Interview presentation examples: 21 topics for your ‘hire-me pitch’

You’re here because it feels like your future hangs on your next interview presentation.

It makes you nervous. That’s a good thing. Nerves make us better.

Here you’ll find interview presentation examples, strategies & topics — all wrapped up in what we call the hire-me pitch.

Read on for:

The 2 must-know presentation principles

3 interview presentation examples

Successful professionals do these 4 things

The 3 questions your presentation needs to answer

Finding your topic — 21 ideas to get you started

Interview presentation tips that don’t suck

Let’s cut straight to the chase. The only thing that counts is how well you answer the interviewer’s only question:

Bottom line. The company (and by extension, the interviewer) care about one thing — results. They care that your salary earns a return. Everything you do to prepare for your interview needs to be geared around answering this question… everything.

The 2 must-know presentation principles

1. Don’t Tell. Show.

Sell solutions, not the product.

Sticking with the drill metaphor — a good drill salesman doesn’t lead with the product’s features. He knows that the customer doesn’t care about the durability of the drill-head or how long the brand has been in business.

The smart salesman asks what the customer is making. A tree house for the kids you say? That quarter inch hole will easily support the joinery frame for their weight and it works great for pen/paintbrush storage for little fingers too.

In pitching for an interview, you are the salesman and the drill.

You don’t get hired by talking about your experience & skill set — they’re just your features. The interviewer doesn’t care about your experience & skill set — she cares about hitting her sales targets, connecting with customers, adapting to industry disruption and 100 other challenges.

Your presentation should only focus on issues that matter to her organisation. Their problems, their needs, their goals.

You prove your value by directly addressing the problems/opportunities you intend to solve/exploit when hired.

Don’t talk about yourself or your achievements — no-one cares.

2. So what? Now what?

Don’t stop at just identifying a problem or opportunity. Demonstrate your critical thinking by outlining actionable next steps the organisation needs to take.

Identify further research, critical investments, new hires or even just how much time it will take to fix the issue.

Demonstrating a clear grasp of the next steps immediately positions you as a valuable hire. You’re telling the interviewer “all you need to do is hire me and this problem goes away”.

Let’s check out some interview examples to see these principles in action.

Interview presentation examples: Hire Dan!

A year ago I was set on applying to a global employee analytics company. Staying well clear of the hiring funnel, I planned 3 hire-me pitches (one to land a referral interview — the other two to impress in the interview).

The format for each? A piece of paper plus charts where applicable.

The blog post

A sample blog post inspired by a quirky report I stumbled on, covering management lessons from the 17th century. Written to match the company’s tone, average blog length and citation style.

• What the company sees — “this guy can take a load off the blog writers, understands our vibe and reads enough to find something a bit off-beat and fun”.

The bad exit case study

A recap of the industry research (backed up by insights from manager friends) on the cost of a lack of trust in the employee exit process e.g. “screw you, I know I’m leaving in two months, but I’ll wait until my legally obligated 2 weeks to hand in my resignation”

• What the company sees — “this guy is thinking like one our customers and has identified one of their pain-points. We could work that into our sales pitch”.

New customers

A round-up of informational interviews with HR reps about their employee analytics software choices (if any). The added bonus was identifying leads for a sales pitch. I would start with a few friends in big HR teams and used LinkedIn to land the bulk of the interviews.

• What the company sees — $$

These hire-me pitches were built on Don’t Tell. Show and So What? Now what?

Nothing in there was about me, my experience or skills. It was tangible proof of them. Everything focused on showing — specifically — how I could add value. Critically, the improvements were concrete responses to the companies challenges and could be implemented immediately:

• Increase blog post quantity & quality — check.
• Customer pain point research and sales pitch development — check.
• Generate sales leads — check.

Could the company be all over these already? Almost certainly. But put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes…

“This guy strolls in with some interesting ideas and demonstrates a solid grasp of what we do here, all without any access to any our internal knowledge… Imagine what he could do with some direction and access to customer data, operations information, sales intel…”

Interview presentation example: Nina4airbnb

Check out Nina Mufleh’s impressive website pitch for Airbnb’s middle-east team. She got the job of course.

Technically Nina’s work wasn’t an interview presentation. She built the site and pitched it directly to Airbnb decision makers via twitter (what a hustler!). She had a reply back in minutes.

But what do you think they discussed during the interview? Her CV, education and strengths/weaknesses? Or how she would grow middle-east operations for the company?

