Interview Prep Guests

I’ve been involved in a number of interview preps where the hosts of the prep brought in guests for various stages of the preparation process and there have been good experiences with that and not so good experiences with that so I wanted to make my recommendations to you about how to think about guests in the room as your team is prepping for an interview so in general what I found is there are two kinds of guests that people have in the room one of them is like an expert regarding the prospect the the the potential client that is being interviewed with this time around it’s people who know the personalities and know the organ gation know what they care about my recommendation about guests like that is get them in the room as early in the process as possible so while you’re still strategizing the process while you’re still figuring out the message get these folks in the room and ask them a bunch of questions see if you can have them tell you who these people are what they’re like what they care about what they are specifically concerned about regarding this project so that you can wrap your thinking around what they know about how they think you don’t want to get too far in the process because if you start to strategize and start to design your messages and then pull people into the room when you’ve started to present the message that you’ve put together at that point you can get feedback like oh no no no I I wouldn’t talk about that at all talk about this instead this is a real sore point you don’t want them hearing about this from you you want to focus on that so you need to get that into your team’s brains as early as possible the second kind of guest to have in the room is like the people who really know your team and know their weak points maybe know what they’re worried about that those team members might sound and look like those folks very often get brought in at the tail end of a prep process and they very often accidentally make the team members much more nervous much more self-conscious much lower down on the ladder of confidence Ence that they have slowly been climbing over the course of the prep process so do not have folks like that in the room at the tail end of the process at the most get them in the middle of the process maybe after a first run presentation and whenever you have people like that providing feedback talk to them before they go in into the room talk to them about how to give feedback it’s really important that feedback givers focus on what worked and what could be even better you want them to be positive and encouraging you don’t want them to point your team members towards problematic areas like stuttering and stammering or covering the wrong stuff you want to get them focused on what they’re doing well and what they can work on what can be even stronger and you want to have these folks communicate their confidence to the team members communicate that the team can and will get even better in this aspect of their presentation