How To Prepare For An Interview

So you got the Zoom scheduled, but how to prepare?

So you’ve finally scored that big interview. Maybe it’s been months of shooting your shot on Linkedin, maybe a friend made an introduction for you, or maybe they reached out to you. Whatever the circumstance might be, you’ve making progress. That’s great!

Your resume is on point, but what do you do to prepare? I personally spend a significant amount of time preparing for an interview, and I have a process in place that I go through as part of my preparation. I’m going to break this down into 3 sections: The Business, The Consumer, and Self Prep.

The Business

Every person you interview with will have a different take on what the role you’re hiring for is. Your boss will need your help filling a gap in their needs for the team, other departments might be interested on your thoughts on ownership of certain aspects of the work, or maybe checking to see if you have the defincies that would affect their work, and HR might be looking to see how well culturally you’ll fit. There’s no way to be able to anticipate what angle everyone will be coming from, but you can arm yourself with knowing as much you can about the company.

Linkedin
I’m sure most of you do this already. But it’s time to be a bit of a stalker. I try to figure out the structure of the marketing organization as best I can. What departments are there? Social? Consumer Marketing? Strategy? Paid Media? This can help you get a sense of the teams you’ll most likely be working with, and can reference your experience collaborating with different departments in the past.

Secondly, what departments aren’t on the team? Maybe it seems like there’s no paid media team. Most likely means they use an agency (time to see if you can figure out who!). Could also mean they live elsewhere in the organization, or some of the responsibilities are shared by multiple team members

Lastly, obviously have to check on the team. How long have they worked there? Are most people new, or have been around for a long time? What other companies were they at beforehand? Industries? Your goal is to really try and understand how the team functions. As an example if everyone has been there a long time, culture is more likely a really important issue for them. If everyone is new, they are more likely open to new ways of thinking, or reinventing how the marketing function operates.

Quarterly Earnings
If you’re interviewing at a public traded company, every quarter they’re required to publish the an update on the business, and it’s performance. They also usually highlight areas of investment, projections, and lots of other usual information like plans for upcoming products.

They can usually be found in the investor relations section of the corporate website for the company. As an example, you can find Disney’s Q1 earnings report here. You’ll notice there’s also an audio portion, which will contain the CEO and other senior leaders speaking through the business results, and often times a Q&A as well. All fantastic information that can be super helpful to understand the business.

Senior Leaders
Lastly, I like to search YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google looking for recent public talks with members of the C suite. Maybe it’s a panel at a conference, or a podcast with a journalist, whatever it might be, hearing from people that run the company is an invaluable way to really get a sense of what matters, and can help you structure your answers knowing what’s important to them.