Transcript- How to Interview for Senior Roles by Teresa Duke

How to Interview for Senior & Executive Roles –…

by Sophie Odgers

(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

I'm going to try not to send you into executive interviewing without talking first about some of the key things that we need to make sure that we've got in our bag of skills. Consider an investment, it takes a lot of time to interview in general, let alone for senior level and executive level roles. We're going to talk about preparation and then taking charge. Do you have what it takes?

Assess: Do You Have What It Takes

Some of this might be obvious to some of you and that's okay, it's just a good reminder. From my experience, a lot of leaders feel like it's obvious, but they're not necessarily fully prepared.
What I haven't included though, just to note in this, is subject matter expertise in particular areas. For example, if you have domain expertise in development, you're going to have a lot of other skills that are not listed on here. Just to check what was really hot in the market right now, I spent some time with some executive search people and I narrowed it in on what all of the executive search people were seeing as the “hot skills” that they want to see as well as some illustrating.

Many people don't realize what more senior roles entail. It's important to remember, and lots of you have heard this –just because you're a great supervisor might not mean that you'll be a great divisional director and so on, and so forth. For example, if you have a sales manager, great at building and mobilizing teams and then they move to the divisional director, instead of being able to handle the numbers, it might be understanding and creating information for other parties. It might turn on an analytical mindset, that someone who's a sales manager might not have in this role.

This is called the Peter principle and it's quite fascinating. It goes a bit deeper than where I'm going today, because I'm keeping it a little bit high level for you, but a lot of more hierarchical organizations, or it's less skilled in recruitment or training, tend to be choked up with people problems rooted in promoting people above levels of competency.

In terms of the first executive skillset, effective executives figure out where they are competent for themselves. Maybe they hold informational interviews with other people. I highly recommend, talking to people in roles you're curious about. One of the executive search people was emphatically wanting me to tell all of you that the business communities are much nicer and much warmer than we think and I'm like, "Okay, that's awesome."

Finding out what they feel and what they think are important in terms of the competence required for the skill. People that are in similar roles, there's entrepreneurial DNA in successful executives, this insatiable curiosity, "What makes this successful?" In addition to this concept around competencies, around the role itself, a lot of the cutting-edge research is talking about having vision – being able to paint a picture of vision and handle change management, is massive.

Leadership

I know you can all appreciate how much change is happening right now. It can be quite messy if leadership doesn't know how to work through change management. There's lots of wonderful resources like John P. Kotter and other books out there. Recruiters are looking for evidence of this in your experience, as you're moving along in your career, noting your experience around building change.

One way to build your leadership skills beyond recognizing the competencies required is working with volunteering opportunities on boards and associations. A lot of the executive search people say that you can't necessarily get some of the experiences you want, so you don't know how good you are. It's called unconscious incompetence, so hopefully you want to bring it to conscious incompetence and be able to understand, okay, what does my strategy really look like. Maybe

I'm going to do it as a board member or an association member, but whatever kind of area that you can get more experience in, in a volunteer capacity, is wonderful. Even committees, some people say that their building strata has given them some interesting experience. I don't know if that would qualify, but I mean, I'm sure some people have developed some wonderful people skills.

Character

In terms of the next skill around character: displaying resiliency, adaptability, persistence, integrity. Do you know yourself? I like to say very simplistically, if you are a car and you don’t know if you are an off-roader or a Ferrari – if you are big – if your chassis is hanging in the back then you're going to hit people, you're going to not enjoy the ride and maybe not even get to the destination you want. Knowing yourself is huge and in terms of leadership, that means having resiliency, adaptability, and curiosity.

Curiosity is the antidote to judgment labeling, "This is bad, this is bad." And it closes off your ability to see potential opportunities. Curiosity is something that we look for in leadership and whether you know your own values. Have you got something that helps you make decisions? A recommendation: exploring tools like StrengthsFinder, if you haven't done that before.

