Ace Interviews With Mind Maps
This week, my friend Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang shared some grim numbers:
She concluded with this question: What are the most important skills that have helped you get to where you are?
As someone who’s been through multiple roles and industries across seven companies, three continents and tough times like the Financial Crisis, I can confidentially say that storytelling and having strong narrative is critical to bouncing back from a layoff or transitioning into a new role.
Today I'll show you how to use a powerful Mind Map to craft a compelling professional story that highlights your strengths, accomplishments, and growth during those critical interviews.
Interviewers Want Stories Not Bullet Points
When a hiring manager asks you to walk them through your CV, they’re actually saying:
Don’t just talk me through your bullet points (I’ve already got that in front of me and have seen literally thousands of them). Instead I want to know your story - the highlights, your strengths, the challenges you faced and lessons learned.
I want to know how you became the person sitting in front of me today and what makes you special. In the process, I’ll be able to determine your values and mindset and whether you fit with our team.
Storytelling is the oldest and most effective way to accomplish this.
The purpose of the Transitions Mind Map is to identify your professional hero's journey, because there's no such thing as a perfect career path. It's precisely the twists and turns that make your story compelling.
When were those times that you were forced to hustle and adapt? How did you grow from your victories? How did you pick yourself up after your failures?
The best way to identify these plot twists is by mapping your transition points.
The Template
Here’s mind map template we’ll be using:
Put your name in the center, and the companies or roles that you’ve done as major nodes around it.
Now we’re going to expand a few things associated with those roles: It could be events and milestones, the different challenges and lessons that come to mind. Just write down whatever comes to mind. This nonlinearity is powerful because it expands our creativity and openness before we need to converge everything into a linear story (this is the same reason why I always map my presentations before hitting PowerPoint!).
Next, draw the transition arrows between the roles and identify the nature of those transitions. Was it intentional or did it happen by accident? Did an opportunity just land on your plate or were you forced to move? Flesh it out because it all contributes to a career coherent story.
Finally, zoom out a bit to see if there are any patterns, themes, lessons or strengths that emerge. This is the meta layer of this mind map that'll add color and flavor to your story.
Once this map is finished, you can use it to either tell your entire story or take snippets of it for role specific details or answer questions like “give an example of how you solved a problem in the past”.
It’ll all make a lot more sense as I go through our example.
The Basic Map
Below is my full 13-year tech career laid out in a mind map.
I began my career as a Deloitte Consultant, went through multiple startups, Google, Niantic Labs, traveled around the world and now am a content creator. I like to begin on the right side and work clockwise, but you can pick your own direction.
Sometimes the nodes will expand into child nodes. For example, at Google I was part of two teams. First was Local Incubation where we launched new products like Google Wallet. Then I moved into product strategy on Google offers through a reorg.
London was also a formative period when I did my MBA, ran tech conferences and meetups, dabbled in venture capital and became a product manager.
Now let’s take a look at the expanded map.
Big Picture, Compelling Stories
This monster might look intimidating, but it’s actually quite simple once we breakdown a few specific roles and transitions.
Let’s start with Deloitte Consulting. This was my first job out of university during the Financial Crisis. The national unemployment rate was at a pleasant 10% (compared to 3.5% these days). My entire graduating class dealt with massive uncertainty of whether we were even going to get jobs. The biggest lesson from this era was to adapt to shifting expectations.
Given my performance at Berkeley, I had expected to go into a top 3 management consulting shop like McKinsey, Bain, or BCG. However, the jobs just weren’t there, so I had to shift my expectations as well.
Funny enough, within a year, I learned that consulting wasn't for me and my desire for a team made me look for a company to join.
Enter Cogenra Solar, my very first startup. I got exposed to breakneck speeds, the hustle, and developed comfort with quick decisions. It was also my first interaction with investors and board members, as well as the dynamics of different departments working together. This was a vastly different world compared to the life of an outside consultant looking in.
What I gained from Cogenra was agility and resourcefulness. Talking about how I acquired these attributes is far more compelling than just going through bullet point accomplishments - save that for the resume!
Cogenra was also a period of self discovery. It was my first exposure to sales where I’d cold call a list of conference attendees to sell them expensive solar installations. I learned real quick that this push style of sales was definitely not for me.
This has huge repercussions because to this day, I prefer to engage in what I call “pull” tactics, which is making content and hosting conferences so that people come to me, rather than squeezing into packed networking events. If I were going for a business development role, this is what I’d highlight.
Now for the juicy plot twist: how I was forced to “transition” from Cogenra to Google.
Share Your Transitions
Less than six months after starting at Cogenra, I was laid off. The industry tanked as foreign competition dumped cheap solar panels into the market. I learned that I didn't do enough due diligence on the company’s playing field. This was my first wakeup call to think of my role holistically relative to the broader company and industry - long before I ever came across the term “systems thinking”.
During the eight months that I was unemployed, I launched a gig economy startup (this was 2012 when Uber was still a black cab company) with some college friends, learned UX design and put together investor pitches, helped a German biogas company expand into the US and implemented their Salesforce CRM system.
Simultaneously I also had a new mortgage from the house I bought right before the layoff, cover my own health insurance and was desperately trying to make ends meet. Meanwhile the recession was still raging, unemployment hovered at 8%, and I ended up applying to over 80 jobs with lots of dead ends before finally landing my dream role at Google.
Through this trial, I also grew resilient. The fact that I hit rock bottom professionally at such an early age turned out to be a blessing in disguise because it made me opportunistic and desensitized me to risk taking, which eventually made the diverse patchwork of my career.
Show Your Journey
You can literally see my entire career path in one mind map. What's powerful is that you can share either the entire story or its parts because that’s what each of these major nodes are - just packages of stories.
If an interviewer ever asks “tell me of a time that you had to overcome a major challenge”, I can now say: ”Well, after six months on my first startup, I got let go and this is what I did and learned in the interim, and this is how I eventually got my dream job.”
Mapping out my whole professional journey surfaces the “storyworthy” moments to incorporate into my interview as key takeaways.
I’d love to hear from you.
What’s one keystone career moment for you?
What did you learn and how would you tell the story?
Tweet or DM at me on Twitter / Instagram @shengsilver.
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