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Mary is interviewing with her dream company, dressed to the nines in a business suit she hand-selected for this special day. She prepared by reading the most popular interviewing how-to’s and wrote her answers down to the most common interviewing questions -- and memorized them. She put on her brightest smile and wore her most daring perfume. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Or so she thought. The dream company asked Mary a question she never saw coming, and her confidence quickly deflated following a flurry of stuttering and starting. “How do you handle conflict?”

How many of us have experienced this same situation before? Most interviews can often go without a hitch, but more often than not an interviewer throws us that one curve ball.

And, like Mary, the pre-planned answers we memorized don’t always to fit. We can read articles and books and blogs on how to answer certain types of interview questions, but the true answer can elude us in the interview because managers are always one step ahead of the interviewing experts. Acing the interview is less in knowing the answers than it is in self-confidence, and self-confidence results simply by knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. The Keyword Approach to interviewing is different from most approaches as it allows you to focus less on the answers, and more on your experience. With the Keyword Approach, Mary’s confidence would not have deflated with embarrassment during her interview.

When training employment candidates for interviews, I’ve always advised that confidence derives from simply knowing your strengths and weaknesses when you walk into an interview. If you know your strengths, then you understand what you can bring to the team and to the company overall. If you identify your weaknesses, it shows that you recognize your own workstyle and areas of improvement. Anyone can memorize an answer to a question, but only someone with confidence can perform the job responsibilities at an adequate level.

Memorizing answers for an interview is a failed approach for two reasons. Answers can’t predict the questions. Mary could memorize every answer in an interview training manual, but managers are always looking for new and attention-grabbing ways to see if interviewers can solve problems. Questions can be direct, such as, “Tell me what your strengths are.” Often times, a manager will ask the same question in a different way: “Tell me what your supervisor would say about your work ethics.” Same question, but potentially a land mine.

Memorizing answers also sound different than speaking from the heart. A canned answer may sound either obtuse or long-winded. If Mary had written answers down prior to the interview, she may have written several paragraphs and memorized those as her answers. In most cases, that’s too long.

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Instead, the clear winning approach to any interview is the Keyword Approach. Like plugging two or three words into an internet search engine to deliver optimum results, keeping a few good keywords in mind about your strengths and weaknesses can result in a boon of relevant answers.

In Mary’s second interview with her dream company, another difficult question came up again, but asked in a different way. “Tell me about a time you handled a fight with a co-worker.”

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This time she was prepared with the Keyword Approach. One of her keywords for her strengths was “communication.” She knew immediately upon hearing this question that “communication” could be woven into the answer, and she responded, confidently: “I find that communication can solve all conflicts in the workplace. Once I had a disagreement with a co-worker regarding an error in quality control that he believed he never made. I asked him to communicate with me how he obtained his results and he detailed everything step-by-step. In the end, we discovered the error together. As long as we keep the lines of communication open in the workplace, conflicts can be resolved efficiently.”

Keywords are easy to remember and will help jog Mary’s memory for those past situations that showcase her talent and demonstrate how she solved difficult problems. By knowing the keywords related to her strengths and weaknesses, she can focus on the real red meat in her interview answers: her experience.

Here’s a prescription Mary was given to have a successful interview: Think of keywords for the following areas!

5 keywords that can describe your strengths.

2 keywords that describe your weaknesses are areas to improve on

2 keywords that describe your aspirations and goals

2 keywords that describe your impression of the company

Combined with a story that serves as proof, keywords place the interviewer into Mary’s shoes during her answers, and allows her personality to shine through. The dream company realizes that they have met with a problem-solver, and Mary leaves the interview feeling confidence and peace of mind knowing that she gave a stellar performance.

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Thank you for reading my strategy on interviewing! I was a recruiter for 7 years and can give more advice articles on this subject if it is desired... just upvote this post and leave a comment with areas that you would like to see written about. Thank you and follow me @professorx for new article feed updates!