Today we meet Natalie Fisher, a career mindset coach, who explains why you may be getting job interviews, but no job offers.
Natalie has helped hundreds of people get unreasonable job offers that they originally didn’t believe they could get.
In this short discussion, you’ll discover how to:
- Give yourself proper credit for the work that you have done.
- Share about your experience leading with the results rather than the actions.
- Maintain mental and emotional resilience when interviewing doesn’t go as planned.
Introducing Natalie Fisher
Laura Brandenburg: Hello everyone. I’m Laura Brandenburg from Bridging the Gap here today with Natalie who’s here to talk about why you are getting interviews, but not an offer, for a business analyst job. This is a challenge that I know a lot of you face.
Natalie is a career mindset coach that’s helped hundreds of people get unreasonable offers that they didn’t originally believe that they could get. She works on mindset, which those of you who have followed me for a while know I’m a big geek when it comes to mindset and success strategy. She helps you with both and is obsessed with figuring out the specific mindset tools and blocks that will get in the way of really smart people succeeding in getting into the position they want with a salary they want.
Great to have you here, Natalie. Thanks for being here.
Natalie Fisher: Thank you for having me.
Laura Brandenburg: Before we get started, you have this guide, which you shared with me called, “Eight reasons that you get interviews, but no offers”. I’ve downloaded it and read through it. I think it is absolutely brilliant. Anyone who wants to download it can get it in the notes below. We’re not going to cover all eight reasons today because this is a bit of a short interview, but I do want to just dig deeper into a few of the reasons that really stood out to me and I think are relevant to our community.
Employers Can Sense an Energetic Doubt in Your Abilities and Decide Not to Make a Job Offer
The first one was number two, and this is where you said, “They sense an energetic doubt in your abilities.” This one certainly, I think, affects business analysts because as analytical thinkers, we often doubt ourselves in the first place. And then we can get thrown off because the terminology is a little different than we’ve seen before and we want to make sure we’re answering the question perfectly. That can make us come off as less than confident.
My question for you is how do you advise people to overcome this one?
Natalie Fisher: Yeah, for sure. There are many different tools that I use. I think the one here that’s most applicable for maybe a new business analyst or somebody who is unsure of their own abilities right now is to, first of all, take stock of what you have done and make that forefront of your mind. Even if it seems like it’s small things, there’s always a big list of things that you have already done that you’re probably not giving yourself enough credit for. Then the, “I can figure things out” thing because you have figured out a whole bunch of things that you didn’t know how to do in the beginning.
You’ve been doing that since you were born. Walking, talking. It’s just stuff you’ve figured out along the way. All of a sudden we grew up and got really doubtful that we would be able to figure things out and that’s where we get tripped up. I would offer that thought. It’s really helped a lot of my clients to just repeat that. “I know I can figure things out.” And then pointing to all that evidence of the times when you have figured things out when you started and you had no idea of how that was going to go.
Laura Brandenburg: Just like as a business analyst, your job is to figure things out, right?
Natalie Fisher: Yeah, exactly.
Laura Brandenburg: You probably have done this before. If it’s a good role for you, you probably have a lot of evidence in your favor.
Natalie Fisher: Yeah. There’s so much evidence anyway. It’s so easy for me to go into a conversation with the clients and start to dig out all the things that they’ve done. But the problem is nobody is going to sit there and question you on the details of the things you’ve done. So you have to do that yourself, for yourself so that you can be like, okay, I understand. I do bring more to the table than I thought, and I have figured out more things than I thought.
Laura Brandenburg: Yeah. That prep work seems really key.
Natalie Fisher: Yeah.
You Might Not Get an Offer Because the Information You Provide is Not Concrete or Specific Enough
Laura Brandenburg: The next one I wanted to ask you about is when people say they didn’t get specific enough or concrete enough information. Can you just share a little bit more about that? And how much do you advise people to share? Because you also don’t want to go so deep into the details that you’re lost in the weeds.
Natalie Fisher: Yeah, for sure. That’s a great question too. It’s kind of like I was thinking about this and how I could use an analogy to kind of illustrate how this is.
It’s like if you’re serving a meal, you don’t want the meal to be overwhelmed with so many spices and so many things that you can’t taste any of it. But you also don’t want it to be so bland that it just tastes like nothing. So what I think is people normally will go on the bland, vague side and they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I can do that,” or they won’t give specific examples.
What we want, I think, is like the main part of the meal is your results. What are the results that you attained or achieved from the story that you’re telling? Was it that you got people to collaborate on something and that meant that the business was now able to move forward with a project that got done on time? Why did that matter? So the main part of the meal is the result.
The side dishes are kind of like the situation explaining the context of the situation, how you got into it, what your task was, and what the assignment was. Just giving some context. Then talking a little bit about the actions that you took and how you did them. But your main part of the meal is the one that they care about the most, the end result, what you’re talking about actually achieved. That’s kind of how I describe it. Just think it’s one extreme, you’re really vague and you’re like, yeah, I did it. I can do it. No problem. The other you’re like telling them all these things and they’re just kind of, their eyes are glazing over with, okay, when are you going to be done talking? You want to kind of be in the middle, focusing on don’t forget the results. I find a lot of people forget the results. I’ll be having a conversation and they’ll be like, “Well, I did this, this, this, and this.” And I will say, as the coach, “Okay, but why did that matter? What were the results from that?” And then they will give me the best answer they’ve given.
