How to Avoid Negativity in Our Job/Career Change Story
If neediness is Number One Interview Killer, then negativity is a sure Number Two. How can we avoid negativity when we tell our job/career change story? By reframing it.
And that's how it goes.
Why We Change Jobs/Careers
When we start a new job, we are full of great expectations, overly positive and enthusiastic.
Then, the reality inevitably kicks in. We are still positive, yet we may discover a few things we wish we should have known when we signed up.
Then, some time later, comes a moment when we start thinking about changing a job, or maybe even career.
It may happen that we still love our current job, yet the new opportunity is so big, shiny and beautiful that we can simply not say no to it. Such change story line is "Love -> Bigger Love".
More frequently though, we start feeling the itch to change our job or even our career because we are unhappy with one or more aspects of our current role: a micromanaging boss, a lack of diverse and challenging projects, limited mobility, a toxic working environment, etc. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina”, "every unhappy employee is unhappy in his own way." When negative aspects outweigh positive ones, we want to make a move, to walk away from the things we can no longer tolerate. The arch of the change story is "Love -> Hate -> New Love".
The Usual Ways We Tell Our Job/Career Change Story
Then comes the moment of a job interview, with the inevitable "Tell me about yourself" question, and "Why this move?"
If the underlying story pattern is "Love->Hate->Love", here are the three typical reactions:
(Over)explain. "Why?" universally puts people on the defensive. Our first, knee-jerk reaction to "why?" is to explain what happened. And so we do, and usually overdo. Even when we start with positives, we quickly bury them under a pile of (very detailed) negatives. Good things and achievements get side-lined. As a result, we can come out as a negative person / a bore and miss a golden opportunity to enthusiastically reveal our motivations for the new job.
2. "Photoshop" the negatives. We speak in vague terms, use lots of euphemisms, like "I realized it was not a good fit". The problem? When we are being evasive, the interviewer usually feels it and it's a blow to the trust we build throughout the interview. Here again, we waste a precious opportunity to actively reveal our motivations.
3. Leave out the negatives completely. Instead, we focus mostly on the new job. The effect is the same as in the second scenario, just bigger. We make it clear why the new job is good for us, but omit to say why we are good for the job. We cannot be persuasive about our fit to the new role if our story misses its important chapters.
Can we do better? Yes we can. The little secret is reframing. We need to reframe two things: (1) our assumptions about "Why?" and (2) the way we think and talk about the negatives.
Reframing Our Assumptions About "Why?"
We need to reframe our assumptions about both the external and internal “Why?”
Reframing the External "Why?"
The "Why?" question the interviewer asks us is not a request for information, it's a request for meaning. What the interviewer is really asking is "Help me understand your motivations for making this change, help me see why this change makes sense to you".
We should not leave the interviewer second-guessing our motivation. We should actively reveal our motivation, as it is crucial for the trust we build throughout the interview. Our story and our motivation can turn out to be more important than our qualifications.
We can go one step further. There is another interesting way to use "Why?" effectively when talking about your career change. Chris Voss in "Never Split the Difference" suggests the idea
to employ the defensiveness the question triggers to get your counterpart to defend your position. It sounds weird but it works. The basic format goes like this: when you want to flip a dubious counterpart to your side, ask them: "Why would you do that?" but in the way that the "that" favours you.
"Why would you ever hire me?" Why not start your answer to the interviewer with this question?
Reframing the Internal "Why?"
When we had failures or negative experiences in our career history, we rarely truly accept them. Instead, we focus on analyzing why it happened to us, was it our fault, etc. This often leads to shame and guilt, or, on the opposite side, shifting the entire blame to others. These negative vibes will inevitably transpire in our conversation, in the stories we tell.
What if we chose to reframe the internal monologue and instead of asking "Why did that happen to me?" ask ourselves "Why did we need this experience? What are we taking away from it? What has it taught us?" We are accepting the past experiences as they are, taking away lessons, and building on them to move forward.
