Countless elements go into building a successful loss prevention career. We evolve through a series of self discoveries as the many features that make up who we are unfold through foresight and occasionally blind ambition as we forge the pieces into the image of leadership that we share with the professional world.
As our journey progresses, we learn the depths of our skills and abilities, developing our talents through experience and education, and balancing the lessons of ego and humility. Through perseverance and hard work, we create opportunities along the way, highlighting the attributes and the potential that compels others to take notice. This is the objective of job interview preparation.
Job Interview Preparation for LP Professionals
The job interview should help identify the best possible candidate for a position. Talents, abilities, experience, expertise, leadership—all of these attributes can be misunderstood, underestimated, or even overlooked altogether if we fail to send essential messages during the course of the job interview. In order to secure the best loss prevention jobs to build exceptional loss prevention careers, it’s critical that we undergo an appropriate amount of job interview preparation and learn how to present ourselves.
The interview provides a forum to open a window into who we are—as a professional, a leader, a partner, and a person. We are given precious minutes to summarize our value and our character and make a positive and lasting impression on those who offered us the opportunity to spotlight our loss prevention career.
A job interview is also a search for a match. Both company and candidate look to balance their contributions with the offerings of the other. In a traditional interview, the interviewer will ask questions focused on whether the candidate has the skills, knowledge, and expertise necessary to do the job.
In today’s competitive market, however, interviews typically go much further. Additional questions are asked regarding character and other attributes that can help better determine whether a candidate fits the organization’s needs and company culture.
By the same respect, candidates have also learned to ask better and more revealing questions about the company, the position, those individuals they will be working with, and the prospects that will be available to them moving forward.
It is a dynamic but delicate balance of questions and answers that helps lead to better-informed decisions for everyone involved. All of this makes the job interview process a complicated quest that demands focused effort to ensure the best results.
Why Job Interviews Are Tough for LP Pros
Unfortunately, all of this can be especially challenging for the loss prevention professional. Generally speaking, LP professionals are not very good interviewees. This is a difficult concept for LP people to accept (“We’re professional interviewers! How can this possibly be the case?”) and an issue that is often minimized or overlooked during our job interview preparation. Often, we think that we’re much better than the results tell us, and are surprised when the feedback that we receive is less than stellar. However, when we are willing to step back and look at the subject objectively, it’s not so difficult to see where this can present a concern.
By the nature of who we are and what we do, we’re suspicious. We’re guarded. We’re careful with what we say and how we say things. We have a natural tendency to try to take control of a conversation. Many of our professional interactions take place in adversarial situations. Our experience and training lead us to instinctively look for signs that something is wrong or out of the ordinary during a conversation.
For example, during the job interview, the person that we’re interviewing with isn’t under the same stress that we’re used to seeing during an interview with a dishonest employee—and the verbal and nonverbal cues that we look for might not necessarily reveal the same message in this type of setting. These tendencies become embedded in our habits, which are typically pointed out to us by our spouses, friends, and family on a regular basis.
This isn’t necessarily a flaw that we have to bury or overcome, but rather a tendency that we have to recognize as we do our job interview preparation.
But while there is clear merit to this aspect of our abilities, they’re not competencies that should dominate every aspect of our personal or professional conduct. There is a self-awareness that we must be willing to accept and manage. Especially as we look to climb the ladder of success there must be depth to our capabilities, and a maturity that showcases our appeal as a respected, respectful, and valued business partner.
The job interview is a process through which we actively progress, not an event that we experience. It requires skills that we must develop in order to be proficient. What’s most important is how the interviewer feels about us as a candidate at the end of the conversation, and not necessarily how we feel about ourselves at the conclusion of the job interview that will matter.
This is an opportunity to market ourselves—to show who we are, what we’ve done, and what we’re capable of accomplishing. This requires that we step into every interview situation with the right attitude and a winning approach. First steps are often the most important. When it comes to building your loss prevention career, always make sure that you start out on the right foot. Make the most of it, and knock their socks off.