Interview Tips: Job-to-Be-Done
When you discover a job description online or receive one from a headhunter, how often do you ask yourself: 'What's the REAL job-to-be-done here?' Most of the time, there is always more to a job than what's in the job description. Figuring out the real "job-to-be-done" helps you pitch yourself and your ideas better and increases your chances to get the right job on the right terms.
Job-to-be-done
The late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen proposed a mental model of "job-to-be-done": you need to figure out the real job your product does. You might be surprised by how far it can be from your initial assumptions. If you figure it out, bingo: you can better align your product development and marketing efforts around this job to be done.
In his book "How Will You Measure Your Life", Christensen illustrates the jobs-to-be-done concept with the help of a story about milkshakes at a fast-food restaurant chain. They discovered that customers were using milkshakes for two different jobs. One is what you would traditionally assume: to treat your kids or yourself after a meal. However, the morning customers were "hiring" the milkshakes for something else - to make their commute more enjoyable. Following this discovery, the restaurant chain developed two variants of the milkshake to better do these two distinct jobs: a thicker morning milkshake that would last the entire commute, and a more liquid, traditional version for the afternoon job.
What works for milkshakes, works for our job search strategy! Let's see how we can uncover a job-to-be-done of a job.
Start with Why
I like the idea of mapping anything we do, as an individual or as a company, using the theory of change framework.
The first two blocks - the Input and the Activity - are the HOW of your work: your resources, skills and actual tasks.
The third block - the Output - deals with WHAT. These are your immediate, short term deliverables.
A standard job description often covers only the HOW and the WHAT of the job. However, the real job-to-be-done does not sit there.
You need to look for the WHY.
The Theory for Change framework for your job
As Simon Sinek in famously said in "Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action",
People don't buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.
So we follow his advice and start with WHY. But how exactly? That’s where we need our super simple and super useful 2x2 matrix.
2x2 Jobs-To-Be-Done Discovery Matrix
To quote Jeffrey Fox's "How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients",
Customers buy for only two reasons: to feel good or to solve a problem…
So the first dimension of our matrix are the two primary reasons for the job to be done: "solve a problem" and "feel good"; the former is practical, the latter- deals with emotions and aspirations.
The second dimension is the perspective we take to look at the job-to-be-done: we should examine what are the jobs to be done both for the organization that hires us and the individual(s) - the hiring manager and other stakeholders.
This results in the following 2x2 jobs-to-be-done discovery matrix. When you prepare for a job interview, or to pitch an idea, you need to explore jobs-to-be-done in all the four quadrants.
2x2 Jobs-To-Be-Done Discovery Matrix
Let's take a closer look at each of the four quadrants.
A - Organization x Solve the Problem
The first important thing about this quadrant is that the job-to-be-done is not the activity, nor the output. Rather, it the outcome, the underlying problem you help to solve. Its about the value.
Remember the story of Mika, the Japanese-English translator from our earlier post "Man on the Moon"? When asked which value she provided, her first answer was 'translating documents from Japanese to English'. However, when she asked herself WHY the company needed her well translated documents, she understood that the job-to-be-done the law firm was hiring her for was to win a lawsuit.
The second important thing about this quadrant is that, to quote Jeffrey Fox again,
the solution to the problem can always be expressed in financial terms - in dollars and cents. Rainmakers don’t sell fasteners or valves or washing machines or training programs or golf clubs. Rainmakers sell money. They sell reduced downtime, fewer repairs, better gas mileage, higher deposit interest, more wheat per acre, more yardage per swing. Rainmakers help the customer see the money.
Tip for the job interview preparation: In quadrant A, you goals are
Find the job-to-be-done: the real problem(s) the company/business unit/department/team needs to solve and why. What is at stake?
"Show the money": design your presentation of your past experiences as the value you have brought: increase of gains, decrease of costs, avoidance of errors etc.
B - Organization x Feel Good
Here, we take the outcome we discovered in quadrant A and ask as many why's as necessary to get to the impact, to the ultimate why - in sync with the mission of the organization. Quadrant A was about the value. Quadrant B is about values.
Remember the famous story about NASA janitor? His answer to JFK's question what he was doing for NASA was "Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the Moon".
Another great story on how mission and purpose can illuminate even the most tedious tasks comes from Richard Feynman's book "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman". How did he manage to get the total engagement from the new recruits in the Special Engineer Detachment for the Manhattan project? By telling them what the project was about:
There were clever boys from high school, who had engineering ability, and the Army collected them together in the Special Engineer Detachment. They sent them up to Los Alamos. They put them in barracks and they would tell them nothing. Then they came to work and what they had to do was work on IBM machines, punching holes, numbers that they didn’t understand, nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that the technical guys know what we’re doing. Oppenheimer went and talked to the security people and got special permission. So I had a nice lecture in which I told them what we were doing, and they were all excited. We’re fighting a war. We see what it is. They knew what the numbers meant. If the pressure came out higher, that meant there was more energy released and so on and so on. They knew what they were doing. Complete transformation! They began to invent ways of doing it better. They improved the scheme. They worked at night. They didn’t need supervising in the night. They didn’t need anything. They understood everything. They invented several of the programs that we used and so forth. So my boys really came through and all that had to be done was to tell them what it was, that’s all. It’s just, don’t tell them, they’re punching holes, please. As a result, although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months, which is about nearly ten times as fast.
