Increase Your Value For Interviews, Reviews, and Retrospecitves

“Tell me about your approach.”

😳🥵 You’re frozen, staring at the Zoom screen. The interview was going so well until now. Was she asking about how you work with others? Or the literal steps you take? Maybe how you collaborate with teams across time zones?

The possibilities are endless and the last thing you want to do is ramble and lose your interviewer. 

I work with so many ✨insanely talented ✨creatives who struggle to convey their value, impact, and process during evaluations or interviews. When you’re a creative professional, your work usually doesn’t tie directly to ROI or a KPI. And that makes for a really sticky situation… Job security? What job security? 

It would feel a lot better to have your value elevator pitch locked and loaded, right?

Your signature process, aka “approach,” aka “style” is highly valuable when you figure out what it is and how to leverage it. It isn’t just about how you approach a project or solve a problem. It’s about how a project takes shape because *you’re* involved.

See, your process produces RESULTS, whether you’re aware of it or not. So, when you take time to understand the impact of your unique process on the initiative or border company goals, that’s money. Figuratively and literally 😅

Say your process includes a collaborative meeting with other departments that will be affected by or leveraging your Creatives or Copy… For example’s sake, let’s say you meet with Field Sales to identify the necessary collateral they need to help close deals. Because you had that meeting, you now know they need XYZ asset. Something that wasn’t part of the original plan but now will be included. And after rollout, this asset results in a 10% lift in close-won cases. 

You added 10% more value there. And you’ve just increased your chances at that new role or pay bump because you’ve tied your process to a result.

Want to know how to identify your unique approach and package it, ready to be unleashed during interviews or reviews?

Here is the first technique I ever used to discover my process: 

➤ Keep a journal before, during, and after a project. Note your steps, the challenge or problem you’re facing, your approach to solve it, project results, and key takeaways.

➤ After the fact, conduct your own Retrospective and read back your entries to see more clearly what your overall process was. This can look like who you include, who you exclude and why. It can be certain types of foundational or background work you do that others don’t spend time on. Or you can see how you learn, grow, and adapt through what kind of takeaways you wrote down.

There are so many more threads you could pull here, but start with these. Write down your process as steps and results. 

✏️Verbiage example:

“I start with a thorough brief to ensure that I create content that hits the mark. I take time at the beginning of the project to identify any missing information that might cause downstream delays. Taking this extra step has resulted in 27 out of 27 projects being delivered on time or ahead of schedule.”

See? You’re tying your PROCESS to a RESULT. These two together are crazy powerful.