of the time. During the interview, McIntyre said in her LinkedIn post that successful candidates asked intentional questions about the hiring manager, company, its culture, team, and goals.
McIntyre told BI that nowadays, interviewers are not just asking if the candidate can do the job — they want to know if they can work with that person eight hours a day.
“In today’s market, pretty much everybody has the hard skills,” McIntyre told Business Insider. “Pretty much everybody that’s getting interviews can technically do the job.”
She said when people don’t ask questions or when the interview doesn’t turn into a conversation, interviewers can end up feeling like it’s not a good fit.
McIntyre suggested candidates throw the question back after answering. She also said at the beginning or end of the call candidates can ask the interviewer about their past experience at another company or why they joined their current company.
“The hiring manager feels like, oh, they actually care about me and my perspective,” McIntyre said.
