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Equipped Interview
Equipped Interview
Cracking the Code of Successful Interviews with William Vanderbloemen
Resources shared in today's episode:
Check out theunicornbook.com to get your copy of Be The Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits That Separate the Best Leaders From the Rest
Find hundreds of free job search resources at Vanderbloemen.com
Ready to uncover the habits of the best job candidates? We sat down with industry veteran William Vanderbloemen to dig into the insights he’s gathered from his diverse career path and extensive interviewing experiences. From his start as a pastor to working with a Fortune 200 firm and launching his own company, Vanderbloemen has conducted over 30,000 face-to-face interviews! His fascinating journey has allowed him to keenly observe the common habits of standout candidates—which he's ready to share.
Astonishingly, the most successful candidates all share a common trait: high responsiveness. Vanderbloemen sheds light on how such a seemingly simple habit can make you stand out in a crowded job market. We'll also tackle the often-dreaded interview question: "Tell me about yourself." You might be surprised how a dash of self-awareness and a little prep work can transform your answer from mundane to memorable.
As we wrap up, Vanderbloemen shares his unique method for kickstarting conversations at the end of an interview, and introduces us to his data-driven book. But that's not all! He devised a self-assessment tool that can help you identify your three best habits from a list of twelve. This innovative tool might just be the game-changer you need to uncover your blind spots and understand how you're perceived by others. Tune in and let's crack the code of successful interviews together!
Don’t spend any more time searching through articles, lists, or websites.
Check out Equipped Essentials for your all-in-one, 35-page digital book that offers examples, tips, memory hooks, and easy to follow advice.
Don’t spend any more time searching through articles, lists, or websites.
Check out Equipped Essentials for your all-in-one, 35-page digital book that offers examples, tips, memory hooks, and easy to follow advice.
in this last year and a half really, when the pandemic shut the world down, we had some time to work on some research. It was growing every year and we were able to say you know, we've now conducted 30,000 face-to-face interviews. I wonder if we could figure out who the best candidates we've ever interviewed are. And we were able to do that Like did they get the job? Did they stay in it?
Joshua Tinkey:Hey everyone, and welcome to the Equipped Interview Podcast. With a combined 30 plus years of being interviewed and interviewing thousands of others, we're here to build your confidence, help you stand out and get your dream job. Your hosts are Joshua Tinkey and Linda Commale. Let's get you equipped All right. Well, for today we have another guest and I'm excited to introduce you to William Vanderbloemen, and I could share a little bit about him, but you know, I think it's always best to have everyone introduce him or herself. So today we have an expert in the industry in a few different ways, but William, first of all, welcome.
William Vanderbloemen:Thanks so much, man. I appreciate you the chance to be on here.
Joshua Tinkey:Absolutely, and our listeners will learn a lot from you today and some of your experience. But let's just start right at the beginning. Love to hear from your perspective what's your background and a little bit about your experience and interviewing others. Anything else you think we should know from the get-go.
William Vanderbloemen:I've got kind of a weird career path and I'll try and keep it short. I tell people I'm a recovering preacher, so I ramble on and on, but I spent about 15 years serving churches as a pastor, mainly as a senior pastor, and ended up serving a fairly good-sized church in Houston, first secretary in Houston, then went through a divorce and then found myself as a single dad with four kids and you know, just not in any kind of shape to be giving out spiritual advice. So I went into the corporate world and went to work for a Fortune 200 company. They kind of had me on like a management rotation thing where you learn this department this year and then we'll move you to this one and then kind of teach me the industry. And my first year was in the HR department, because they're like oh, you know people, so we'll start there. Okay, the CEO, who had been CEO for nine, nine and a half years, which is a long time for a Fortune 200 company, said, you know, I think it's probably time to find my successor, and they hired this thing that I've never seen before called a search firm. And because I was on the HR team, I was kind of like water boy for the process right, didn't really have a key part to play, but I got to see everything going on. So within 90 days they had their new CEO. So back up just a little bit.
William Vanderbloemen:I'm serving at First Presbyterian Church. It's within the small world of Presbyterianism. It's a pretty big deal like kind of like being mayor of a big town in Scotland, like what difference does that make? But it should not be a place that's hard to recruit to. It took them almost three years to find me. I was there six. It took almost three years to find my successor. So they spent 12 years, half the time with a pastor, half the time looking. And then this oil and gas company that I'm sitting here working for gets done in 90 days.
