YouTube Transcript:
How to Stand Out in an Onsite Interview - My Secret Weapon for In Person Interviews!

- Hey, everyone.
This is Self Made Millennial.
I'm Madeline Mann.
Today I'm going to teach you a strategy
of how to stand out in an on-site interview.
This strategy can be such a huge help
to people who don't have a lot of experience
in the field they're going into.
It'll really help you compete
against people who are more experienced.
And those of you who are experienced,
this is going to give you a big edge
against a lot of the other candidates.
What this is all gonna be about
is a strategy that almost no one does,
and it's all about this.
♪ The BAMF binder ♪
I call this my BAMF binder,
and I've been making them
every time I'm on the job market.
I didn't think it was anything special,
but now that I'm on the other side of the interview table,
I realize that almost no one does this,
and when they do,
it is hugely impactful.
I'm gonna show you exactly how to put a BAMF binder together
in this video.
What's tough is that generally the professions
that do create portfolios are more visual professions,
like a photographer or a designer.
Not all of us have visual jobs,
so we're gonna have to get a little bit more creative
at showing visually what we do,
but it's a lot easier than you think.
This is basically a sweet catalog
that they get to flip through
to see what it'd be like to work with you.
So what to include in your BAMF binder.
(rock music)
The first thing you can do is include academic items.
This can be a powerful way
to overcome the no experience paradox,
where you need experience to get experience.
Most of you, from attending these universities and programs,
actually have experience,
but it's not the experience in a traditional sense.
It's more project-based
or you headed up certain events.
And those things can be extremely impactful
as long as people fully understand the context.
And then the more years you are out of school,
you can start to leave off this section.
What to include in your academic section?
Throw in your college transcripts,
but only if you're proud of them.
Include copies and images of awards you've gotten
and even write a little description under each one.
Include summaries and slides from your favorite projects.
Possibly you competed in some competitions,
so include photos of you at that competition
as well as any information about where you placed in it.
Include papers you've written,
and then include any other visuals,
such as a photo as you president
of an organization on campus,
or a screenshot of where you were quoted
in an article for the campus newspaper.
So second, you'll also wanna make sure you obviously have
your professional items in there, as well.
First thing I would do is put your resume in there.
Include printouts of any articles
or blog posts you've written about the industry.
Include any certificates of trainings you've done.
Think about what you've done professionally
and how do you present that visually.
I think the most powerful thing you can do
is try to put things that you've accomplished into graphs.
People love graphs.
- This is a pie chart describing my favorite bars.
And this is a bar graph describing my favorite pies.
- Maybe you work in customer service,
and over the course of the last year
you've been at your job,
your number of people who you've helped
each week has escalated.
Or if you're someone who handles
a bunch of schedules you're coordinating,
you could have a graph of
how many inquiries are coming to you
and how many things you're scheduling a day.
The sheer volume of that could be very impressive,
especially when shown visually in numbers.
Also include presentation slides
that you've done professionally,
and include summaries about how the presentation went
and what were the results of it.
This is truly an exercise in creativity
of thinking how you can capture what you do in your job
and put it visually in a book,
and I really challenge you to do that.
Third thing to include in a BAMF binder
are some personal items.
Include fliers of events that you've put on or spoke at.
Include anywhere that you appeared online,
like, on the news or in an article.
Simply being out in the world and doing things
and being known is attractive to an employer.
Maybe you have an online presence or you have a following,
and it might not be related
to your industry or line of work,
but showing those numbers of followers
and your analytics of some of your pages.
A few bonus things you could even add
is maybe a list of your role models.
This is not something that you are gonna go down the list
and explain to someone who is interviewing you,
but, you know, if you just write, you know,
a few role models on there
and your interviewer's flipping through your binder
and they see that you love Michelle Kwan,
and they also love figure skating,
and then you two bond over what hard work it is to,
you know, become a figure skater,
and suddenly they're in love with you
and really have no doubt in your work ethic.
Stuff like that happens.
Just throw the kind of information in there,
and you never know where you might strike a human bond.
And then finally,
you could also include a list of your favorite books.
So now you have an idea
about what could go in the BAMF binder.
Let's talk about creating it.
(rock music)
There are a few different strategies
on how to think about best way to create it for you.
One way to go about it is to look at your resume,
and on your resume hopefully you have listed
under each job your key achievements,
and look at those achievements and think about,
how can I present each one of those bullet points
in a visual way?
Another way to think about it is think about your strengths.
