Crafting Your Winning Experience Presentation

“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”

• Mark Twain.

“Only the prepared speaker deserves to be confident.”

• Dale Carnegie. 

The Presentation You Will Likely Never Give.

Networking with a past colleague about his job transition experience and learning he mentioned a suggested approach to preparing for organizing your thoughts on a job opportunity.  My thanks and shout out to Andres Velasquez. This idea is to create a PowerPoint presentation with a 3-4 slides that could be used to ‘sell’ someone on why you are a great fit for this position.  I found this interesting and thought I could pass it along. 

As a hiring manager, I have sometimes had candidates prepare a presentation and then give that presentation to a group of people from the hiring company.  The idea is to see how they do in front of people, how they organize thoughts, can they handle questions, etc.

This turns out to be similar, but different.  Prepare a presentation that sells yourself for this role, but with the full knowledge that you will likely never give the ‘pitch’ to someone on the hiring team.  Maybe you will, but not often do hiring managers encourage you to hook up your computer to a screen and share something versus just peppering you with questions.  The general theme of the presentation is: “The Fit of My Experience & Skills for this Role.”

You will need a couple resources for this.  The job posting and the description of the role.  You also need your resume’.  The exercise will be to take what they have said they are looking for and compare this, favorably of course, with your experience and skills.

So, the example presentation that I have seen is formatted like this.

1. Have a cover slide with a simple but professional intro.  Your name, the position, the hiring company and then an image(s) to dress it up.  Perhaps a logo, an industry shot, an image from their website or a photo of their building that you picked up off the internet.

2. You begin to structure a comparison between yourself and the role.  Start with the simple things in two columns or groups.  Column 1: “You Asked For”, and Column 2: “I Bring To You…”. The fun part here is you can take a few liberties with how you interpret or position somethings to help sell the idea.  This can also likely work in the discussions with the hiring team.  Just like a polished politician you use an ‘angle’ on the question that works well for you.

   1. Tackle the less subjective items first.

      1. Education level and/or degree

      2. Years of experience

      3. Types of prior roles

   2. Start to address the key job requirements and outline how your skill set matches up to them.

      1. Pick a few of the most critical written up job requirements

      2. Then address them with statements of how your background matches up

      3. Key experiences, skills and abilities

The work on this presentation is meant to help you construct your best arguments for why you are the correct person for this position.