William Vanderbloemen:And I just kind of was like, wow, there's, there's got to be a better solution. And I thought maybe we could build something like this for churches. And I came home and told my wife we just got married earlier, that you're blended. Our family with six kids, you know, just bought a house. And I said you know, I think I'm supposed to quit my job and start something new for churches. And she looked at me and she said, oh, that's because churches love new ideas, right, and if you've been around churches at all, you know that's yeah and oh, josh. The best part, it was the fall of 2008, which was just a brilliant time to quit your job and go try something new.
Joshua Tinkey:Slight recession during that time.
William Vanderbloemen:Oh my, gosh, I was so dumb and, and you know, my wife should have said I love you, love your vision, we got children to feed, go back to work. And instead she said let's give this a try. So she really should get credit for starting the company. And now you fast forward. And what started with? Could we help churches find a pastor? Turned into? What about schools that need a headmaster? What about relief organizations that need a CEO or a CFO? What about value space businesses that are? They're? They're hiring for people with aligned values and not just competencies, right? So 15 years from when we started our little idea, it's blossomed into this multiple verticals of people who have a set of values, who are looking for really top talent and trust us to find the cultural and chemistry sort of tissue match for them as they try and transplant a new leader in. So yeah, that's a that's a long way of saying.
William Vanderbloemen:I've done a whole lot of interviews in the last 15 years and in this, in this last year and a half really, when the pandemic shut the world down, we had some time to work on some research that we've grown every year and and we were able to say you know, we've now conducted 30,000 face to face interviews, I wonder if we could figure out who the best candidates we've ever interviewed are. And and we were able to do that Like, did they get the job, did they stay in it? And then we said I wonder, I wonder of these best of the best, I wonder if they have anything in common. And so we start studying and turns out they have quite a bit in common and the coolest part is the things they have in common are easily teachable habits that are really common among the very best candidates I've seen and really uncommon among everyone else, and they're just not that hard.
William Vanderbloemen:So, you know, our research project has now turned into a book where we've been able to identify these 12 habits that the best seem to show and the rest don't, and a guidebook for, like, how you can adopt those habits. And you know, josh, with a good job market, it's kind of looking a little wobbly the last six months. It's also really crowded, with more generations in the workforce than ever and and, by the way, we're also competing with machines now, right. So I'm really hopeful that the result of this research will help a lot of people out there adopt some habits that will cause them to stand out of the crowd, kind of just get that little, that little half step ahead of the rest of everybody else so that you can get seen and noticed and hired or promoted or whatever the situation is. You can stand out.
Joshua Tinkey:Well, those are the words that we use a lot on this podcast.
Joshua Tinkey:Here we talk a lot about how do you set yourself apart, how do you do that exactly and that's how you stand out, so that you can also build your confidence and do both of those things, because they tend to go hand in hand, and so I'm really intrigued about this research, and I know you have a new book coming out.
Joshua Tinkey:I want to get to that specifically as well. You also made me super curious about some of these things you learned, about those that do, in fact, stand out, because we have a process here that we talk a lot about over and over again. We have something called our seven prep steps, and we talk a lot about making sure you're incredibly proactive and don't make any assumptions that the person that interviewing you can connect the dots that you want them to. You have to be very clear in your communication and know what you bring to the table, why you're there and say it out loud. Don't make any assumptions, in other words. And so, if you've done all these interviews over 15 years and all this data diving that you've done, can you go into a couple of them? What are some of the things that do help people stand out, that you found.
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah, you know, here's the really cool thing the 12 commonalities that we identified among these best of the best. It was not oh, they're all six feet tall, or oh, they have great hair and great teeth. You know, it's not even they all went to an Ivy League school or they all speak well in public. It's simple things Like maybe the most uncommon habit among the general population that was very common among the best of the best was a very high responsiveness.
William Vanderbloemen:They got back to people really, really quickly and like uncanny quickly and you think, well, let's see, I get back to people quickly. Everybody thinks they get back to people quickly. We surveyed a quarter million people around these 12 habits. This is hilarious, and I think it was like 71% of everyone surveyed said that they are better than average at getting back to people. So, first of all, the math doesn't work right.
