The Rock That Interview Story

Ten years ago, when I first started my recruitment agency, I made an incredibly important discovery which had a tremendous impact upon my business. Finding qualified candidates for companies didn’t turn out to be my biggest problem, finding qualified candidates who could talk about what makes them valuable was the problem. I discovered that while there were a great many wonderful candidates out in the job market, few of them knew how to truly articulate their value to a prospective employer.

If you think about it, you can probably do your job very well, but if put on the spot in a formal interview situation, you may need a little help in talking in depth and in detail about what it is that you do on a daily basis and why you are the perfect fit to perform your same job for another company. Not that you couldn’t do it – but you probably haven’t been taught how to do it!

For those very reasons, my super qualified candidates were losing job opportunities to lesser qualified candidates who happened to be better at playing the interview game. Sure, I was making the hires, but I knew that the hiring company was not getting the best person for the job. If I was making the placement, why should I care? Well, all I can tell you is that it makes a big difference to me. I didn’t just want the placement, my dedication to providing the best possible services to my clients caused me to set out to fix this problem.

I developed an interviewing system which I taught my candidates, and suddenly my placement rate not only dramatically increased, but my client companies began to get the truly best candidates for their job openings – the very thing my clients deserved! I started to love to go to work again because I was, and to this day am, providing a service that I am proud of.

Most of us have been taught at one time or another the basics of interviewing for a job. Wear appropriate business attire, bring a resume, sit up straight, try to connect your job history to the company and job you are interviewing for; but those basics, while important, are NOT enough, few of us have been taught how to do the most important thing at a job interview – how to articulate our value.

The program will teach you how to treat a job interview like a business meeting, how to organize and prepare a business meeting agenda which consists of the most important points to cover at your interview, and most importantly, systems and techniques that will enable you to articulate your value to the company.

If you put in the time and effort, you will positively set yourself apart from other candidates who are interviewing for the same job. Simply put, you will blow the interviewer away because the average candidate is making it up on the fly. We don’t interview on the fly because we don’t conduct business on the fly. We plan and execute a marketing program to invest in your future. That’s what getting a job is all about.

After a while, I found I was spending all day giving interviewing classes so I teamed up with Brian Skalski, a Marketing specialist, to produce a self-paced multimedia program integrating a video, workbook and website. What's truly unique about our product is that it comes with a Personal Workspace web login where you can practice techniques, maintain your personal profile and scripts, and generate custom agendas that you printout and take with you to every interview!

The title of our program, “Rock That Interview!” naturally came about as a result of what mastering these systems and techniques accomplishes for our candidates. First of all, I am not your typical ultra straight, corporate style business person, and secondly this program is somewhat off the wall, requiring that you think outside the box. If you’ll put it all together you will simply “Rock That Interview!” That’s both the goal and the result. So the name stuck!

-- Elliot Jagoda & Brian Skalski

P.S. At first, it was thought the program was geared toward entry-level job seekers.
But after several years of positive feedback we've found it's ideal for experienced candidates who need a way to organize and focus their broad experience for a particular job AND for English As A 2nd Language Candidates looking for a systematic way to articulate themselves in an interview.