"A strength is something that energizes you, not something that depletes you." Notice what you're doing today and what you're being asked to do. Are those strengths in alignment?

If we only live once, it'd be nice to enjoy what we actually do. If you want to do a little bit more values work, Brene Brown has kind of an analytical approach she made in her book "Dare to Lead." I run through it with coaching clients.

EQ

Next, if I were to say the top two executive skills, EQ would the absolute top. There are so many big, long, lengthy definitions of EQ, but the one that's simple is the ability to identify and manage one's own emotions as well as the emotions of others.

We weren't taught this stuff in school, that's why I really love the book I listed down below, by Marc Brackett, "Permission to Feel." He talks about school and our emotional literacy as really limited. How do we decode what someone just did if we can't even understand it for ourselves?

Investigating emotional intelligence is a fantastic skill to build no matter where you're at in your career. It involves self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skills, all those sorts of things.

Our emotions affect everybody like a waterfall. Emotional intelligence only came out in the big-book accepted form in the 1990s. They were championing it back in the seventies, but in the 1990s, is where it really got a toe hold. When you think about how we create innovation and are competitive in our companies, in our endeavors… before, it was the top downs, raining down all the information from on high and we were treated like factory minions. Some of us still are, which is something I’m hoping we can change soon.

Now, as many of you know, we're working in teams. The creativity that is needed can't scale from one person or it would be very limited. We need creativity from everyone and we need these skills to come through people that actually feel okay, because creativity doesn't come from people who are just running on a treadmill, “embracing” themselves. It comes from people who feel comfortable, they have trust, they have psychological safety.

Intellect

All of this EQ stuff is massive; if you're leading people, it's a great thing to invest in. And then intellect, we can't underestimate intellect, which can grow just like EQ. The ability to find a business strategy beyond the original product core concept and garner support of stakeholders, that's what strategy is. If you're lacking in the strategy skills, you can build them on other board’s associations and so forth – enterprising thought processes around coming up with ideas. Or is your thinking limited and rigid with policies when you've been working with other companies?

Are you just going to import a culture and this is who you are? Or are you curious and taking the best from one and combining it with the best from others and creating innovation? Analytically looking for multiple merit variables. When problem solving, do you fold in concepts and attributes and make others stretch to understand the bigger picture?

Business Intelligence

In terms of business intelligence, connecting the dots in the business itself is important. When you're getting to these very senior roles as people who are already in them know, it's very important to make sure that you're understanding a lot more about how you run a business. You're trying to know a bit more of what a CEO would know in terms like: What's a P&L statement in finance? How is the cash and balance sheet? How do those three things work together? It’s like a superpower, especially because organizations might get more agile in the future. Knowing more about what's going on and embracing your own entrepreneur and understanding what's possible in the organization is huge.

Financials and understanding interdependency are huge. Often you get people like, "I'm really good at what I'm good at, and that's it." You might be successful in that regard, but look at building your knowledge, because when you're in that board meeting and they say something, if you don't sit there and go "Do do doo, I don't know what they're talking about..." and have something to say, you open up the stratosphere of opportunity.

Understand where the business is at and where it's going. Is it owned by a parent company? You are seeing a lot of really interesting things happening in the market right now, some of which are absolutely terrifying. A great way to diagnose businesses is the recommendation that I put here, Chris Watkins' "The First 90 Days." He talks about understanding the stages of the company. It allows you to pick opportunities that are more suited to do what you enjoy.

This is just a sketch of what he's talking about in terms of diagnosing where a business is at, if you haven't seen this before. I also recommend by the way, "The First 90 Days" book for everyone, even if you are starting new jobs, sometimes you can restart your job with some of this understanding and framework. It's good for you if you got promoted too, but basically if you are say, in a turnaround and a lot of businesses are at a turnaround right now, that's where, the crap is hitting the fan. "We need to button down the hatches because we have to save this business."