Joshua Tinkey:Yeah right.
William Vanderbloemen:No, but secondly, you know we used SurveyMonkey and so we talked to the people at SurveyMonkey and we said so we're asking people, if they're fast, what is a fast response time for SurveyMonkey? And they gave me the stats on all of their surveys. They're like you can expect most people are going to reply within three days. The outliers will be later than that. Okay, fine. So we went and looked at what was the average response time of the quarter million people we surveyed. It was five days. So the average of our quarter million people is slower than normal at SurveyMonkey.
Joshua Tinkey:And they identify themselves as fast.
William Vanderbloemen:And they identify themselves as fast. Everybody thinks they're faster, but it's uncanny. I don't know if you've ever done this. If you just like sent somebody an email and you hear back from them within a minute, I mean it's like weird, like wow, absolutely. If you can train yourself to get back to people with ridiculous responsiveness, you will stand out of the crowd. Now that can become tyrannical if you're not careful when you're. You know, like at our office we have different inquiries require different rate of response, and if we're just emailing each other at work, like if I send an email out now it's after hours, the office is closed. People know to look at it in the morning, right?
Joshua Tinkey:And if I send a?
William Vanderbloemen:yeah, if I send a slack out now after hours, whoever has slack will get back to me and if I text them, they will call me right away. That's kind of our like DEF CON 321, you know.
Joshua Tinkey:So there's just pressure to be on email all day. That's right.
William Vanderbloemen:That's right, but but it's not just email, it's get an answer, it's get back to people quickly, it's responsiveness. I mean like even on dating sites where you've got two people who are paying someone money to try and help them figure out who they can match up with, the response time is slow. When there's an inquiry, people just don't get back to. You know our interviews, hiring agencies hire us, whether it's a school or a church or a cause or a company, and they're like go find our next unicorn Right. And we've been very fortunate to work with some of the very best organizations that are high, high reputation, and so you would think when we reach out to people about the possibility of interviewing for one of these jobs, they would get back to us right away. They don't? It still totally turns my head if I get a text back right away from somebody.
William Vanderbloemen:So that's just one and it's simple. It sounds like, oh, I'll start doing that. And then, before you know it, you started procrastinating, which I, I, I had forgotten until we were writing the book. I took a bunch of Latin in school. The word in Latin, that's tomorrow, is the word crastina. So you procrastinate Literally, I'll just get to it tomorrow, and that's what most everybody does. You want to stand out, get back to people right away.
Joshua Tinkey:So that's the process, that's one of the things that you can do and then find a way to just stand out from the crowd there. What about during an interview itself? One of the things that we talk a lot about here and I I have very strong feelings around what's to do and what not to do during the kind of your opening pitch during an interview, around the tell me about yourself question, what's your background, that type of thing.
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah.
Joshua Tinkey:Have you found any any ways that candidates stand out in that area?
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah, to come to mind immediately. Okay, so the first one is the whole tell me about yourself question. I mean, that's like the number one question in interviews, right? So what do you say? Well, if I see that you are self aware right and have done your homework with the job that you're interviewing for, you immediately stand out. What does that look like?
William Vanderbloemen:Hey, Joshua, you're interviewing me for this job in marketing and I love your company. I love that it's new, I love that it's growing fast, I love that. You know you guys are kind of figuring it out as you go and you know what I'm learning about myself. I'm like a seven on the enneagram, Like I love the next new thing. And if you come to me and say you know, I know we hired you for this, but the job shift and change. We've got other duties as needed. I'm going to thrive in that.
William Vanderbloemen:If you need somebody to do the same action over and over and over, all day long, on a very predictable schedule, I'm not going to be happy in that. You're not going to be happy with my work. I know me well enough to know I like the next new adventure and the job you're hiring me for. That we're talking about right now is exactly that, and let me show you three different places in my career where I had the same sort of environment. I really thrived. So you see what's happened there. You've told me you're self aware, right? You've also preempted the worst question in interviewing, which is tell me your greatest weakness, you know like.
