The One Thing You Must Prepare For Your Next Job Interview

It's pretty typical to prepare for an upcoming job interview by looking up the company's favorite interview questions, bios of your interviewers, and all the other typical preparation activities. But one issue that often gets short shrift during interview prep is reflecting on highly detailed experiences from the past few years of your career.

You'll want to recall all the nitty gritty details from your most noteworthy or meaningful work experiences over the past few years. Here's why you want to have as much detail as possible about important team or leadership experiences, moments of overcoming challenges, learning and growing, etc.

We know from the landmark Hiring For Attitude research that great and not-great candidates answer interview questions quite differently. Great candidates will have a long history of amazing accomplishments, of course, so they'll naturally have better experiences to share in their interview answers. But beyond that, high performers display other signs in their interview responses.

For example, great candidates tend to give longer answers with more nitty-gritty details than lesser candidates. That's why, in the study Words That Cost You The Job Interview, we discovered that low-performing candidates used 40% more adverbs (e.g., "very," "really," and "quickly") than their higher-performing peers.

Insecurity, lack of experience, and more can spark a need to embellish the facts and cause candidates to qualify their words with adverbs to 'amp' things up. Instead of sharing the details of a specific time they had a brilliant idea, a not-great candidate might instead say, "I was quickly coming up with the very best ideas."

You don't want to be the candidate that spews trite cliches; it's far better to wow the interviewer with great specifics about your past experiences. To that end, you'll want to do some deep reflection about your past experiences. Here's an easy way to start:

First, you'll want to identify the types of experiences you'll need to have for this potential new job. Experiences with teams, showing leadership, emotional intelligence and resilience, building buy-in, and resolving conflicts are pretty universal experiences and competencies that companies want to see these days.

Second, think hard about each of those issues. Start by thinking about, for example, every experience you've had working on a team. Once you've got a comprehensive list of them in your head, pinpoint the best and most meaningful ones. Now try to recall all the nitty gritty details about those experiences. Where did your team meet, and when? Who were the people on that team? What departments were they from? What specifically did the group accomplish? What were the minor victories you experienced along the way? Try to flesh out as much detail as you can.

Of course, you're not going to share every single one of those details; that would be mind-numbing for the interviewer. This is first about forcing yourself to bring that experience fully back into focus. And second, this is about being able to describe your great accomplishments and experiences in such a way that your listener feels like they were there with you.

Puffery is pretty easy to spot, and it sounds remarkably false and insincere. The fastest way to spot a liar is to listen for people who won't give direct and specific answers to your questions. If your interview responses don't contain enough specifics to convey your firsthand experience with this issue, your answers can end up sounding like they came from a book. And there are already far too many candidates who give that impression.

Too many candidates skip the deep reflection about these important experiences, thinking that they're already easy to recall. But no matter how recent the experience, it's easy to miss the nitty gritty details and nuance that bring stories to life. That's why it's critical that you spend a few minutes bringing those accomplishments to the forefront of your mind.