How To Know Your Worth For An Interview
Many of us STEM professionals are quite comfortable with numbers but for some reason when you ask us to quantify our day-to-day responsibilites in dollars, suddenly we’re scratching our heads.
Why is this? As someone who is currently studying psychology, I believe I have an answer. When we’re asked to talk about the purity of a drug or how heavy a particle is when we’re firing it at incredible speeds, there is really only one answer. It’s either right or wrong. Black and white.
When you are bringing in more subjective variables, like the value of a skill or a task that you are looking to complete, suddenly it’s messy and there’s no real right answer. You’re dealing with a subjective reality that really doesn’t have a correct answer to it.
Welcome to the world of sales.
How can you quantify your worth for an interview?
There are actually formulae that you can use in order to properly quantify the value of what you do however, I don’t want to get into them here because it’s quite technical and really for our purposes we don’t need to go to that level. What we need to do is think about time, money and processes.
Time Saving
Without getting too philosophical, time is a finite resource and only we can choose how we spend it. This means when you consider a business as an entity, you can understand that it also has finite time. Things need to be done in a certain amount of time and they need to be done to a certain standard in order for them to be effective.
When we think about time in a business, if you can get something done in a quicker and more efficient manner, that frees up more time for the business to focus on other tasks. Say if something usually takes an hour a day to complete and you reduce that to 30 minutes, you would go from having a task cost 260 hours a year to complete to 130 hours. Or in other words, something that costs just shy of 11 days of the year now costs 5.5 days. That gives the business 5.5 days extra to conduct their business and is a valuable asset.
Let’s look at some examples;
Successful maintenance of the organization & continuity of business through company separation from the realignment of the existing team, leading to a potential saving of up to €250,000.
Contractors are reviewed for ability to deliver projects on time, quality workmanship, ability to work with our client’s needs & competitive pricing. Managing these contractors is essential for the success of each project.
Successfully reduced the implementation time for new sport/vertical businesses from 3 months to just a week.
Money Talks
We live in a capitalist society, everything when it comes to business is how is more money made? And the sooner we get this into our internal thoughts, the sooner we can talk the language of corporate.
Why should we bother? Because no matter how content we are with creating new drugs or software or designing buildings, we rely on our employers to pay us in order to pay our bills and if we are able to understand their language, it’s much easier to negotiate and also to explain our worth in an interview.
Let’s show some examples;
Pioneered a social fundraising model. This new model led to a 3900% growth in community fundraising income, from average of €500,000 p.a. in 2017 to average of €2m by 2021.
Average project scope and scale average of €45,000. Typically have 8 projects running at once, to an overall value of €360,000.
Secured a 75% reduction in product testing, with a saving of $1.5M.
You can see above how money can translate across different sectors. The examples come from Marketing, Pharmaceuticals and Construction but it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the specifics of the market, money is universal. And this is an important aspect to consider when you are interviewing. You may understand the importance of your tasks but your interviewer may not and so it’s best to contextualise your value.
Process Efficiency
When we are thinking of our value as STEM professionals, we tend to gravitate towards process efficiency as a default. This is a good first instinct however where most of us fall short is to either contextualise our process efficiency or to relate it to money and/or time.
It’s important to realise that when you are interviewing somewhere that you are engaging in a sales process and to ignore this would be to significantly reduce your ability to do well in an interview. Make sure to frame your answers in this light to not only make sure that you are understood regardless of your audience, but also to display your soft skills.
Let’s look at some examples;
Reduced unit cost of event participation by 50% from 2019 to 2021 by introducing long term planning that enabled switch to a different supply chain.
New process resulted in a series of user interviews, design changes and ultimately a 10% increase in end-user conversion on forms which helped to generate more revenue.
Facilitated disposition of 600,000 tonne of held product over 2 months by streamlining product grading & release process.
By going through the above examples, I hope I have effectively illustrated my point. Just sticking down your day-to-day responsibilities unfortunately won’t cut it anymore. You need to be able to effectively sell yourself and this is how I help my own clients get those dream jobs.