William Vanderbloemen:I never asked for a raise. I worked too many hours, yeah, exactly. But if you can show self awareness, I know I like the next new thing. I can do detail work. I've done it before and I can show you five places where I had to do all the details myself. But I do better with big ideas and if that's what you're hiring for, this could be a match to be a lot of fun. That has just showed me an unusual self awareness. You can even take it a step further. If you were hiring me to be your chief compliance officer, I would be terrible. You don't want me doing that. That is measure eight times, cut once. That's compliance, or oriented things, that's. I'm more of a creative. I'm not going to do well at just sort of the brushing and flossing, which is a great job, but not a job I would. I would flourish in.
Joshua Tinkey:Right. I love that specific example. Not only does it show self awareness, it shows something that we talk a lot about here in a couple of different ways. One is hearing your kind of sample response. There you focused on your skills. You showed an awareness of what the role might entail and how your skills match up with that or don't match up with it. Two, what I really liked about it we talk a lot about here is adding some credibility to your own opinion of yourself by bringing in an outside objective source like the anagram test or the strengths finder test or other assessments that basically give a somewhat third party perspective or an objective view on what you're saying. Kind of add some credibility to some of the commentary that you're providing.
Joshua Tinkey:So I really like that. And one thing that I'm just pointing out to just drive home for some of my regular listeners is that one thing you didn't do, which is exactly exactly how I coach people, and that's you didn't just walk through your chronological background of your history. Well, first I was here and did this, first I had this job, and then I had this job and then I did that job. I know it's just a short example you gave, but the way you approached it I just want to call that out it was very skills focused and focusing on what your strengths are and your awareness of the job and how they match together, more so than just saying, okay, here's who I am, and walking through your history, because it gets boring pretty quick for the interviewer if you just walk through your resume.
William Vanderbloemen:Oh, it's like watching paint dry. Let me tell you, I've been through it thousands of times to get somebody who is on a journey of self discovery. You know there's very little we have that is directly quoted from Socrates. It's all just sort of verbal tradition. One of the few things we have that was written down is the one sentence that he's most famous for, where he says know yourself, we're the smartest guys to ever live.
William Vanderbloemen:What's the beginning with know your? You know, like you think about Jesus saying if you see somebody doing wrong, don't worry about the splinter in your eye. In there, I get the big old stick out of your own I. I don't think he was fussing at people. I think he was saying, hey, you need to know yourself first and, if you can, to me and I'm probably just telling you guys things that you're already discussing, but to me the clearest predictor of future job performance is previous job performance. So if you can show me some self-awareness and I'm really good at other duties as necessary, it's like when I worked in a startup where we had to figure it out as we went. We had hockey stick growth, my job Title change 15 times, but I grew the email list 350% in nine months and I had a lot of help there and a lot of teammates. But, like I love working in that kind of crazy environment, that would make a lot of other people uncomfortable.
Joshua Tinkey:It's a very practical data-driven type of response and something like that it's, and it really paints a picture for the interviewer. Speaking of dad, I know we touched on it earlier but love to hear a little bit more about I know you have a new book coming out and that is data-driven. Tell us a little bit about, a little bit more about that book and you know who did you decide to write that for?
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah, well, you know, during the pandemic and the shutdown, our sectors of work mainly services industries Really didn't have any service going on, right. We just you know, it wasn't like zoom that was hiring people left and right. So we get to drop back and do some research and say, you know, we've been doing this a long time. Anytime we do any search, we'll have Maybe a thousand people that we take a look at for this one position and then that quickly turns into a hundred. And then you know, you do some phone screens and some zooms and then you're getting down to like the best of the best and and when you get down to that final Call it, six to ten candidates, they all get a long format, face-to-face in person interview with us. Okay, and we have done those 30,000 of those long format interviews now. Wow, so, so that's 30,000 with really talented people, and we're Kind of maniacal about keeping our records.
William Vanderbloemen:I would say that my team is OCD, but they get mad because that's not alphabetical, they'd rather be called CDO, and We've just been able to say, okay, let's go look at all these interviews, let's look for commonalities, and that's that's when we were able to see there are some markers and we whittled it down to 12 that are clearly achievable habits, that these best of the best exemplified and they're normal, for the best of the best, and very abnormal and uncommon among the rest of everybody else. And I, you know, I just the other thing in an interview, you want to really stand out in the crowd. I talked about the. Tell me about yourself. You know where I've been doing this long enough now where many times in an interview, by the time they get to me, they've already been interviewed many times over by our staff, right? So I'm like you know, uh, joshua, you don't need to tell me your life story and all that. I team's done a great job. How about we do this?
