THE BIG HURDLE

Some employers will ask you to make a short presentation, usually immediately before an interview. This can seem daunting – you have to communicate on your feet to an audience which is probably going to be critical rather than supportive, and you know that everything you do is being assessed. What’s more, a presentation means an audience, which usually indicates at least two people interviewing.

WHAT GOES WRONG

Over the years of fishing for feedback from candidates and interviewers I am pretty sure that if anything is going to go wrong it’s probably something from this list:

The 10 most common features of shaky presentations

1. Stilted, under-rehearsed opening.
2. Misunderstanding (and usually, over-complicating) the task.
3. Speaking too quickly, trying to cram in 50 ideas into 5 minutes on the assumption that some of it might stick.
4. Having too much material so you overrun and have to be stopped part-way through your flow.
5. Putting far too many long sentences on each PowerPoint slide, and reading them all out.
6. Being wooden, sounding uncomfortable, failing to engage with the audience.
7. Failing to leave some questions open so that you have a good footing to start the interview.
8. Failing to establish eye contact with anyone in the room.
9. Striking the wrong balance in answers to the 90-day question (see below).
10. A flat ending that sounds as if you’re not sure whether you’re finished or not.

MAKING MOVIES

A presentation is a gift. A large part of the interview process is about getting a movie running in the interviewer’s head which shows you doing the job. While it may take half an interview to get that picture across, a presentation can do it in a couple of minutes. Why? Because it immediately answers questions like ‘Will this person be credible addressing the Board?’ ... ‘How will she come across in a heads of department meeting?’ ... ‘Can we be confident of his ability to address the public?’

Look at any movie showcasing a major star, and watch the first 60 seconds that actor is on screen. In those seconds as a character is established you often decide whether it’s going to be a good film or not. Presentations have the same power to intensify first impressions, so the first part of your presentation is not your script, but the immediate impact you make just by standing up. Work hard on your ‘look’ (see Chapter 8), and get some feedback. When you walk in and begin presenting, how well does the person on show match the person presented on paper? Career coach Bernard Pearce says ‘Organisations form an opinion of you long before they see you, so be who they are hoping you will be!’

THE TASK

Normally employers will give you presentation topics in advance, but most are predictable – however it’s dressed up, the presentation topic is usually, in essence, ‘show us how well you understand what we’re trying to do, and tell us how you will make an impact’.

Think carefully about what the employer really expects you to deliver. Most candidates try to fit in too much. You will probably spend anything between two to four minutes talking about each PowerPoint slide, so don’t expect to get through more than four to five slides in a 10-minute presentation – you will probably be stopped at the time limit, cutting out your closing points. Make sure slides are not over-stuffed with text. Limit yourself to three or four punchy bullet points you can expand upon. If you will be using PowerPoint, do check what practical arrangements will be in place – email your presentation in advance (take a back-up on data stick), and enquire tactfully if the equipment will already be set up and tested before you use it.

The main reason to welcome a presentation is that it gives you a great opportunity to show how you can analyse an organisation and its problems, even for a relatively junior job. Rather than repeating random facts, try to paint the big picture. This requires care, because you can easily sound glib or lacking in research.

A presentation will often work around three key stages:

1. Analysis – saying briefly what you see and understand. The more this sounds like a ‘helicopter view’ the better.
2. Making connections – drawing different pieces of evidence together, including perspectives from outside the organisation, and possibly your own experience, too.
3. Suggested actions – clear recommendations. These will inevitably be slightly cautious because you would of course need more detail before implementation.

REHEARSE, REHEARSE

The good news is that performance anxiety lessens the more you do something. Your brain starts to recognise contexts and starts to say ‘This is OK, I have been here before.’ Interestingly, this is equally true for rehearsal as it is for actual performance, and even works with visualised scenarios. So the act of imagining yourself doing well in a presentation, thinking through the positive phrases you will use, starts to build a kind of mock memory of success.

The problem is that few people actually rehearse interviews or presentations. They say ‘I guess I will talk about ...’ or ‘My answer will be something along the lines of ...’, when what they actually need to do is to answer real interview questions and pitch actual presentations. Find people who have some experience of conducting interviews and get them to hear what you have to say, and then probe you on the points you make. Tell them the questions you are most worried about, and then answer them, for real, using exactly the words you would use in an interview. So not ‘I will probably say ...’ but ‘I did ...’.

