Best Way to Deliver the Benefits and Features of Your Company During an Interview

In the end, each candidate wants to know “What’s in it for me?” Therefore, you should concentrate on selling the benefits of your company, rather than its features. “Benefits” are what something means to a candidate. “Features” are merely descriptive. Part of your job in selling is to convert features into benefits. To give you an idea of how to do that, listed below are examples of some common features of companies, followed by corresponding benefits to candidates:

• A young company—opportunity for growth, ability for you to relate to other employees.

• Major customers/clients—interesting work you’d do, stability.
• Support services—you can focus on the job you’ve been hired to do, on interesting work.
• Excellent employees—you will be trained by the best, opportunity to observe them in action.
• Pleasant people—the time you spend at the company will be enjoyable.
• Cutting-edge work—you will be challenged and stimulated.
• Lack of structure—you will not be inhibited in your growth by a lot of rules and formalities.
• Small office/break down into groups—you will not be lost, you will be a valued member of the team.
• Prestige of the company—you will feel proud to work here, you are not limiting your future options.
• Well-managed—you are coming into a stable, suc­cessful company, you won’t have to worry about things other than doing your job well.

Notice that all of the benefits speak in terms of “you,” the interviewee. Interviewers should begin to make inter­viewees feel they are part of the company by conveying to them, “This is what it would be like if you were working with us.” The best way of selling anything is to make the buyer feel he owns it. People love to buy once they own something.

Like the interviewer, the interviewee, too, can improve her selling efforts by understanding the difference between features and benefits. Convert your selling points into bene­fits to the employer. For example, assume that the job you are interviewing for requires you to put out a monthly client newsletter. Instead of simply referring to your attention to detail, you might say, “You could be comfortable that I would not let that newsletter be sent out to clients without double-checking to make sure there were no errors in it.” This type of statement not only identifies the benefit to the employer, but also shows that you are focused on getting specific tasks done, an important characteristic for most any employee.