Tip for the job interview preparation: In this quadrant, you goals are
Find the job-to-be-done: Research and conduct informational interviews to understand the real (not declared) culture/mission of the organization. How strong is it? How compelling?
Explore your fit: See how your own values align with the company culture. Will it be a good fit? If you think the culture is really strong and you see yourself as a good fit, find the stories from your past that highlight your alignment with the company values.
Now we move to the individual level, the psychological dimension comes into play and makes it really interesting.
C - Individual x Solve the Problem
Here our aim is to uncover what are the problem(s) the individual who is conducting the interview has and how our work will help her solve those problems.
It can boil down to outsourcing: you free up the person's time / resources for a more valuable activity. One of the recent guests to my sessions, an expert in the investment operations, made an absolutely brilliant pitch by selling to an imaginary Asset Manager a bright and worriless future, in which he will be able to focus on what he does the best - his portfolio management strategies , while she will make sure those strategies get flawlessly implemented across operations.
Another possibility is when a project that the hiring person needs to deliver has very tight timelines (e.g. writing a book), your job-to-be-done is to help finish the project on time by adding an extra pair of eyes / hands / extra brainpower. Sometimes projects with tight deadlines end up in happy marriages - a great example is the love story of Dostoevsky and his wife who met when he needed to finish a novel within 4 weeks, otherwise he would have to forfeit his copyright for this novel and all future novels to his publisher for the next 10 years.
Tip for the job interview preparation: In quadrant C, you goals are
Find the job-to-be-done: try to uncover the incentives and challenges of the hiring person, as well as any other key stakeholders, especially those who will interview you. What is at stake for each of them? Is it in line with the priorities of the organization? Whenever my guest is preparing for an upcoming interview, we always try to profile individual interviewers and make some educated guesses about their jobs-to-be done.
"Show the money/Be the solution": pitch yourself not in terms of tasks and activities, but for the value you bring. Similar to A, just at the individual level.
D - Individual x Feel Good
In this quadrant, we are in the most fascinating and probably the most impactful area that can give you leverage in the interview process and negotiations. It is the realm of psychology and emotions. What does the person really needs to "feel good"?
Victor Cheng in his book "Case Interview Secrets", gives a nice description of what a CEO is actually buying when hiring a strategy consultant:
On the surface, it seems like a client outsources to a consulting firm the analytical work needed to make a big decision. Upon deeper inspection, we see that the client (the individual executive, not the corporation) is highly uncertain about an upcoming business decision. In many cases, the decision is a “bet your career”–type decision with extremely high stakes for the client’s personal career.
The client’s psychological motivation for hiring the consulting firm is to reduce the anxiety associated with a lack of clarity about the decision. In other words, the client isn’t buying just analysis; she is buying confidence and reassurance about a particular course of action.
Ultimately, consulting is the transference of confidence (in a decision) from the consultant to the client.
Some of the underlying individual motivations/jobs-to-be-done can be well hidden. You will need time and patience to uncover the hidden agenda, like did a Korean MBA graduate from Chris Voss's book "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It":
Returning to Seoul after getting his MBA, he wanted to work in his company’s consumer electronics division, rather than the semiconductor section, where he had been stationed…He had gotten two job offers from the consumer products division. He phoned his ex-boss from the United States. “You should reject this offer and find your spot here with the semiconductor division,” the ex-boss said.
…He contacted a friend who was a senior manager in the human resources department to check on the company’s regulations. He found there was no rule that he had to stay within his division, but he did need his ex-boss’s blessing to switch.
He phoned his ex-boss again. This time he asked questions to draw him out. “Is there any reason you want me to go to the semiconductor headquarters?” he asked. “It’s the best position for you,” the ex-boss said. “The best position?” he asked. “It sounds like there’s no regulation that I have to remain with the semiconductor division,” he said. “Hmm,” the ex-boss said. “I don’t think there is any.” “Then will you please tell me what made you decide that I remain in the semiconductor headquarters?” he asked. The ex-boss said he needed someone to help him network at headquarters between the semiconductor and consumer products divisions. “So it sounds like you could approve my new position no matter which division, as long as I was in headquarters and could help you communicate better with the top managers.” “That’s right,” he said. “I must admit I need your help in headquarters.”
It turns out his former superior would be up for a promotion to vice president in two years. He desperately wanted to move up into this job. He needed someone in headquarters to lobby the company CEO.
Bingo! By asking questions that got him to “that’s right,” my student had achieved his goal. He also got his boss to reveal two “Black Swans,” the unspoken, underlying breakthrough dynamics of a negotiation.
2x2 jobs-to-be-done matrix in practice
After a not-to-short introduction, it’s time to put the 2x2 into practice.
Next time when you will have to prepare for a job interview, take an A4 sheet of paper, divide it into 4 quadrants, You can break each level down into as many dimension as needed (organisation = company, business unit, department, team etc; individual - hiring manager, all persons who will interview you, any other important stakeholders). And then think about the job-to-be-done in each of them. If you feel that you do not have enough information to make an educated guess, it will be the area that you will need to explore either during the informational interviews, or via online research, or - by preparing the right questions for your interviewer.
Please write me to share your experience with 2x2 jobs-to-be-done matrix. How has it helped you to be more successful in your interviews? In pitching your ideas?
Illustration: Jake Carter