JOY=Success Launches Career and Interview Coaching Workshops
Siobhan Neilland, Fortune 500 Recruiting Leader and Leadership Development Coach, is launching a new funding mechanism for the OneMama non-profit. Siobhan will now be offering private interview and career coaching or group virtual workshops where 100% of profits go directly back to community at the OneMama Uganda Health Center and Birthing Clinic.
Siobhan’s professional experience of over 20 years ranges from recruiting to building companies from scratch, working for some of the top companies–primarily in the tech industry–while also helping hire some of the best leaders and technologists to run those companies. With that, Siobhan has developed a style of leadership interview coaching that gives candidates that extra lift in their ability to get the job they want and deserve.
In a fireside chat with Siobhan, she discusses all the details of her services and how they can help save her passion, the OneMama.org NGO.
– QUESTION 1 –
Specifically who will your interview coaching workshops best benefit?
RESPONSE: These programs help experienced, senior level talent, leaders, and technical experts build-up their interviewing skills and land the roles and positions they deserve and in the companies they want!
- This is for people who are seasoned in their field and want to step up to the next level.
- For people who have a robust skill sets that seems atrophied after working the same job and company for so long.
- For people who struggle with self-advocacy.
- For people who may interview a lot yet aren’t getting the results they thought they deserve.
- For people who are willing to look at the interview process through another lens.
- For people who need help creating innovative, authentic stories out of their accomplishments and experiences.
- Or, for people who simply need guidance understanding their career journey.
– QUESTION 2 –
What would you say is your goal in offering these career-building services?
RESPONSE: My goal is to help people find their ideal jobs at the top companies they envision and offer them the toolkits they need to help them nail their next interview, gain confidence, and land the role they always dreamed of.
I love coaching candidates on how to have self-advocacy and successful negotiating skills in the interview process, and helping them discover the roles that work best for them–the places that they truly want and would be well-suited for, and it’s exciting to help them build-out their personal career path toward the next big thing in their life journey.
Together, we’ll create an strategic action plan that will get you HIRED!
– QUESTION 3 –
How were you inspired to offer your career and interview coaching services?
RESPONSE : First of all, I love coaching leaders to find their passion in their career. It’s fun for me and with these new services, I get to reach a larger community of individuals who can benefit from this. Helping others fighting for joy is all the inspiration I need.
The idea to host these sessions came from my general experience in leadership recruiting in the tech fields and in observing one of the most prevalent issues holding back personal career growth for a lot of professionals and leaders today… That is the scenario when top performers and leaders who are quite skilled and highly motivated at doing their work well, often stay at their employment and are promoted within at the same company for a long time, sometimes a lifetime. When a candidate is coming from this scenario, surprisingly, they are not very good at interviewing! They are not used to delivering the proper language around how to talk about themselves, how to build their stories, and, generally, how to interview successfully for their desired role. Basically while they might be great at their role, they may not be very good at interviewing, and this where I can help!
By utilizing the advanced interviewing programs I successfully built-out that have helped people for employers like Amazon, Google, and other Fortune 500 technology companies (and small startups) and customizing these methods, I am able to offer candidates insightful, uplifting, and self-building guidance that they will take into their next phase of their life.
This inspires me to want to help a wider audience, a larger community, for you to build your voice and reach the partners, funding, and career you always dreamed of!
– QUESTION 4 –
What are businesses really looking for in a leadership role candidate today?
RESPONSE: Top tech companies are currently asking recruiters to build top-tiered, innovative teams with more emotional and social intelligence-based questioning versus just interviewing with what is considered typical leadership and technical questions. Candidates must step into embodying being these kind of leaders!
– QUESTION 5 –
You often mention how potentially excellent candidates often self-select themselves out of the interview process with their poor interview skills. Can you explain this more?
RESPONSE: One hyphenated word: SELF-ADVOCACY!