In a turnaround, what kind of leadership is required? How does that affect my department? What do I need to do? What you'll find is traditionally, and this is speaking generally, but leaders who have the ability to paint a vision of this is where we're going to go, and they're very skilled in combating despair. They are all about hope. Some people would call it a hero, heroine type of figure. You might be a leader who's really good at channeling excited confusion into productive directions. Realignments, unlike the heroine that's clearing the path and pushing through to get things done, realignment is when it's the businesses maybe not doing so great, potentially the numbers are a little off, but otherwise everyone's hanging on just fine.

It takes a lot more stewardship and diplomatic influence to help paint the picture of… "Yeah, I get you're here, but you really need to think about where it's going to go." Sustaining success is when it's preserving the vitality of a successful organization. You need to invent the challenge and combat complacency. You'll have all of these types of things, even in microcosms -- realignment, start-ups, turnarounds -- within your department, sometimes even within a team. It's a handy framework to help you understand what's going on in the business.

Are You Ready to Invest Enough Time in Interviewing?

All right, so now that we've gone through those essential skills, we want to consider, are you ready for the investment? Because it does take some serious time to be able to interview for these roles. How many hours do you think it takes for an executive to move through a hiring process on average? I would say the average good software engineering interview (for ex.) that's well done is around 10 to 12 hours, including tests. Some might disagree depending on unique pieces of your process. That's been what I've seen across the industry.

I chatted with a friend of mine who just got an engineering manager job and her first opportunity she talked to was five hours total, for an engineering manager. The other job opportunity she was talking to was 25 hours. Quite a disparity. On average, a software engineering interview that's really well done – industry standard – is around three weeks, depending on context, of course.

The friend that I mentioned, her five-hour interview process took three weeks, but five hours is on the low side for sure. Her 25-hour one took three months. Know which job she took? The interview process had a huge part of it. She took the three weeks one. She was so drained by the three months she couldn't take it. They kept taking her in many different directions. The answer is, on average, 30 to 47 hours of time commitment. This is interaction time and preparation time and three months from end to end is a beginning point. I've had it where it's six to eight months, depending on the role and how much executives have codified what it is that they're looking for.

The Executive Interviewing Process

So, what kind of steps are involved? This is a traditional executive interviewing process, that's well-written, process-wise. You can see you've got three recruiter interviews to go through. Usually, it's an individual recruiter at the beginning and then two people talking with you in a room, sometimes executive search is involved in those interviews at the very beginning –on-sites, we used to call them. The formal ones, the structured interviews, before, it was a lot of informal meals and those might take on more of a casual conversation, but there's a lot that's lost in not meeting people in person.

It's not a landslide defeat because there's a lot you can do remotely—presentations, case studies, personality profiles. There are some companies that actually use those for the general hiring process. When it comes to executives, it's much more thorough. For example, I have my top three candidates and we spent $2,000 per candidate on comprehensive personality profiles. It's really expensive and then offer-negotiation can either happen pretty quickly, or go for up to three months in some big companies.

I just want to warn everyone that interviews can, ahem, suck! 40% of executives on this one study I read, (there are some other ones that were even worse), 40% of executives hired into role within 18 months were terminated, either voluntarily or involuntarily. That's almost half... "Well, yeah. Why bother? Right?" That's why you need to negotiate a good salary and termination clauses.

Within another study, about 50% of executives that were terminated in the span of two years, 45% of those people indicated they had minimal understanding of the challenges they would face in an executive role. Like what's going on? What are people doing? What are people doing from both ends?

I remember being in a situation where I had some executives that were, interviewing candidates for a C-suite position and there was a moment where the candidate's like, "Okay, so what's your vision?" I watched the interviewer fumble and not be able to answer the question and it happened multiple times. I realized that they didn't know what they wanted. I knew to a degree, but there is nothing like being in an interview and having that moment where your executive can't articulate a vision.