One strength you might feel is one of your strongest suits
is that you are highly organized.
Possibly you find your most amazing organized spreadsheet.
It's color coded showing that amazing research you did
and having it so organized.
That would really show that you are highly organized
and get that through to the interviewer.
When creating visuals about projects or initiatives you did,
take on the PAR approach.
PAR stands for problem, action, result.
So when you're creating these visuals,
instead of putting an entire presentation
or study that you did,
you could break it down into the problem, the action,
and then the result.
Here's an example of a PAR I did.
This is for a training facilitation I put on.
So I start out with a summary
about why the training was needed,
action I took,
so how I put the training program together,
and then this page I have the results.
So I did a follow-up survey
which included both quantitative and qualitative data,
and I included both.
I included some percents as well as some quotes
from people who did the actual training,
and then a quick summary of why it was impactful.
Another tip on creating this binder is make it look nice.
Originally when I started making visual tools like this,
I had it all in a folder
and it was kind of all looseleaf
and I would pull it out and it was,
pages were folded.
Put in some extra time to make sure it looks nice
and neat and professional.
Another thing that I've seen people do
is put their BAMF binder in a digital version
on their website,
though even if you've put this online on a website,
I still think you should bring in something physical
when you come in for the interview,
but if you have your heart set on being digital,
I recommend having a tablet where there's a presentation
or a series of PDFs where they can quickly flip through it
as if it was a binder.
So this final section is about using the BAMF binder.
This is where it comes to life.
(rock music)
There are a few key rules
about using your binder in an interview.
I would recommend you only show your binder in person.
I don't believe that you should drop off the binder
at a hiring manager's desk
or that you should send a ton of PDFs attached to an email
and expect someone to read all of it.
This binder doesn't really come to life usually
unless you're there telling the story with it.
The way I use my BAMF binder in interviews
is bring it in with me to the interview
and I'll have my resume out
and I'll set the binder and the resume
on the table in front of me.
I'll hand my resume to the person who's interviewing me,
and then I won't open the binder until they ask a question
where I will want to reference the binder.
They might ask me,
"What was a challenge that you faced
"and how'd you overcome it?"
And I might start to tell the story
about a project I worked on
and do the whole PAR, problem, action, result,
and while I'm telling that story,
I'll be flipping through my binder and saying,
"Well, so this is where it started,"
and then walking them through the presentation I did.
And so it's a tool to help me tell the story.
And then once I've started telling a story
about something in my binder,
they might be interested to see it themselves,
and so they might ask to look through it,
or I'll start flipping through
and showing them other things.
In some interviews,
the binder stays closed the whole time,
and that is okay.
I just wanna make sure that you all
aren't walking into interviews with a rehearsed speech
of how you walk through each page of your binder,
because that just won't come off as authentic.
It will be too forced.
And you really want the interview
to take itself where it may
and have the binder be this amazing tool
that will help you at certain points.
(rock music)
So this is my BAMF binder.
It's quite a few years old.
But I'll show you a few things that I put in it
to give you maybe some inspiration.
On these following pages,
I wanted to emphasize how I'm great at building processes.
These are a bunch of guides.
A guide to hiring,
a training curriculum I built,
guide to becoming a manager.
I didn't wanna put all these guides in this binder
because no one would want to go through and read it,
but you can kind of see from these images,
you can get a glimpse of
the kind of things I was putting in this guide.
I was trying to send the signal that I am really great
at taking something ambiguous
and putting structure around it.
Here's an example of some graphs I put.
People loved looking at this page.
The numbers really kind of drew them in.
There's nothing in this page that's, like,
super amazing statistics,
but it kind of painted a picture
of the population I was working with,
some of the results of some of the projects I worked on,
and it just gave, like, a good visual summary.
This is my master's thesis.
I just popped the whole 40-page thing in here.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that.
I should've done a quick summary page right here.
Here's another PAR-type visual I included.
This one was done in a before and after format.
I talked about how I gathered lots of data,
synthesized it, decided to make different changes,
and the results of those changes,
thus the before and after style.
So those are all the tips I have for you today.
I really hope that you all decide
to make your own BAMF binders.
I'm serious.
It really is a game-changer if done well.
If you already do this,
then you need to get in the comments
and give more recommendations
and tell people the results that you've seen from this.
This is a new channel,
so please pop a like on this video.
Also, please subscribe.
I will have these videos coming at you every single week,
and I don't want you to miss one.
That's all I've got.
Thanks and see you next time.
(rock music)