I talked with some of the U.S.’s top technologists and leaders who are senior VPs for Apple, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce, etc. and what’s really interesting is that they may know that they are one of the top in their field, but they don’t know the extent or scale of their own skillset. This person may even be only 1 of 10 people in the world that can do a particular skill set or technology. Yet, I OFTEN find that during the interview process, that person will down-play their skills and will in turn self-select themselves out of process!
They say things like: “Oh, well I’ve only been doing this for 10 years not 20 or more.” Or “I haven’t really been at a company like this before, so maybe I’m not a good fit…” Or “I’m missing this one aspect of the job requirements, so I’m not going to get the job.”
These candidates usually focus on the areas where they’re lacking and the negatives during the interview process. This tends to be something that happens a lot of times for women, or even within communities that may have traditions saying that being boastful is considered taboo. So, depite their incredible talent, since they don’t have the language on how to advocate for themselves, they don’t get hired.
This is where learning how to talk about yourself, how to frame yourself on your resume, how to frame yourself on LinkedIn, and how to frame yourself with being real and authentic is KEY to getting the career you dream of. Also, candidates will learn which important details to include on their professional social media profiles and resume. If you leave off some awesome project you developed, or program you created, you are selling yourself short!
And I see it over and over, especially with top tier leaders and technologists, who think that everybody just knows them and their work, and combined with not interviewing well and poor self-advocacy, they don’t succeed in the interview and don’t get the job…
If this is YOU… Good Thing Is… MY INTERVIEW COACHING WORKSHOPS CAN HELP YOU!
– QUESTION 6 –
What are the differences between the Interview Workshops and Personal Interview Coaching Sessions?
RESPONSE: I offer two types of coaching services:
1. PRIVATE ONE-ON-ONE INTERVIEW COACHING
RESPONSE: The second part of my coaching services is private, one-on-one interview coaching. This is where we will really start to do the real details of your action plan. We’ll do this by building-out your stories, looking at the industry and where you really fit in–what your next pivoting point will be, and practicing with role playing mock interviews. We will work on practicing emotional and social intelligence skill sets which will carry you through a successful interview process.
In the mock interview, this will be a great opportunity to see where any road-blocks may be hurting your performance during interviews. Are you self-selecting yourself out of the process more than you realized? Are you rambling?
I will drive this coaching session using the same programs I built-out across Amazon and AWS (Amazon Web Services) that have been incredibly successful for over the past 10 years.
2. GROUP INTERVIEW COACHING WORKSHOPS
RESPONSE: In the group interview workshop/community sessions, you and other similar-minded people will join to get overall knowledge on my methods during the interview process that REALLY WORK to help you land your next leadership job. In a group workshop, you will start to see that you’re not the only person who has these issues. You will have the ability to network and bounce ideas off others as well.
You’ll be given resources and tools for ways to help build out your stories and action plans. I’ll also offer insight into what top business leaders think when they’re looking at a candidate for a job like yours.
– QUESTION 7 –
Tell us a bit about how you are using the profits from your interview coaching to give back to charity?
RESPONSE: Yes! So the non-profit OneMama.org is very close to having to close its doors due to several things all at once. Mainly lack of funding, low donations during the pandemic, local Uganda COVID-19 restrictions, supply shortages, lack of self-sustainable programs, and health and safety protocols.
That’s why launching these programs is happening NOW–Babies and their mothers in rural, hard-to-reach places depend on the help of others when the internal self-sustaining model put in place is basically broken during the pandemic. My heart breaks each day for them, and this is my way to help give back!
At the end of the day, it’s all about JOY…
Helping leadership candidates brings me SO much JOY. In turn, my joy will bring YOU JOY, and our joy together will bring the OneMama Family JOY.
…and JOY continues spreading like currency by sharing the JOY to whoever you gift it to along the way.
This will help move the needle of change both internationally with the work we do with OneMama and locally by building companies leadership bench with inclusive and emotionally intelligent leaders.
#JOY=SUCCESS