Let’s analyse her presentation thorugh the lens of our principles:

• Don’t Tell. Show. Nina leads with an analysis of the local accommodation market and Airbnb’s local operations. She goes on to build a case for expansion and why. It’s only towards the end of the pitch that she discusses her credentials and culture fit. The majority of the pitch is focused on addressing the growth opportunity for Air BnB.
• So what? Now What? Nina’s pitch could have stopped at an analysis of the mid-east market and Airbnb operations. But it didn’t. She went on to build a roadmap of concrete ‘next steps’ for Airbnb in the region — positioning Dubai as the regional focus and identifying partnership opportunities and key regional events.

Interview presentation example: Dan hustles a promotion

I came across the power of the actionable interview presentation a few years back. Granted, it was for an internal interview — but the principles hold true. I had a few minutes to sell myself to senior leadership by presenting an idea and I wanted something in return.

The background — I liked our interns and hated how they struggled under a loose training and support system. After talking to a few of them and seeing no real action from the higher-ups, I went ahead and just fixed the situation myself.

I conducted a few informational interviews with colleagues and interns, figured out how to improve the system and pulled together a one pager covering what was wrong, how we fix it and what I needed to get the job done. It’s available here.

The results:

• I negotiated a % of my time to work with HR on intern development, something I genuinely enjoyed.
• I got valuable face-time and kudos from the Managing Director.
• My immediate boss loved it and I got a promotion shortly after.

The presentation worked because I showed hustle and initiative. Those few hours of self-driven work did more for my career than a months’ worth of ‘do what you’re told’ work ever could.

It showed that I understood one of the company’s goals and had identified roadblocks to achieving it. It demonstrated a curiosity to learn more about the issue and insight enough to find a fix. It showed grit — enough to say ‘this is how we fix it, give me these things and I’ll do it’.

Talented people do these 4 things

Claudio Fernandez-Araoz knows a thing or two about spotting talent. He’s considered one of the most influential executive search & leadership development experts in the field.

30 years of researching high-performing execs taught him that hiring for the ‘right’ experience just doesn’t work in today’s volatile business world. He cites several examples of business leaders who look great on paper, but fail to adapt to new challenges outside of their area of expertise. Alternatively, he points to business leaders who have transformed companies despite lacking the ‘required’ decades of industry experience.

How do they do it? Fernandez-Araoz cites 4 key hallmarks of potential that define great business leaders.

Your challenge: demonstrate these traits in your presentation.

Let’s look at how Fernandez-Araoz’s traits manifest in our interview presentation examples.

“A penchant for seeking out new experiences, knowledge, and candid feedback and an openness to learning and change”

Give them something they haven’t seen before. The employee analytics pitch and nina4airbnb offered fresh perspectives on the things that mattered to the company.

But inspiration and ‘uncovering the new’ doesn’t happen in isolation. It takes reading — alot of reading. You simply cannot expect to demonstrate curiosity if you aren’t actively exploring the cutting-edge of your industry and following the thought-leaders.

You can’t fake curiosity.

It’s not just the high-level stuff. Curiosity can also be getting 5 customers on the phone for a Q+A session. Or 5 interns in a room to talk candidly about their experience.

“The ability to gather and make sense of information that suggests new possibilities.”

Turning curiosity into useful, actionable information.

Nina did this particularly well — her presentation went beyond ‘there is a gap in the mid-east market’. She quantified it, described it and made clear how to exploit it.

The intern development proposal was built by gathering opinions from several individuals and distilling the key themes. With the overarching problem identified, finding the solution was relatively straight-forward.

“A knack for using emotion and logic to communicate a persuasive vision and connect with people.”

What separates good presentations from great ones? A clear path to achieving the goal.

The pitches all have a clear call to action or next step — post the blog, refine the sales pitch, contact the sales leads, partner with these Dubai-based events, re-design the intern system. Answering So What. Now What? with clarity gives people confidence. If the interviewer can walk into the next room, group up the troops and action your proposal immediately — you win.

I’m not a big one for emotion — I like to let facts do the talking. Nina on the other hand, nailed this one. Pay attention to the eye-catching design, convincing insights and clear reasons why she was a culture match for Air BnB (notice that she finished with these ‘about me’ points, leading instead with her case for business expansion).

“The wherewithal to fight for difficult goals despite challenges and to bounce back from adversity.”

