Matthew T Grant

This was one of my first posts on Aquent’s Talent Blog, November 3, 2006

What if you went into a job interview and asked all the questions?

The web is rife with tips on how to interview successfully. You can find them here and here and here. For the contrarians among you, there are even tips on interviewing unsuccessfully.

The tipsters all emphasize being prepared, which is unassailably sound advice, as any Boy Scout would tell you, but they don’t point out something that might make you rethink your entire approach to interviewing: Interviewers are often unprepared!

While some companies have thoroughly developed and well-defined processes for interviewing people (and will even provide you with a detailed overview of said processes beforehand), many companies do not. In fact, as these tips for interviewers from Monster imply, the interviewing process subjects interviewers themselves to a lot of stress.

So what does this mean to you as a marketing professional approaching an upcoming interview? It should encourage you to play an active role in the interview and work hard to make it a conversation rather than an interrogation. Don’t be afraid to take the lead and start off by asking questions, especially thoughtful, well-crafted questions that demonstrate your knowledge and experience while simultaneously conveying your interest in the position. As a kind of test, ask yourself, Could I get a job offer based solely on these questions I’m asking?

Asking questions, especially from the outset, will take some pressure off the interviewer and, ideally, provide you with insights that will allow you to present your own qualifications in the context of the role. This is key, for while the interviewer will inevitably ask you what you have done for others, she is most interested in discovering what you will do for her, her team, and her organization. There is no better way to do that then by peppering any discussion of your talents and triumphs with specific references to the challenges she is currently facing.

Ultimately, by engaging in a conversation about the role rather than submitting to an interview for it, you will accomplish two things. First, you will more readily be seen as a colleague or a peer than a candidate. In a sense, you will already have entered the interviewer’s world.

Secondly, and most importantly, if in this conversation you can project a sincere eagerness to learn and contribute to the success of the enterprise, you will send the message that every interviewer wants to hear: Not only can I do this job, I’m already thinking about how I’m going to get it done. Let’s get started right now!

Image Courtesy of Sean Dreilinger.

This post originally appeared on Aquent’s Talent Blog, February 23, 2009

Matthew T. Grant has chosen as his tag-line, “Tall Guy. Glasses.” He has done so for several reasons. First of all, he is above average in height for the human male (6′ 7″). Second of all, he wears glasses (I’ve been told that contacts are out due to my astigmatism. If any opthamologists are reading this and believe that I am misinformed, please contact me at mtg_at_matthewtgrant.com).

The most important reason for this fairly pedestrian tag-line is that I, Matthew T. Grant, have a variety of interests, several well-developed abilities, and a non-linear career path. I have established and run a corporate training department, directed an array of internal and external communications efforts for a global company, served as a business process consultant, taught at several colleges, and performed in a number of rock bands in San Francisco, Boston, and Ithaca. I received my PhD in German Studies from Cornell University (1993) and wrote my dissertation on mass media and political militancy in West Germany in the 1970s, My bachelor’s degree in German Studies was granted by Stanford University (1985).

As far as my aforementioned abilities are concerned, those that may be of most interest to you as an individual or representative of an organization are as follows. I can write real good (that grammatical incorrectitude was intentional). I’ve been involved in blogging, podcasting, and various online communities for years. I’m an entertaining and informative presenter (that link takes you to the slides for a recent webcast I conducted. To hear the ‘cast itself, go here – it’s free, but requires registration). I am also extremely comfortable hosting large events as well as facilitating small discussion groups.

To put this all another way: I’m skilled at acquiring and comprehending information and then communicating it to people in the way best suited to them. By “information,” I mean just about anything and by “people” I mean just about anyone.

Allow me to illustrate this ability in action. While serving as corporate spokesperson, I enlisted our local field managers to find me speaking engagements by telling them, “I can talk about anything.” The then-manager of our Osaka office took me up on my offer and said he had me scheduled to speak on “business method patents” at a large conference in his native city. I told him I didn’t know anything about that and he responded with, “But you said you could talk about anything.”

Hoisted on my own petard, I delved into the controversy surrounding the patent Amazon received for their “one-click” buying method and gave a presentation to three hundred Japanese business folk calling for greater openness and flexibility with regards to intellectual property in the Web era (you could call my approach anachronistically, “Lessig-esque“). Although the audience seemed more interested in learning how to make money from patents, rather than how not to, nobody said I didn’t know what I was talking about.

So, that’s Matthew T. Grant, in nuce. This blog will now return to its regularly scheduled programming.

The other night I attended a presentation by Dan Schawbel, “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y.” His approach to personal branding – the art of marketing yourself – is very methodical and he communicated it in a clear, practical way. Indeed, this blog is itself the direct result of some of the advice that Dan provided. Specifically, he said that you should own your name as a domain so I went home, registered “matthewtgrant.com,” and within a week I had this blog up and running.

Now, I’m no stranger to the discussion/debate around personal branding, having addressed the topic several times on Aquent’s Talent Blog, but I must admit that I’ve always found the concept de-humanizing. Aside from the notion that “branding” stems from the cattle trade and involves a painful, flesh-searing procedure, personal branding essentially calls for reducing one’s inevitably complex and even contradictory identity to a tag-line and one’s character to a commodity. This process was summed up by a grad school friend of mine who described his approach to the job search with the phrase, “I am a box of Tide.”

To the extent that “personal branding” means “understanding your capabilities and being able to clearly articulate them to people who may be interested in paying you for services rendered,” I’m all for it. In fact, I strongly believe that finding a job or landing a project depends on your ability to connect with a “target audience” (client/hiring manager), differentiate yourself from the competition (other vendors/job seekers), and persuasively communicate the specific ways that you will provide value and meet specific needs (marketing).

In other words, within the limits of one’s worklife something like “personal branding” unquestionably has it’s place. I do not believe however that it should be applied to all aspects of one’s life as some sort of path to enduring, personal fulfillment. Still, that seemed to be precisely what Mr. Schawbel was suggesting when he said,  “You need to monetize your passion because that’s how you find true happiness.”

I understand that “making money doing what you like to do” is a widely accepted ideal. Nevertheless, I believe the contrary to be true: True happiness comes from doing what you like without consideration of loss or gain. To achieve that end, I believe we need to be able to monetize, not our passions, but the necessities of life. I mean can we envision a better “job” than getting paid to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom?

I think not.