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How to stand out in an interview starts before you walk in the door. Build a real, specific answer to why they should hire you, because on paper your resume reads exactly like everyone else's.
Andrew Butler has spent 25 years in brand strategy, at agencies including Chiat\Day, Hill Holliday and Arnold, and he now teaches at Northeastern. I wanted to know what actually makes one candidate different from the next, since he's the one making the calls.
How do you stand out in an interview?
Andrew has his students bring in their résumés with the names taken out. "I've erased their names at the top of it, and they all look exactly the same," he said. Same school, same major, the same way of introducing themselves, every time.
"That's one of the first questions that they'll ask you is tell me about yourself and why I should hire you," Andrew said. What he tells students who blank: if you can't come up with a real reason, you've failed yourself before you showed up.
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What makes you different from every other candidate?
Andrew leads every conversation with students the same way: what are you good at, why does it matter to you, and what makes you interesting beyond the job. Andrew was getting flat responses from a student until he shifted gears and asked what the kid was into outside the classroom. That's when the student lit up about rock climbing: "I'll do this dynamic swing to completely take a different path that nobody's ever talked and done before."
Andrew turned that into a technique he now teaches students to use when they introduce themselves. Now you walk in and say when everybody else is doing this, I try to take a dynamic swing, and here's where I've already done it. That's a perspective nobody else in the room has, and it's the difference between being forgettable and being remembered.
How long should you stay at your first job?
Andrew's advice runs against most of what people hear in school: don't pick an agency and don't pick a brand, pick a person you want to work for. He worked for four different bosses and got something from each: business fundamentals, creativity, leadership, and how to operate an agency. CLUTCH Workshop is what he built out of all that experience.
How he thinks about it: learn what you came for, then go find the next person to learn from. Stick around much past two or three years without a clear reason, and you've stayed too long.
Branding vs marketing vs advertising: what's the difference?
Andrew draws a hard line between brand and marketing. "Brand is the core. Brand is why you exist, it's the role you play in somebody's life." Marketing, in his framing, is how you actually tell that story once you know what it is.
He figured this out managing Bob's Big Boy, where the team took budget out of marketing to fix the restaurants and retrain staff first, because advertising can't save an experience that doesn't match your story.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full episode for Andrew's take on posting your point of view on LinkedIn, whether a career coach is worth paying for, and why he thinks marketing books are a waste of your time: Stop Blending In: Advice For Your First Marketing Job.
Watch next: What 25 Recruiters Say Actually Gets You Hired In Marketing & Advertising
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