„Myth: the presentation at a job interview is about the brilliance of your thinking
Reality: the presentation is about your ability to communicate and persuade“
The more senior the job, the more likely it is that you will be asked to make a presentation as part of the selection process. The most common place for this to happen is in the first 15 minutes of the panel interview where the panel are therefore your audience, but if there is an assessment centre it can also be designed into this day. Your nervousness or confidence about the presentation may depend on how often you have to give presentations in your current or previous job. If it is a routine part of your work you may have long since overcome any anxiety. If you have never given a presentation before then it may create feelings of dread and terror.
Many people misunderstand the purpose of the presentation. They believe that it is designed to be a test of your intellect. This is the cause of much wasted preparation time and usually results in a dull, tedious ramble.
Actually the presentation is a test of your ability to communicate and persuade. This is true even if the panel itself innocently believes that it is about the excellence of your thinking. This does not mean that you can get away with sloppy thinking, only that it is not the prime quality on which the panel judges you. Ability to influence is virtually always on the list of job competencies. This is because it is an essential part of any job. The more senior the job, the more it is likely to be about being able to influence people over whom you have no control. It’s about feelings and emotion not about rational thinking. It’s also about selling. If you doubt this, think about any time you have faced the task of having to convince people that your opinion or suggested solution to any problem is the correct one. Invariably some element of selling is involved. By this I don’t mean selling in its negative sense of overpowering people too foolish or gullible to be able to resist your pressure. In an organisation setting, selling is about persuading people that one idea is superior to another. This will often involve a presentation, perhaps just to staff clustered informally around your desk in an office or during a formal meeting in a board room.
Here are some examples:
Dawn wants to improve the layout of the open plan office in which she works. Several of her colleagues like it the way it is, so she will face resistance.
Prash wants to challenge his boss about the way she handles complaints from customers. She’s asked him to make a proposal at their next one-to-one meeting.
Kate has to sell an idea to her team about new ways of working; she feels they work competitively. She would like them to be more collaborative.
Angie finds her sales targets too tough and wants to persuade her boss to reduce them.
Mikhal wants the senior team in his organisation to endorse a new project. He has been offered a ten-minute slot at the next team meeting to put forward his ideas.
The ability to influence others is possibly the most important single skill you need in order to be successful at work, no matter how senior or junior the job. That is why a sensible employer wants to see how you set about it, and the best way to test whether your claims to be a brilliant influencer match up with reality is to experience you in action. The questions the panel is asking itself are:
Am I convinced by this person? How self-confident is he or she?
Do I like him or her?
If this person were giving a talk to staff, how would they respond?
Am I enjoying listening and watching?
Can I follow the thread of what this person is saying?
Being authentic
The best way to deliver any presentation is to be your authentic self. The secret of achieving authenticity and relaxed authority is first to imagine that you are speaking naturally to people you really care about. You must want to engage them. You must also want to share your own excitement and interest in what you are saying and this means being super-alert to their moment-by-moment responses. Let real emotion come into it: if you feel passionate, show it in how you speak.
The content
It would be rare for selectors to spring the subject of the presentation on to you. Ninety-nine percent of the time you will be informed at least a few days in advance. Organisations show a distinct lack of imagination here. In my experience the topic is most usually a variant of one of these
What would you expect to achieve in your first six months in the job?
What are the challenges facing this team and how would you deal with them?
In effect these are the same topic. You cannot talk about either without having researched what the job and the organisation needs. So the presentation is one place where you get the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the quality of your research.
The temptation with either topic is to believe that you should batter the panel into submission by doing a mini-McKinsey analysis of their problems, replete with mind-blowing statistics and very long words. This is a terrible idea. First, you are still an observer and however excellent your research, even when you have managed to get some privileged insider information, you will have limited access to what is actually going on in the organisation. Secondly, despite the fact that all organisations believe they are unique the problems that beset most of them are extremely similar: staff who are not motivated, predatory activity from competitors, spiralling costs, lack of innovation, climates of fear and suspicion, poor leadership – and so on. The chances that you will say something startlingly insightful are small. The other danger is that organisational problems are multi-layered. Once you start really trying to analyse all the problems, there is a severe risk that you will get carried away and over-run your allotted time. Beware: if you do this it simply reduces the amount of time that the panel has left for your interview and will leave the impression that you are too fond of your own voice.