A lot of times people don't know what they need and they're looking for someone to come and help them, but people on both sides need to be aware of those gaps, as opposed to, "Just come help me. Come solve it." It doesn't do both of you any good, because you might not have the aptitude or the skills to be able to meet the need. It's important, because of those stats, to make sure while you're interviewing, that you take responsibility and set yourself up for success.

Types of Interview Questions

Now, types of interview questions: behavioral –this goes into your past experience—massively important to think about this one. Situational-- "What would you if..." Situational questions are very powerful for technical questions and to augment behavioral questions and closed-ended: yes or no's. You'll find that in certain interviews that if it doesn't feel very prepared and people are not really sure, like they don't seem to have a level of sophistication in the interview.
Sometimes you can decode it by the amount of situational questions they ask, because if they don't ask about your past experience, how are they going to know how what you've done applies?

if you're answering behavioral questions -- Situation, Task, Action, Result. As an interviewee especially as an executive, you're being asked to be a storyteller. You're trying to tell stories about what you've done in the past and how it applies to the future. The Situation, Task, Action, Result (or STAR acronym), is a very handy framework. Not only to answer interview questions, but to help you with telling stories. People love stories because we spent how many tens of thousands of years with no writing and only oral tradition! Our brain is wired this way.

If you can't remember Situation, Task, Action, Result, just remember SAR: Situation, Action and Result. What was going on? Think of it like a movie scene where you're going in and you're describing the characters in the scene, what was going on, what you did and what was the result.

How to Answer Behavioural Interview Questions (with Example!)

If you interview people practicing the STAR framework and being able to hear it is an important skill to develop as an executive, to be able to recruit effectively. What's the situation? “As the VP of HR, I had high 'regrettable' turnover.” This will be an answer to a question such as, "Would you tell me about a time when you faced a significant challenge in your HR department" -- or in your company, and so I would say, "We had lots of people leaving and they were really, really good."

Ideally you want to give a few numbers and statistics. Try to keep track of your accomplishments: the numbers, the people involved in the scenarios, maybe it's in your notebook, maybe it's on a spreadsheet that you keep over a few years. The longer you get in your career, the more you forget. This is important to help you tell stories that are pertinent to the next role you want to interview for.

"I had turnover and it was really alarming, so what we did is we made a goal of reducing regrettable turnover within two quarters. I wanted to reduce it by at least 5% to the total amount. We presented the problem to my HR team and brainstormed. Bob and Sue were really good at analysis, so they made sure that they confirmed the numbers and Jenny was really great at understanding who the high performers in the company were. What we did was we decided to do stay interviews and stay interviews helped people to articulate what they were feeling and help us catch some new hires who managers hadn't yet really connected with. The result was, we reduced. We doubled the amount by reducing it 10% with cost savings, which we reinvested."

That's an example of a STAR response. Do differently and learn. "What would I have done differently?" After you answered the result or what you learned from the process, that is where you start to show those skills around curiosity and learning and creativity and resilience.

Be Confident & Clear on Who You Are & What You Bring

Knowing thyself, like I said before… if you're not confident and clear, don't jump into that process. Get an accountability buddy or success circle, people that can help reflect with you –some of your strengths, some of your wonderful gifts –procure feedback from previous direct reports, whatever information you can get that helps you understand who you are and the stuff that matters.

Formal Interviews

What does an interview look like? A formal interview is a panel. Now it's like The Brady Bunch on Zoom and a lot more people are doing panels because of this. Panels in-person can be terrifying, very, very terrifying. In executive interviews they can be quite common, especially when you're doing presentations. Structured and unstructured, onsite.

You'll find a lot more companies than you would think are very unstructured in their interview process. When they have really unstructured process, that means they might not cover everything that they need to know about you or even everything that you need to know about them.

If you read Laszlo Bock's book, "Work Rules" by Google, they had some interesting data sets on how people interviewed effectively and all that did was serve to make the interviewer look smart and the interviewee looked dumb. Yay! Great qualifier. Fabulous. Do those! Not!