William Vanderbloemen:I think the best way to spend our time together is for me to answer questions you have about this job. You know how much I learn based on how intelligent the questions are that people ask. It's, it's amazing and and that comes down to one of the 12 habits was kind of an insatiable curiosity, like why are we doing that? How are you doing this? And and if you, if you have done active research on the job you're interviewing for, hey, I see your company has a big, bold expansion initiative that's rolling out over the next 12 months. Tell me more about that. What drove the decision for the expansion? How are you funding it Like? Teach me that kind of curiosity. I learned way more about a candidate based on the questions they ask me than the answers that they give me.
Joshua Tinkey:And the type of question that you just gave us an example is more of a conversation starter than it is just Q&A.
Joshua Tinkey:We're, there's, they're throwing they're not throw away questions, um, and that that's a really important part of the interview process. I won't go into the whole the whole process now, but we we teach something very similar to what you just said called the show method SHOW to to try to kickstart, to yourself up for a conversation at the end of the interview, cause you might, you might be given like the way you just set it up there, you might be giving someone half an hour of time to just ask you questions and if you're not prepared for that, it's going to be a long, long 30 minutes, or it's going to be really, really quick and you're going to, not the candidate selected, and so the way the show that we talk about is S stands for.
Joshua Tinkey:Just share something that you hopefully have researched about the company or that you've read or you've watched, whether it's a Ted talk, book, an article. Share something that you know about that's relevant to the role, the organization, the industry have an opinion about it, to demonstrate that you've thought it.
Joshua Tinkey:That's the agent show. Have an opinion about it, um, and then, and for the next opinion, get their opinion on your opinion you might have a differing opinion in. There is great that. That is especially a set up a conversation. And then the W is to to wonder. It's kind of a you mentioned the word be curious, the phrase we talk a lot about that here and be wonder or be curious about their opinion, to keep the conversation going and don't let just don't just get their response and say that's great. Here's my next question. It's have an actual conversation so you can show that you've done your research, that you understand the role, talk more about your skills if you need to, but just give yourself a chance to, to share what you've learned and hopefully a lot of the research that you've done ahead of time, and more so than just what's the job like. What are you looking for?
Joshua Tinkey:That's right, we all have our pet pee questions and some of.
William Vanderbloemen:That's right, so that's all so good. That is really good. And you know what I've found? Um, I had one stop in my career where I was regularly interfacing with, frankly, just world beaters. I mean, there were captains of their industry, you name it. They were either the first good or the best at doing it, or what. And I noticed over time that the more successful a person was, the less they talked about themselves and the more they asked me about me.
William Vanderbloemen:I just think it's uncanny, and so I've thought about that through an interviewing perspective. How does that translate? How do you? How do you? Well, it's like hey, Joshua, you know everything looks great. I'm so excited about this opportunity and really appreciate you making time. Tell me this Why'd you come work at this company and why have you stayed this long? I mean, what tell me about you and your journey with the company? Well, nobody's going to turn down that question. And then you can hear you know, well, they have an amazing PTO schedule, or you know we're building literacy centers with a small part of our profits, or whatever the great things about the company are. And you've shown curiosity.
Joshua Tinkey:Really really good. Interesting to learn that that's part of the data that you have, all those surveys. You had the research you did for a long time.
William Vanderbloemen:And I will say on that curiosity piece, I can't tell you how many times who got the job boiled down to who asked the best questions. Not had the best answers, but asked the best questions.
Joshua Tinkey:I hope you're listening. That's a really, really valuable statement. So if you were multitasking while you're listening, come back and you repeat that one more time, William, because I think that's really important.
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah, I'm just. I don't know if I'll get it verbatim, but I'm amazed how many times who got the job in a search boiled down to who asked the best questions not who gave the best answers. Love it.
Joshua Tinkey:That can be.
