As a longtime executive at Google, Jenny Wood had a chance to figure out what she doesn't like to see in job interviews.
She prefers that candidates not ask about their work-life balance, for example, and she likes to see excitement for the role. Wood's shared some of her insights and advice in her forthcoming book, "Wild Courage," out March 25.
As far as green flags before a job interview go, "people often make the mistake of thinking that their interview is the 30 minutes that they are in the meeting," she says. The interview starts as soon as the preliminary call with the recruiter takes places -- maybe even as soon as they look at your resume.
Here's what Wood recommends doing to get noticed throughout the process.
First, consider writing a one-page plan for your role before you go into the interview to share with your prospective employer. In it, include a few pillars of the business and how you'd contribute to them.
Say you're interviewing for a company that sells packaged ice cream. You could have three pillars in your one-pager that say, "Revenue: increase chocolate ice cream revenue by 3% year over year. Operations: increase retailer satisfaction by 5% year over year. Team: lead one team bonding event in the first 90 days," says Wood.
If you're a teacher, you could have pillars that highlight metrics goals like "increase statewide math scores by 13%," she says, community goals like participating in the PTO and extracurriculars like leading the robotics team. The point is to give a sense of how you could move your employer forward through the different responsibilities of your role.
This could be made as a pdf of a PowerPoint slide or a Google slide -- however you choose to do it, you could link it to a note you send 24 hours in advance letting them know how excited you are about the opportunity.
You could also "think of a way during the interview where you can gracefully bring this up and say, 'Oh, this actually reminds me of something I wrote in the business plan. Let me just pop that up on the screen for a minute,'" she says.
Wood herself got multiple of her roles at Google using this strategy.
Your prospective employer will absolutely check your LinkedIn within 24 hours of you coming in to remind themselves of your background. If you write a positive LinkedIn post about the company you're interviewing for within a few days of the interview, it should be the first one people see when they look at your profile.
Say you're interviewing at Salesforce. Write a post that says, "hey, I just read this new article on Salesforce's new AI product," Wood says as an example, and elaborate on that. It doesn't need to be long, "keep it under seven sentences" and make sure it's not a single block of text that makes it seem like your future correspondences would be difficult to read, she says.
That post "shows you're proactive. It shows you're informed. It shows you're eager," she says.
Finally, once you find out who's interviewing you, connect with them on LinkedIn and send each person interviewing you a voice note 24 hours before your interview.
Say something like, "Hey Jane, super excited to be connecting tomorrow," says Wood. "Just wanted to let you know how eager I am to get this role. It is the perfect alignment with my skills and experience, and I think there's a lot I could do to help drive the business forward. See you tomorrow."
Wood gets numerous direct messages on LinkedIn, but when she gets a voice note, those always stand out. And "I listen to every single one," she says.
All three of these tactics are effective, Wood says, because they "keep you top of mind for the hiring manager and that makes it more likely for them to take you over someone else."