Informal Interviews

Informal interviews, onsite or remote "chats." I have been tricked on this even with all of my experience and I thought I was going for coffee and then boom, it's an interview and I was just having a bad day and I was like, "whaa!" Don't underestimate these chats. They are interviews. Meals and coffees, if we're back in person, these are all interviews, but they are informal. They'll say it's not, but it is.

If recruiters are checking in on you, they're collecting data the whole way. I used to use the receptionist and the coordinator as part of my interview team. We would collect data on how pleasant and how resilient and adaptable you were when you were working with the coordinator on email and then how you greeted people. I had people, kid you not, overlook the receptionist and just be like, "Yeah, I need to talk to someone."

A show I watched on interviewing, this one manager would lean over the atrium fencing area and they would try and see who held open the door for people. Now that's a little extreme, maybe not such an accurate indicator, but still fascinating. They could have just been nervous and in their head, so it wouldn't be an effective measure of a human being, but still fascinating. Actually I even used the janitor once, it's terrible. I was just curious.

Presentations & Case Studies

The next one is presentation or case study If it's really intimidating for you, this is a really great place to pause because most executive positions require lots of presentations, lots of analysis. If you're uncomfortable doing this in an interview setting, find out where the fear comes from or where it's like, "I materially do not want to do this kind of thing."

Some companies will say, "Well, what are you going to do to solve our problem in finance that we have?" And they'll give you a problem that they want you to solve. There is some talk of some companies just saying, "Yeah, do a 30/60/90-day plan and interview for us." And suddenly they get your wonderful information and then they ghost you and you basically have given them thousands of dollars' worth of free consulting. It's the exception, not the rule.

If you have a really light front end on your interview process where they're not investing a lot in recruitment and understanding who you are, maybe that's an indicator that something might be up and they're looking for some free consulting. But, if you are doing your diligence, hopefully you know, something more about the company than just the interview process. Maybe, you know some people who know people who work there?

Presentations are great because they help the recruiters understand how you think, your work habits, how you strategize, how you organize. Don't hesitate to ask them for more information. This is an indicator of what it's like to work with them. Have they given you partial information? That might be part of the test, whether intentional or unintentional on behalf of the company that's interviewing. Did you come prepared, convincing, credible, logical, compelling? It's as close as you can get to a work product.

We have talked now about assessing our skills. Do we have the needed foundation abilities to do leadership roles? And then we are considering the investment in time for preparation because there's a good amount and we can do this over the long term, or for a specific interview process. Now, because so many interviews tend to suck and the failure rate of executives is really high, we want to take charge. We want to own our interview. You can't trust a company to do this for you.

Take Charge: How to Own Your Interview

So how do we own our interview process? Knowing how to tell your story is a big piece. Tell me about yourself. Start by understanding what are the strengths that light you up and what are stories that you can tell that support that.

Research is also enormous in terms of your interview process. So financials, if you're interviewing with a private company. What is some competitive analysis out there? What are the competitors doing? Is the market lifting up? Is it going down? Do you know someone that works there? If it's a public company, you should be able to read those financial numbers in the stock market understand share price and movement. If you don't, get someone who can translate it for you, these are really needed skills and things you can talk to that show that you are also a business expert, as well as being an executive in your own domain. Networking with people who used to work there—or do work there–don't underestimate how powerful that is and make your inroads without being too obtuse. Then, creating a checklist. Not any checklist. We're going to call this a big checklist. It's so big that it's a framework

The “Own Your Interview” Framework

Just like when you, as executives and leaders are building out position profiles and doing due diligence on your end about what you'd want a job to check off on certain core capabilities and attributes, so should the candidate have a framework to make sure that we're getting the amount of information we need to make a very informed end decision.

#1 - Responsibilities

What does the business plan call for with this role? Can they talk about the business plan with you? What does that look like? What's the goal? What are the results they're looking for this new executive to produce? You're taking notes while you go through your interview process and you can also use our diagnosis tool. "Is it sustaining success? Is it start-up?"