Reframing the Negatives
The wonderful thing about reframing is that it is entirely in our control. Though we might not change the circumstances, we may change the way we think and talk about them.
Instead of talking about things that we HATED, we can talk about the things that we were missing, things we were craving for, opportunities for professional and personal growth that were not available. As a result of this reframing, we come out as positive persons with a growth mindset and clarity about our needs and motivations.
Examples:
Instead of saying "I had a micromanaging boss", say "what was missing was a greater autonomy in decision-making".
Instead of saying "I ended up running the same kind of cookie-cutter projects over and over again", say "I was craving for more diverse projects to work on".
Instead of saying "my ideas were stifled under the bureaucracy and multiple layers of management", say "what was missing was the opportunity to fully express my entrepreneurial spirit"
Rebuilding our Change Story
We can develop the change story arch in three coherent steps:
Gratitude
Craving
What's Next
Gratitude
It's so rare that a person starts with genuine gratitude to the people she met and the experiences she had in her previous roles. It sounds so fresh, so positive, so enthusiastic.
It's a strong start to the conversation that sets the tone. We tell about what we learned - about the business and about ourselves, what projects contributed to our growth in the most significant way. Tell about the people who influenced us and helped us grow. We are grateful.
This gratitude will radiate on the interviewer as well - somehow it makes it easy to imagine that we can be as grateful to her/him too.
We highlight from the start our strengths in a way that is not arrogant or self-aggrandizing because we recognize the opportunities we had and the people who helped us on the way.
Suppose we want to move from leading transformation projects to a general management role, to have direct responsibility for a business unit or a country.
Example:
When I reflect on my time with ABC Company / career so far, I feel so grateful for how fully it engaged my creativity, my analytical skills as well as my emotional intelligence, and gave me the chance to learn about various areas of the business and design and implement digital transformation initiatives that helped the company strategically pivot in a challenging environment. I have been extremely lucky to meet, recruit and work together with brilliant people: in our diverse teams, we developed strong bonds where we challenged each other and helped each other and our business grow…
We can start even stronger, with that reframed "Why?" question. We can make the doubts explicit, say them out loud, make the interviewer understand that we are sensitive to those doubts and we are here to make her see why we are the right choice.
"Why would you hire me, if I have never managed a business unit before? When I reflect…"
Craving
The transition to this step should be "AND at the same time". Not "BUT": as much as "why?" puts us on the defense, "but" has the power to diminish and destroy the positive things we've just shared. No BUT's, please.
Example:
And at the same time, I started to crave for more impact and responsibility, for opportunities to apply my business acumen and leadership skills in a broader, more strategic context.
What's Next
Every interview is not really about what happened. It's about what happens next. Here it can be tempting to zoom in immediately on the job description of the role we are applying for. A better way is to first paint a bigger picture, leaving space for imagination and things we don't know about yet. And only then put the company and the role we are applying for into this bigger picture. It shows our clarity about the direction, about our motivations, and leaves the room open for the possibilities.
Example:
So that is why, when I think about what's next, I know it's going to mobilize all the business knowledge and strong leadership skills I have developed so far, while giving me opportunities to develop and drive business strategy and its execution. And from what I understand, these are the key attributes of the (Head of the Business Unit) role we talk about.
This story structure is great because
It is coherent and easy to follow.
It makes our motivations explicit, without skipping or glossing over our failures or negative aspects of our experiences
We come out as positive persons who know our strengths and know what we want next.
It provides the answer to the "Why would we hire you?" question, spoken or unspoken.
I am grateful to Jessica Mastors and her fantastic webinar "Why This and Why Now: How to Make Sense of an Unconventional Career" for the inspiration I got for this article. I gladly recommend the resources you can find on her website.
I hope you have found these ideas useful and try and test them in your next interviews. I am curious to know how this approach played out for you - so please don’t hesitate to reach out!