Forget “Tell me about yourself.” Here’s the only question in the interview that actually matters – Is the interviewer impressed?

Have you shown them you can do the job? Have you made them see your value?

One of the best ways to sell yourself as a candidate: Add data - data/details/evidence/specifics.

Add data to your answers

It’s important to include data in your answers to interview questions.

Instead of calling it “data,” call it “details.”

For some reason “details” is a word that isn’t as scary as “data.” We all know what details are.

You have some details about the topic, don’t you?

Data is often the difference between a mediocre answer and an impressive answer.

What if I don’t have any data?

My clients freak out to me all the time:

• “Should I include data?” “What data?”

• “What if I don’t have any data?”

• “What if I don’t have enough data?”

• “I’m in Sales, I don’t really collect data.”

• “Only scientists have data.”

If you think you don’t have any data, you don’t understand what counts as data.

Checklist of details (data) you can add to your answers

Details to include at the beginning of the story (Situation)

Describe the situation you faced and the background. The context.

The who/what/when/where/why:

• Company background: company name, industry, brief overview of product/service.

• When this happened. The project: What was it about? What was the size/scope?

• Your role and responsibilities: Your job title, activities, decisions you owned, and decision-making level on the project.

• Who was in it with you; what were the relationships?

• What would have happened if you didn’t resolve it (blast radius)?

Facts to include in the middle of the story (Action)

How did you solve the problem? What was involved in the execution?

• What options did you consider? What were the pros/cons of each?

• Who else was involved?

• What was your thought process? / Why you did it.

Facts to include in the end of the story (Results)

Was it resolved?

What was the outcome you achieved?

How did you measure success for this project? Quantify to understand volume, size, scale. You can give both absolute numbers and relative percentage.

Where was the impact?

IMPACT can be broken into:

• Top-line driven: revenue, market share, new customer acquisition

• Bottom-line driven (cost-savings): time/person hours, budget, space, equipment reuse

• Customer-value driven: CSAT, customer anecdotes, adoption rate, retention rate

• Engineering-driven: traffic volume/velocity, week-over-week bug/severity tally, implementation time, deployment time, compute power/time metrics

• Risk driven: risk reduced, crisis prevented

• Team driven: morale improved, collaboration facilitated

Other ideas that may give you an idea of how to think about your results:

• How does this compare to your target?

• How does this compare to previous periods?

• How does this compare to other business units or competitors?

I keep writing posts about including data in your answers because it’s so important and I want to make sure the message comes across. Using data is really the #1 way to seem like you’re the best candidate for the job.

If you give a vague answer, one without details, you’ll sound like you don’t really know how to do the job.