Then, the history of it, it's really fascinating. Is this a new headcount? If someone gets fired, why did they get fired? You can ask those questions. “Is this new or a backfill?” If it's a backfill, if they act all cagey, don't give up, okay? There's a reason. If you need help with that, we can talk to you about that because it's delicate, but it's very important.

#2 - Leadership Style

Of course, as a leader you're wanting to bend towards the situation, but what is the dominant style that's needed today? Because, it might change between five years and now. Your adaptability and your flexibility and your interpersonal skill those are huge pieces of leadership style –being able to demonstrate those. How much are they needed and required of you?

There are many different schools of thought on types of leadership and leadership style. Don't get too hung up on trying to understand a little bit more about your sweet spot, where you'd love to be. Some people use supportive, delegative, coaching and directing, and then they move between those.

#3 - Authority

Have they shown you an org. chart? "We're flat! We're so flat!" I call BS. Sometimes it's not flat. Most of the time it's not. Getting an understanding of the formal and informal organizational chart networks is huge and I make sure I put through to executives an organizational chart that tells them the lines of responsibility, even if it's confusing. If it's confusing that's a data point for you to dig into. Why is it? Where is there clarity needed? What are the stronger and weaker departments? Can you find out about that? That's always really interesting. "Oh, you know Susan over there? Oh, what a basket case!" Woo! Data point! They talk behind each other's backs. The leadership team is fractured. Note to self! People manager versus individual contributor, making sure you understand that.

By the way another pro tip is: one of the key pieces to ensuring your success is making sure you have enough resources to do the role and one of the key resources is having a big enough team. Once you have an understanding, of what the KPIs, KRAs, the goals and the unexpected outcomes of the role are, make sure you meet with your hiring manager that's responsible and you codify really quickly what is needed in that regard.

When I go into the reasons a lot of executives fail, it is because they don't have enough people on their team to be able to do the job they need to do and then they're overwhelmed and frustrated and off they go.

Also, be very clear about this particular organization and be intentional. These are questions you need to ask and be forthright about. What is the difference between a manager and director? Between a VP and a director? What are your levels? If they do have levels. What does that look like? "Okay, so what does it take for me to get to the next level?" Talk about it at the beginning and get your resources guaranteed, as much as you can, on email or something ahead of time. Sometimes they'll say, "Yeah, we'll give you lots of people."

I sat down with an executive once who wanted to hire me to be a VP of HR and they were really nice and really keen and, oh, so lovely. As we talked, I said, “Well, what's your cash position like?” And he was like, "Oh, it's really terrible. We have hardly any cash, blah, blah, blah." And then he started to talk about the relationship with the board and he's talking about the board. "Oh my gosh, they want us to grow 18X in a period of time." And I'm thinking to myself, "Okay. this is a series C, funded and accelerated. They have no assets, they have no cash." And I said to him, "Well, I'm only interested in a job if I can do a lot of learning and development material, as opposed to just, taking care of the HR faction." He's like, "Oh, we'll fund you. We'll fund you." After learning about their cash position, the board relationship, everything was like, "Nope, I call baloney." You won't be able to fund me. You're going to want to fund the endeavors that I want to be able to do for your team, which I see that they might need, but you can't fund me.

#5 - Personal Qualities

So, your value alignment, your personal qualities and styles, knowing your values and how they match. The interesting thing about being an executive and in a leadership position, many of you will know, is that you are a change agent, no matter if you like it or not. You bring culture with you. You bring approach, because you're in a leadership role. Do they want you to come in to counter the culture or do they want you to come in to promote it? Because those are strategic hiring decisions. You’ve got to get to get some clarity on that and it will help you understand if this is really aligned with what you want.