Aka grit. I love this one. If curiosity, insight and determination were bricks, then grit is the mortar. In a pinch — I’d rather have more mortar and less bricks.

The best way to show determination is to put in the hard yards and simply do more than the competition. Did the other candidates call 5 customers, distil their feedback and provide two actionable insights to better improve customer service? Did the other candidates spend a day reading about how blockchain will impact the industry and identify 3 research areas to help leverage the new tech? Did the other candidates interview 3 employees as part of their presentation research?

Go the extra mile and identify critical requirements and next steps (better yet, do the next steps yourself — be they gathering customer feedback, writing the blog post or doing the ‘next step’ research).

Nina’s presentation was the road-map for expanding Air BnB operations in the mid-east — what do you think she got hired to do?

The 3 questions your presentation needs to answer

Don’t fear the interview presentation.

I get it. It’s nerve-wracking stuff. But it’s also your opportunity to demonstrate the four hallmarks of potential.

Show that you understand the issues and challenges facing the company. Show that you can help solve them. Don’t talk about yourself and your experience — no-one cares. Give them something they haven’t seen before and provide actionable next steps forward. Do something that your competitors can’t or won’t.

What does all that look like? Great answers to these 3 key questions (these also work as headings for your hire-me pitch):

1. What is the problem or opportunity facing the organisation, department or team?
2. How do we solve the problem / leverage the opportunity?
3. What do we need get started — aka So What. Now What? Identify critical requirements for success (research, upskilling, tech, capital investment, time, cost).

I hear you — the hardest part here is finding the right problem/opportunity to tackle.

There are two approaches here:

• Gathering intel from your network of allies within the target organisation, department or team.
• The educated guess.

Let’s walk through each option and how they work best when combined.

Finding your topic — gathering intel

Reveal challenges facing the organisation, department or team through informational interviews with people currently working at the organisation.

This is a big one — building a network within the target company. This is some sneaky Ninja stuff and is absolutely crucial.

No doubt you already know the importance of networking, but you can find a refresher on landing and conducting informational interviews in our 5-step networking strategy guide.

These contacts, even if they’re junior employees, are the source of incredibly useful information — you just need to ask the right questions. Cultivated Culture have great piece on really extracting value from this meeting but most importantly, be sure to steer the interview to cover key areas that will really benefit your hire-me pitch, including:

• The challenges the company is facing
• The challenges specific to your contact’s department
• The challenges your contact’s team is up against
• The latest industry trends impacting the company’s operations
• Where your contact sees the industry going in 1,3 and 5 years
• What keeps your contact’s boss up at night?
• Be honest. “I’m presenting at an interview next week, what would you suggest as a topic?”

Finding your topic — the educated guess

Start with generic business goals/opportunities and drill-down.

Every business, large and small, faces a common set of challenges and opportunities. There is plenty of content online to make an educated guess about the issues that matter to your company and formulate a road-map to address them.

Full disclosure — I’m a comms guy — I think digital transformation in marketing holds the most promise for sniping a piece of value the company may have overlooked. It’s also where I’ve chosen to upskill so a lot of the next primers are from a marketing perspective.

Let’s go through each of the broad categories and ask some drill-down questions that could spark a great hire-me pitch topic.

• Can you refine the product or service to add more value to customers?
• Can you refine the product for a more specific audience — e.g. a lite version for students?
• Can you identify new raw materials that could be used in packaging/production — maybe something more environmentally friendly?

• Can you identify a niche customer audience the company could target — who are they, where are they, what do they want, how would the company reach them?
• Can you use your experience and network to identify or even pitch new clients?
• Can you identify where your target audience crosses over with another brand’s? Build a proposal for a collaborative project that leverages both brands capabilities to deliver a great experience for the shared audience.

(The customer journey covers how people find, research, purchase from and continue to interact with the company)

• Can you identify a pain point in the customer journey (e.g. buggy payment, slow & ‘salesy’ customer service). How about just calling 10 customers, summarising their experiences and suggesting an improvement?
• Can you make a case for a new online payment option — the company doesn’t use paypal/bitcoin? Build a case for why they should.
• Can you identify consumer trends that are moving toward/away from current product lines?
• Can you articulate any questions you (or customers) had about the product/service that aren’t answered by the FAQ? How about writing the script for a youtube instructional video?