Laura Brandenburg: But you have to dig for it?
Natalie Fisher: Exactly.
Laura Brandenburg: We didn’t quite prep for this, but I’m interested at what level you coach people to give results. Because as we were talking about before, there’s the project results, but then there’s also the individual results, what they contributed to the project. And I think BAS can kind of get stuck in the middle of that. What results do you advise people to focus on in the interview?
And It May Not Be About You At All!
Natalie Fisher: The question I ask to kind of weed that out and clarify that for people is, “What would have happened if you were not there? What do you think would have happened if you were not part of that project at all?” It kind of becomes clear as to what unique, specific contribution that they had. And we can kind of put together what was it in their unique thought processes that contributed to that final result. That’s kind of a good weeding question to make it clear because they have a pretty good idea at that point. If you remove that person from the situation, the project would have turned out differently.
Laura Brandenburg: Yeah. As a business analyst, if you weren’t there to write the dozen use cases for how the software was going to work, the business and the software people would have been talking back and forth and trying to shortcut this process and probably built the wrong thing.
Natalie Fisher: Exactly.
Laura Brandenburg: Instead of a really clear process. That example, too, in terms of your don’t go into the deep, like you wouldn’t go to the details of, “Well, first I did this use case and then I did this use case, and then I did this,” but you might say, “I created a dozen use cases and this is how I worked with the team,” to kind of give a flavor of the project without like the step by step.
Natalie Fisher: Yeah, totally. And I like to say, when I was interviewing myself, I would always kind of give them that overall thing. And then I would say, “If you want to see more examples, if you want to see more results, I’m happy to share them.” Most of the time they didn’t need to, but it made me feel better to just give that option.
Laura Brandenburg: Yeah. All right. There are so many, again, good reasons in the guides and there’s a lot of practical guidance, too. But the last one I want to talk about in the time that we have today is #8. This was, “It has nothing to do with you.” I think job seekers want to make every interview about them, and it’s not always the case.
Often, I think when people are interviewing business analysts, it’s like the hiring manager sometimes doesn’t have a clear view even of the role that they’re hiring for. And so they might put a list of qualifications down, but then as they start to interview people, you might be qualified on paper, but they’re like, oh my goodness, this is not what I actually need. I didn’t get the requirements right. Which is a total, “It’s not about you” situation. How would you help advise people to maintain their mental and emotional resilience in the face of that kind of an interview process where that might be happening?
Natalie Fisher: Totally. In that kind of an interview process, or in the kind of a process where you went in and you just kind of knew it wasn’t the right fit and you didn’t really like it either. There are going to be situations like that where it just wasn’t going to work out no matter what you did. In those situations, your first step is to identify that. But I think deeper is just being confident with how you showed up and focusing on evaluating yourself from your own perspective. Not making the result mean something about you if you got rejected for something.
I had a client, he got rejected for something that he told me he didn’t even want, but he was still disappointed about it. And it’s like, you get to make the decision. I don’t want to work for a company who doesn’t know what they want yet. I don’t want to work for a company who isn’t going to be flexible with time off or whatever it is that you discovered in the interview that maybe you didn’t feel right about.
I would say, like in my program, I talk about evaluating based on things you can control. There’s a list of things you can control. You can feel really good about. You can walk out of that interview saying, “You know what? I did everything I could, I’m happy with how I showed up.” If it’s not a match, it’s not a match. Sometimes you know it’s not. Identifying that you have a decision to make as well. It’s not just them. It’s equal. I think we often get that confused. We think they’re the ones with the power and stuff, but they need you too.
Laura Brandenburg: Yes. I mean, you have an immense amount of power as a business analyst. If people need the skillset, they just need to understand what you can do and the value you can create for them. That’s awesome.
Natalie, do you want to share a little bit more about this download I’ve been talking about and where people can find? I’ll definitely leave a link below.
Natalie Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. So the link for it is below and we go into the eight specific reasons how to fix them all. And yeah, just kind of going into the mindset, because that was the number one question that I kept getting is, “I’m going on all these interviews, but what am I doing wrong?”
Like we talked about, sometimes it really doesn’t have anything to do with you, but most of the time there are some things that you can do to definitely increase your chances and guarantee that job offer coming through.
Laura Brandenburg: That’s awesome. And if you want to learn more about the business analyst role, specifically, at Bridging the Gap, we also have a free workshop called the Quick Start to Success, and I will leave that link below as well.
Thank you so much, Natalie, for being here today and thank you for being here today.
Natalie Fisher: Awesome. Thank you for having me. It was great.
Get Hired! With These 2 Free Resources
Download Natalie’s 8 Reasons You Get Interviews But No Offer
In her free guide, 8 Reasons You Get Interviews, But No Offers, she shares the most common hindrances that may be keeping you from attaining your dream job that have nothing to do with your experience or skill set.
Join our Free Workshop:
Quick Start to Success as a Business Analyst
Discover the opportunities you have as a business analyst – straight from Laura Brandenburg.