Joshua Tinkey:it's a can be make or break, so it really really is important to to focus ahead of time and do your research and know what you're going to ask and start set yourself up for conversation, more so than just hope that you run out of time before they get to their questions, because that's not a that's not a winning strategy. So I'm glad that came out of research. Well, this the time's going faster than I expected, so let's do this. I have a few more questions I was going to ask, but let's just end it with this and we can wrap things up here. But I'd love to hear if you think, think about your thousands of, tens of thousands of interviews. Love to hear what you think is one of your favorite moments and interview, whether it was a good moment, funny moment, learning moment, moment. Love to hear what was one of your favorite moments interviewing others.
William Vanderbloemen:Well, I probably shouldn't tell this. It's a little just. You will probably not have me back on the pile. You can cut this out if it's not good.
William Vanderbloemen:Oh we were. You know we started in the 08, which is when social media took off, so that's a big part of our growth. So we're trying to figure out how to drive engagement in very early days, and so one of our newer team members put a poll out there on I think it was on Facebook that said this is before Instagram and the poll said what's the most awkward interview question you've been asked and that sounds like a fun thing to put out there. Well, like the third answer is somebody wrote boxers or briefs and I'm like, oh my gosh, forget to pull, this is gonna go bad and before we can pull it down. Somebody replied to that response and said depends depends.
Joshua Tinkey:Oh, I love it so bad.
William Vanderbloemen:No I you know, I think I really appreciate when I hear interviews, I mean you are showcasing yourself, your marketing yourself, right, so it's okay to talk about yourself. But, man, when you can, you watch a great NFL quarterback after a game. He's taken all the blame and given away all the credit. And when you start hearing that, you start hearing a leader. And that didn't mean you have to belittle yourself or speak poorly of yourself, but I some of the strongest moments In interviewing that I've had is when people said you know, I'm pretty good at my job, but I wouldn't get at this part if it weren't for the team and the way they pitched in.
William Vanderbloemen:We all work together. You know you've shown some vulnerability there and you're not just trying to be, you know, super plastic with every answer. So if vulnerability and giving away credit and taking on blame, those are, those are powerful lessons. So and I'm guessing that if a guy who gets beaten up by three hundred pound defensive players all week can come up with those words, every one of your listeners can come up with something along that line.
Joshua Tinkey:I would. I would tend to agree. I can't imagine not all right. Well, william, there's a lot of insight. They're really appreciated. I know there's a lot more we could talk about, but for the interest of time, will what is move on from there and love to hear where can our listeners go to learn about you, your firm? Where should they check it out.
William Vanderbloemen:Well, so two easy ways. First of all, the unicorn book dot com. The unicorn book dot com. That'll take you to the hub with all resources and everything that you can imagine. The other thing you can do is just try spelling Vanderbluen any way you want into Google and it will lead to us. And there are thirty five hundred free resources on our website that you know blog post, podcasting, photographs about either interviewing or being interviewed. You'll find a lot of free help here.
William Vanderbloemen:You'll also find your way to the book, and this is the first interview I've done where I've mentioned this. So this is kind of you get in a sneak peek. But we've actually taken those twelve habits that we identified in B the unicorn and we built, we hired some counselors and some data driven people to say how can we build a self assessment tool like the string finders, to find out of those twelve, where my three best and what am I? And it's going to be a super cool personal inventory to figure out what am I already good at and what what's a blind spot. We're also turning it into. You can take it individually, but it's also going to be a three sixty tool for teams at work and then you can use it as a tool to help you get into the book, and then you as a team can see where you go and where your blind spots, and how the individual perceptions differ from what's the previous, or subordinates might say. It's gonna be really cool all that is great at Vanderbluen dot com.
William Vanderbloemen:Yeah, we've already gotten ten thousand people that have gone through it. So it's it. There's a lot of good data points. You'll be able to measure yourself against.
Joshua Tinkey:Excellent, yeah, I'm excited for that to come out and I'll don't worry, we'll make sure to leave some links in our show notes For right to your website, so if someone gets the name wrong, they'll be able to find you know they won't get it wrong.
William Vanderbloemen:It's the only reason we named the company. What we did, searching the search engine guys were like dude. Your last name is so messed up we need to use.
Joshua Tinkey:It has to be what they're looking for. Yeah, exactly thanks so much, william, for joining us and sharing some of your Years of wisdom with our audience and making sure that they can stand out a little bit more, hopefully next time they go to the interview. Really appreciate it.
William Vanderbloemen:Thanks, joshua, appreciate you having me on. Very much got it.
