6 tips for interviewing with me...

If you are interviewing with me, read this, it should help.

These tips are based on my experience interviewing more than 3,500 people over more than two decades (an average of about 3 per week). As simple as these pointers seem, a majority of the people I interview struggle with some of them:

Tip #1: Tell me about how you are going to create value for our shareholders. I'm much more interested in how you can help us than I am in what you've done before (we'll check on that in other ways). That means: research our company, our web businesses, and bring us specific new ideas that drive value creation.

Tip #2: Tell me specifically how you would help implement those ideas. We love "hands-on" leaders with specific skills. We mostly avoid people who need lots of support to get things done.

Tip #3: Tell me honestly how working with us fits into your long-term career plans. I hear a lot of baloney; be authentic.

Tip #4: Quickly teach me something new-- about technology, business models, competitors, suppliers, or customers.

Tip #5: Ask great questions.

Tip #6: Be transparent about your needs and concerns. We're looking for self-aware people who can accurately assess whether our company is a good fit for them. Brutal honesty scores points with us and avoids misunderstandings later.

And, of course, relax and be yourself.

If you already work for us, these tips apply to almost any good meeting with me. I expect a great job interview to approximate actual work conditions as much as possible. I always want to discover how you really approach creating value.

Sense and Respond in the Acceleratron

For years we have implemented the concepts of sense and respond, in the context of a learning organization. For new web services, we reduced the time of market trials from months to weeks. We dramatically lowered the actual costs of experiments to the point of immateriality. And we improved forecasting accuracy.

In short, we were better, cheaper, and faster.

But we were still a bit too slow. By stringing together waves of testing, it might take many months to extract major learnings. And being slow is very expensive.

We've recently begun to solve this problem through massive parallelization of sense and respond techniques. Rather than waiting for the results of a wave of testing, we continually launch new, overlapping waves. While we are unable to incorporate learning from one wave into the next sequentially, we have multiplied the speed of individual insights. We then reconcile and apply the learnings "on-the-fly".

Our new process is less scientific and a little more costly. But it is faster, creates far more value, and leads to higher quality. It is consistent with Kaizen, helping us to better meet the challenges of the acceleratron.

Update: There seems to be confusion about how we utilize this approach. As I wrote, we use it to test new features on our websites before we formally introduce them. We do not use this approach to test software applications, such as vBulletin.