College seniors should be on full blast with job interviews as graduation day approaches. There has been countless articles and posts about how to master an interview and what your resume should look like. All good stuff to know but much of which is cliché and stuff your college counselor probably has been prepping you with if you took career initiative.
Last week I wrote an article about how employers should offer their new hires a professional development allowance in order to both attract talent and better their teams. Today I want to offer a new take for job candidates to stand out while they are sitting down with potential employers.
New hires can all list their GPAs and answer a few interview questions but do you have a true understanding of how you are hardwired? On your next interview, I would offer a “Motivational Manual” to how your managers and peers can ensure you stay on your A-game once you get the job. Offering true introspection to the people who will be responsible for you and leading you should be a home-run in terms of standing out in the crowd.
Your Motivational Manual should simply highlight times in your life that you were highly motivated. I am sure you were asked about these times during the common interview anyway. But let’s dissect what was really going on in those highly productive times so that you and your employer can look to recreate the environment so they get the most YOU for their investment… which will also lead to you climbing the ladder faster.
To build a Motivation Manual, first think about a time where you were charged up. Then start to answer some questions:
- What was the end-goal that you were chasing?
- What sparked the motivation to go after this goal whole-heartedly?
- What were you really chasing? Money? Recognition? Mastering a Skill? A relationship?
- What did your days look like?
- Who were you surrounded by? A coach? A teacher? Peers?
- How do those people positively or negatively affect your motivation? Carrot? Stick?
- What were you eating? When were you eating? What other habits do you remember?
- Where were you getting the most work done?
- What did the physical location look like? Did you have certain pictures up in your office, etc?
Now do this for three to five times in your life that you were highly motivated and pick up on the commonalities. This can help you craft up a one page document that helps you understand how to get into your super-charged productivity state and also allows the leaders you wish to look for know how to get the highest ROI from you. This should lead to great things for both parties!
About
Eddy Ricci, Jr., has been labeled as “the emerging expert in developing Gen Y sales professionals” by the chairman of Publicis Kaplan Thaler and is also noted as “understanding what motivates Gen Y sales teams. He is on my radar and should be on yours” by international speaker and NY Times bestselling author, Erik Qualman. Eddy is the author of The Growth Game: A Millennial’s Guide to Professional Development and serves as the director of a unique training and development collaborative platform that services financial planning firms in the northeast where he has arguably worked with more Gen Y financial professionals than anyone in the country over the past four years. He is the founder of The Growth Game, LLC. ,a professional development company with a focus on building sales and leadership programs.