SPEAKING FROM NOTES

Very few people can trust themselves to speak without notes, but over-reliance on notes almost guarantees a wooden performance. In any case, most people find it difficult to read text while they are talking to an audience. What’s more, holding papers or cards in your hand and looking down at them requires you to hunch your shoulders and stoop slightly, which broadcasts timidity and takes your focus off building rapport with the audience.

There are several strategies to get past this. The first is mandatory, and one you should never ignore: learn the beginning and the end of your talk by heart, so you can deliver these segments without looking down at your notes or up at a screen. The beginning and the end are what will be remembered most, so getting those right matters. A clear, strong, beginning boosts your confidence, and a well-crafted ending to a presentation puts the start of your interview on a high note. Plan the actual words – whether this is a conclusion, a question, a challenge, or an invitation: ‘I’d be happy to provide further details during our conversation today.’

Next, think about how you will deliver the rest of your material with minimum reference to notes. It helps to design slides which prompt you. Never read slides out, always paraphrase, or say something tangential to the material. For example, if your slide says ‘There are three main ways forward for this organisation’ you’ve robbed yourself of a great line. Better to have a short statement (‘Strategies for success’) or a question (‘Is there a way forward?’), and then your slide has a dual function – it grabs attention, and prompts your next words.

As you get more experienced you will see that short on-screen phrases work best, especially if they get your audience thinking. Imagine a slide which shows an image of an hourglass and says ‘10 minutes 5 £200’. You’ve given your audience a puzzle and if you then explain (every 10 minutes spent with a customer costs £200), you’ve caught their attention a second time. Use on-screen material to tantalise, tempt, draw people in, rather than telling them the whole story. Try cutting down each bullet point to one or two words.

CARTOON SHEET

If the slide itself doesn’t give you a strong enough steer in terms of script, try not to fall back on prompt cards. It’s very hard indeed to read text while you are speaking – your attention is easily distracted if you lose your place, and your gaze is locked down onto your document. If you rely on written notes you need to find your place, remember what the words meant, and then turn them into spoken phrases.

What works much better is to draw a sequence of symbols or cartoons which summarise your presentation. Divide up a page into squares laid out like a comic book. For each segment, each example or argument, draw a picture or a symbol, which you will find much easier to take in at a glance. For example, if I want to remember that I have to say that ‘this organisation will get better results if it encourages staff to be more creative and more flexible’, draw a light bulb (idea) over a wavy line (flexibility), next to the organisation’s initials. Instead of writing ‘Three Steps To Motivating Teams’ draw a staircase of three steps leading to smiling faces. You get the idea. Put all the images you need for your talk on one piece of card and keep it just in sight, and your presenting style, with a bit of rehearsal, will be transformed.

THE ‘90-DAY QUESTION’

‘What do you hope to achieve in your first three months?’ is a question you might be asked at interview, and your presentation may be about ideas you can bring to the role. In a way, every presentation is about this topic. Long-term success will often be based on your visibility within that three-month window, and your interviewer is trying to work out what you will look like in the role and what impact you might make.

Take this seriously, because (apart from being an audition for the kind of role you will have to undertake) that’s what the presentation is about – whether you ‘get’ the needs underlying the role, and whether you can deliver.

Answering the ‘90-day question’ takes a lot of thinking. If you are asked about changes or improvements you would make, be careful. Some candidates say ‘I wouldn’t make any changes until I had learned a lot more about the organisation and consulted with my colleagues.’ That answer is not only predictable but a little too safe for most jobs.

At the other end of the spectrum is the kind of candidate who tells the organisation every mistake it’s making and offers to give things a pretty big shake-up – usually enough to put the interviewers’ backs up.

How far you emphasise caution or suggest specific changes depends on the nature of the role, but the best answers take a middle ground between the two which effectively says ‘Yes, I will learn and listen, but I will also get on with things.’

It’s unwise to be deeply critical of the organisation – the system you are trashing could be the brainchild of one of the people in the room. Better approaches say ‘this is the approach I would take ...’, ‘here’s something I have tried elsewhere which I believe could help you’. If you have a proposed strategy, present it as a suggestion open to questions rather than the only way of doing things. If the big strategy is beyond your grasp without knowing a lot more about the organisation, offer some quick wins – short-term results that can be obtained at minimal cost without treading on anyone’s toes.