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Of course, it would be absurd to try to quantify every single one of your tasks or accomplishments. Still, at the very least, you can be qualitatively speci?c. For example, instead of simply saying, “I’m multilingual,” you could say, “I am ?uent in French, Spanish, and Chinese.” Or, instead of saying that your artwork has been shown in “many galleries,” you might say that your work has been shown in “galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Denver, and New York.”
Other statements that do not need to be quanti?ed to convey the weight of accomplishment would be the following:
• I won an award for being the employee of the year.
• I’m president of the Society for Historical Research.
• I graduated with highest honors.
• My customers have described me as dependable, honest, and fair.
• My last boss would describe me as dynamic, innovative, and creative.
• I created a new curriculum for self-esteem in secondary schools.
• I invented a new type of kitchen sponge.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
Notice that the results are speci?c, concrete, and measurable. And notice that, they all, at the bottom line, lead to some sort of direct bene?t or monetary pro?t to the company. There are ?ve ways to quantify your accomplishments:
1. By numbers of people, places, things, units, or actions, such as “handled 200 telephone calls per day.”
2. By amounts of money saved or earned, such as “$300,000 savings” or “$100,000 in pro?ts.”
3. In percentages (or fractions), such as “70 percent decrease in waste”, or “33 percent increase in production.”
4. By time saved, which usually means money saved.
5. By a subjective or objective scale or rank, such as “4.8 on a scale of 1 to 5 for increased customer satisfaction” or “moving from number 360 to number 121 on the Fortune 500 list.”
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
• My team identi?ed four as-yet-unknown species of ?ora and fauna in the mountainous regions of California.
• I reduced overhead by 25 percent while increasing profits by 43 percent annually.
• I designed a microchip that is 23 percent more reliable than its predecessor.
• I introduced an on-site safety program that decreased workers’ compensation claims by 18 percent in 1 year.
• I process more than 250 customer requests daily.
• I won an award for decreasing materials costs from $6.41 per inch to $5.20 per inch.
• I have overseen the landscape design on over 200 projects, costing up to $350,000 per project.
After reading all these different Q statements, you probably see a pattern emerging. First, they all contain action words—verbs such as designed, initiated, saved, processed, and handled. Second, they all end with some sort of number, expressed in monetary amounts, time, and percentages, and numerical amounts of people, actions, or things.
The “formula” for a Q statement would look something like this:
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
• Since I took over as the CEO of this pharmaceuticals company, we have gone from number 347 to number 197 in the list of Fortune 500 companies.
• As a program manager, I instituted and developed a production
process that increased pro?ts by 42 percent in the second quarter.
• I acted as a regional manager for 12 offices overseeing 147 salespeople throughout the Midwest.
• As a human resources manager, I initiated and developed a retraining program that improved employee satisfaction from 2.7 to 4.1 on a scale of 1 to 5.
• As a production manager, I decreased production time by 6 days a month, resulting in a savings of $360,000 quarterly.
• I maintain a caseload of 65 patients.
• I built a prototype that could tolerate 15 percent more stress than its predecessor.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
Interviewers these days want to hear speci?c data. If you don’t provide the interviewer with concrete, quanti?ed examples of what you did, the interviewer will very likely ask you to. It’s much more impressive to be prepared to offer them yourself, without prompting. And in the opposite direction, it is most troubling if the employer asks for examples of your skills and you can’t think of any. To prevent being caught off guard this way, you’ll want to prepare several Q statements (targeted to each speci ?c job) before every interview. If you can learn how to quantify your skills now, it will become an ingrained habit, at your command whenever you need to use it.
Let’s take a look at the structure and content of some other concrete, quanti?ed statements:
• Since I’ve become the director of operations, I’ve been responsible for helping the company to decrease waste by 20 percent, resulting in an overall savings of $1.2 million a year.
• I ran a bicycle sales and repair store with 17employees and gross
annual sales of $193,000.
• I operated a multiline phone system and personally handled over 200 calls per day.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
STATEMENT A: I am a good communicator.
STATEMENT B: I have lectured to more than 12,000 people worldwide
on the topic of personal ?nancial planning, and I have worked individually with clients from 19 to 90 years old.
Which of these two statements seems the most evocative? From which one can you make a mental picture? Which will you remember?
Statement B is more descriptive and more concrete. It does not simply make a claim or advance a personal opinion. Statement B uses actual facts and numbers to speci?cally demonstrate the skills. This kind of clari?cation gives the listener evidence of the skill and a good idea of the scope of it. Let’s take another example:
STATEMENT A: I’m an excellent manager.
STATEMENT B: I have managed 135 people on projects budgeted for over $2.1 million.
If you really do have an accomplishment of such magnitude as the one above, which statement would serve you better? Which statement would help the interviewer to make the best decision about your quali?cations? While “I’m an excellent manager” is a ?ne thing to say, it would be a lot stronger if it were supported by statement B.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
Each of us has some unique capability, waiting for realization.
—George H. Bender
In the last chapter, you identi?ed your skills, personal traits, competencies, and gifts—a task that’s surprisingly difficult for most job seekers. In fact, this crucial bit of “homework” puts you well ahead of most other job applicants. It’s an essential step toward your ultimate goal—being able to clearly describe your skills and quali?cations to an interviewer. The next step will be to use these skills to create pithy, memorable, quanti?able “sound bytes” about yourself, assertions we’ll call Q statements.
What Is a Q Statement?
A Q statement is a sentence (or group of sentences) that expresses a numerical measurement of some action or accomplishment you have performed. It is quantitative. A Q statement is not vague; it’s exact. For example, rather than saying you “increased productivity,” using a Q statement, you would say that you “increased productivity by 25 percent.”
Why quantify a skill? Let’s take a look at the following statements and see which of them bears the most weight and leaves the longest-lasting impression:
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
List the 6 skills you picked from your general skills list:
1. ____________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________
4. ____________________________________________________
5. ____________________________________________________
6. ____________________________________________________
List your 6 to 10 job-speci?c skills:
1. __________________________________________________
2. __________________________________________________
3. __________________________________________________
4. __________________________________________________
5. __________________________________________________
6. __________________________________________________
7. __________________________________________________
8. __________________________________________________
9. __________________________________________________
10. __________________________________________________
List your 3 to 4 strongest personal traits:
1. ____________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________
4. ____________________________________________________
List your three top competencies:
1. ____________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________
Write a few sentences about your gift.
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
I’d like you to carefully read through what you’ve just written. I am willing to bet, right now, that there is not another person on this planet who has the exact same list as you have, with the exact same stories to tell about how and where they used their skills.
In fact, your skills arsenal is as unique as you are. Your talents are to be treasured. I hope you give yourself a good, hearty pat on the back! The following chapters will help you make sure you can convince an employer that you deserve to be paid well for your particular package of talents.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
• What quality would you like to be remembered for after your death? Is it your perseverance against all odds? Is it your ability to inspire others? Your brilliance? Your compassion? Your technical expertise? Your leadership?
• Is your gift . . . Your kindness? Your re?ned artistic taste? Your vision? Your generosity?
Take a while and think about your gift. Along with all these externally oriented skills you have identi?ed in this chapter, see if you can also bring some of this gift in to the interview. Your gift makes up some of what we call your chemistry with another person. If it’s worth having (which it is), it’s worth sharing.
Taken From: Fearless Interviewing