#6 - Interpersonal Alignment

Interpersonal alignment: Can you articulate? Just like I told you this story before, can you even articulate their vision of what they want to do? Hiring people were like, “We're not sure”, but what are they sure of? And is that good enough for you? Can they articulate their why? Another important one for the future is customer and client focus.

Customer focus and client focus. Very current innovative companies are going to be ones that are paying attention, as opposed to feeling like they know everything. They're going to be having more communications with these clients and customers and more organizational agility, being future prepared.

The recent events have made people really jerk into future preparedness, whether they like it or not, but still, even though everything's really jerky right now, are they talking about 2, 3, 5 years? And are they changing the nature of the workforce? Is it going to be all full-time? Is it gigs? Is it gigsters? Is it around the world? Is it outsourced? This is very important information to help you understand if you're going to have the tools you need to be successful and the company will survive, let alone thrive.

#7 - Organizational Alignment

So, organizational alignment. Simple! Do you like your potential boss? Do you mesh with your peers? This is what I mean by fit; I'm trying to get you to understand, does this fit with what you want? Gather information on who succeeds and who doesn't –as much background as you can get, because that can have a huge impact. Remember this checklist is about what works for you, not about how you squeeze into a little shape for somebody else.

[Holly] –And let me just throw something in here about the "fit and tax" comment—that it can be a dog whistle for white people hiring more white people. I agree with what Teresa is saying that when we're talking about fit here, really what we're talking about is—Is this going to be something that works for you as a person? It's good to think about hiring people as in what do they add to the culture? But, if you're thinking as a person who's going to get hired, "What do I add?" And that's all you're thinking, you're missing a crucial piece, which is "I could add a lot, but do I want to? Would this be terrible for me?" So that's the kind of spirit that we mean this in. Be cautious around companies that talk exclusively about fit. I think that's maybe a bit of a red flag.

[Teresa] This is not about squeezing you into what someone else needs, this is about you deciding if the fit is for you and getting the information you need to decide if you're going to run towards them or away from them. So much in our culture is trying to get you to fit yourself into a mold for companies. That's why I harp on knowing yourself, because you're this beautiful, unique human being. What are those interesting and maybe not-so-interesting parts of you that are so fascinating and wonderful? And can we communicate them in a way that other people will be able to receive that information?

That's where the storytelling skills and making sure you understand what's relevant for them come into play. They're speaking a certain language. Can I bridge that language without compromising my uniqueness?

#8 - Compensation

Let's talk compensation! Show me the money! Make sure you're getting this conversation started at the beginning. Sign-on bonuses are usually used in executive hiring when we need to bridge a gap—some inconvenience that's happening. Whether it's…I have to lose a bonus from my work that I'm currently at, or there are some issues around timing with my kids in school etc., sign on bonuses tend to be used for that. Then, some companies are so desperate to get you, they're going to throw it at you, and you're like great.

Sometimes you can negotiate, not just the usual bonus, but milestone bonuses, incentivized goals that are cash based. There are all sorts of fun things. You can see a lot of this if you search it online. And a guaranteed minimum, you can even say, “This is a guaranteed minimum annual incentive”, which makes me laugh, because is it a bonus or is it just money?

For ex. you shift this, you get money. Your team gets flown to Disneyland! You get a claim, you get an extra conference budget… developmental incentives. I mean, the world's your oyster. You can even negotiate as an executive… if we do this, this is what I want, and this is why. You can actually have a lot of fun with short-term incentive plans. Long-term those are the stock options, profit sharing, employee stock purchase plans. Ask if they have each of those: stock options and profit sharing, employee stock purchase plans, those could be material to your compensation package.

Benefits—benefits are non-cash compensation. They don't factor into your number, but you can talk to them like they do. It just depends on what type of relationship you have with the recruiter. Make friends with your recruiter! If your recruiter loves you, they're going to go bat for you. Health and life insurance, do they have RRSP match? That can be huge.