• Can you identify a new social media platform the company isn’t using? How about a short summary of the platform, a few mock posts and a competitor analysis?
• Bit of a techie? How about use-ability tests and recommendations for the company website?
• Can you list celebrity influencers who use the product (or a competitor’s). How big is their following, who are their followers, what kind of content do they share and how could the company work with them?
• Can you write an interesting blog post for the company?
• Noticed a really cool marketing campaign recently? Could your company replicate it? What would it achieve, what would be required and what would be the benefits?

• Can you identify a product/service or marketing strategy that’s working for competitors? What about a social media platform audit vs competitors?
• Can you make a purchase from your company and your competitor and put each customer support process to the test? Measure and report the results — be sure to outline areas of improvement for your company and any opportunities to steal frustrated customers from the competition.

• There are mega-trends at work that will impact every company. Think AI, big data, climate change, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, ethical consumption etc. Get specific with your research and see what the thought-leaders are saying about the technology poised to impact your industry.
• Identify some areas that the company should be researching themselves e.g.
• Here’s how climate change may impact your supply chain in sourcing, logistics, customer demand etc in 5, 10 and 15 years.
• Could you use Big Data to enable a really cool customer experience?
• Here’s how ethical products have performed in your category in the last 5 years — could you better leverage this consumer trend?
• If you love this kind of stuff (I do!) — I highly recommend you check out Building Dragons on our get ahead resources page. It’s a survival guide for companies ready to embrace digital transformation and is packed with great topic ideas.

• Can you identify incoming industry legislation that will impact the company’s operations? E.G. Brexit was a HUGE deal for almost every company in the UK and Europe in the late 2010’s. Summarise how an incoming policy change might impact the industry, any historical precedents and how industry leaders are responding. Suggest a few next step research proposals.

• Can you identify a social purpose organisation that is a perfect fit for the company? Most businesses would prefer to partner with a social purpose rather than just give away cash. Is there an organisation that could use your company’s expertise, manpower, research or reach to achieve something really cool?

Getting it Done — Interview Presentation Tips that Don’t Suck

Play Devils’ Advocate

Public speaking is scary. No two ways about it. Overcome it ahead of your presentation by knowing your content. You will be asked follow-up questions — plan accordingly. If you wanted to sabotage your proposal, what parts would you question? Poke holes in your insights and your solutions. Have friends or family play devil’s advocate and pepper you with hard questions about you and your content. I’m available for pre-interview practice sessions if you’re interested too.

Flair

Remit Sethi calls it ‘The Briefcase Method’ — you LITERALLY pull your insights from your briefcase to demonstrate adding value to the interviewer. The symbolism is delicious. Where other candidates are talking about their experience, education and hobbies, you are showing how to you would step-change the companies social media presence or adaptability to a disruptive technology. In one move, you are symbolising ‘here’s the value I bring’, ‘this is what I’m worth’, ‘this is how well I understand your business’.

During your presentation — pause, reach into your briefcase and pull out a sheet of supporting information. Graphs, bullet points, infographics — material that really drives home your main point. This is your ‘us vs competitor’ social media analysis or the ‘why bitcoin’ graphic. You LITERALLY just added value to the interviewer when they weren’t expecting it. Priceless.

Language

Use ‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’ in your presentation. You are framing yourself as part of the team from the very start.

Technology

This is a tricky one. For every powerpoint lover, there is a hater. I’m a hater. I think it adds moving parts that distract from you and your message. In some contexts sure, but not when you should be making a personal connection and great first impression. I think you add more value researching and building a rock-solid proposal than tweaking slides. Besides, how often does the projector fail and you’re stuck on print-outs anyway?

Keep it simple. Make eye contact. Converse. Impress with supporting info page via the briefcase method instead of power point slides.

Tour of Duty

Want to really impress the decision maker? Suggest you do a few weeks in customer service before you take a specific role. The modern business recognises that customer service isn’t a department — it’s a philosophy. Every decision a business makes needs to be for the benefit of customers. Acknowledge up front that the best thing you can do to be successful in your new role is to learn first-hand the needs, issues and problems customers face. This kind of initiative, self-direction and curiosity (there it is again…) is guaranteed to impress.

And that’s it! Thanks for reading and best of luck friend. Really hope you got something out of our interview presentation examples and are moving forward with your own hire-me pitch.

Head over to our facebook page and share your experience putting these tips into action. I’m there to answer any questions you might have. Come join the conversation.

Dan

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