The paid vacation… a rule of thumb is one week of paid vacation is equivalent to 2% of the salary. If you want to just do some cold numbers on there, adding an extra week, that can add some benefit to you. Professional development. When you were in an executive-level position and maybe even more importantly, you were consciously aware of incompetence and are wanting to build a particular skillset that's necessary for the ability to perform a role. You can negotiate getting an executive coach of some kind, or maybe they have some kind of training or development that's available.

Get this stuff talked about at the beginning. This is where you have that leverage to be able to do this and even an ongoing education plan, you can negotiate something for yourself and even for your team—perks—phones, credit cards, company cards, gym memberships, first-class air travel, financial tax, real estate planning services, legal planning services, college tuition for kids.

Golden parachute! Golden parachutes are when you get really senior and they really want you. They know that if you leave, the business could absolutely tank in a certain way, that's when you can negotiate golden parachutes. okay? Stock, long-term incentive plans etc.

Termination provisions, this is also a good one to note. In the States you don't have this as much. I just dealt with a senior executive and they got two months. “You're kidding me!” And he was with the company for eight years and very senior, New York, flashy-flashy. But up here in Canada, you can negotiate. I've seen very senior executives negotiate three to six months. So if you don't negotiate this on the front end, you're likely not going to get it on the back end, okay?

[Holly] Just to be clear, it's really easy to look at that like, "Damn, that's a lot of money." Also, these interview processes take three to six months, so it isn't that much cash. If you're sitting there going, “Oh I can only ask for a month…”You literally can't afford to only ask for a month.

[Teresa] Some companies will not budge, but you can go to sleep knowing that you tried. Severance packages, just to sum up, can extend to executive ranks and some executives offer six to 12 months or sometimes three months. If the company is small, they don't have a lot of cash, it's hard to do, as well as prorated bonuses in the event their employment is terminated. You can negotiate bonus as well.

#9 - Business Health

I talked a little bit about business health before, but I say SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. I love it if a company has done this; This is a very interesting exercise. If they haven't done it, maybe the interview process involves having them show this to you. And then mutual NDAs. You're going to be talking about sensitive stories. They're going to be talking about sensitive things. You want a mutual NDA at the beginning. Some people just do an NDA, but we tend to prefer mutual NDAs, to protect you as well.

Public company, like I said before, checking the financials again, the time investment—you're going to be doing a lot of research beyond just the usual glass door and the LinkedIn and the word of mouth. And private, we talked about that looking at competitors in the market and so forth.

If you need help on the financial side, I always recommend a lawyer for senior level roles. I even had one when I was going into a manager role once, because I didn't like the offer letter. It was a bit of a hack job. I got a lawyer to look at the paperwork, and then I charged it back to them

Final Tips for Nailing Your Interview

So final tips: Prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare. It’s so important that you take charge of the experience, you want to take charge. You're going to be showing your influence, your skills. You want to be taking charge in a way that doesn't make you come across like a strongarm, or maybe the company wants that.

It's important for you to own your process, given the statistics and given what I've seen in a lot of companies. The interview process is very much two-way. And again, just as a reminder, keep track of your accomplishments and your challenges.

"You got this!" Because the interview process is really hard. "Hey, can I go step in a room with two people I barely know and have them judge me? And most likely, statistically, they're going to reject me?" It's hard.

When you're going through a job hunt process, it's running the business of you, taking care of you as a whole person. Do you have a support system? Maybe it's a group of people. Maybe you've got some fellow job seekers that are doing this alongside you, and you can create goals and sprints together. And then you can also talk about it, "Hey, this was a really hard experience. I feel like I need to cry because I don't have any feelings of control. And I feel like they want me to be something that I'm not."

So being very clear on who you are, knowing yourself, giving yourself the emotional, mental health, and social support, as well as being methodical about the business side of running your business is an important balance to strike. There are some bad interview processes out there and there are ones that are wonderful. I know many people who took jobs because the interview process was wonderful and that’s really considerable.