- Hey, everyone. This is Self Made Millennial. I'm Madeline Mann. Today I'm going to teach you a strategy of how to stand out in
an on-site interview. This strategy can be such a huge help to people who don't
have a lot of experience in the field they're going into. It'll really help you compete against people who are more experienced. And those of you who are experienced, this is going to give you a big edge against a lot of the other candidates. What this is all gonna be about is a strategy that almost no one does, and it's all about this. ♪ The BAMF binder ♪ I call this my BAMF binder, and I've been making them every time I'm on the job market. I didn't think it was anything special, but now that I'm on the other
side of the interview table, I realize that almost no one does this, and when they do, it is hugely impactful. I'm gonna show you exactly how
to put a BAMF binder together in this video. What's tough is that
generally the professions that do create portfolios
are more visual professions, like a photographer or a designer. Not all of us have visual jobs, so we're gonna have to get
a little bit more creative at showing visually what we do, but it's a lot easier than you think. This is basically a sweet catalog that they get to flip through to see what it'd be like to work with you. So what to include in your BAMF binder. (rock music) The first thing you can do
is include academic items. This can be a powerful way to overcome the no experience paradox, where you need experience
to get experience. Most of you, from attending
these universities and programs, actually have experience, but it's not the experience
in a traditional sense. It's more project-based or you headed up certain events. And those things can
be extremely impactful as long as people fully
understand the context. And then the more years
you are out of school, you can start to leave off this section. What to include in your academic section? Throw in your college transcripts, but only if you're proud of them. Include copies and images
of awards you've gotten and even write a little
description under each one. Include summaries and slides
from your favorite projects. Possibly you competed
in some competitions, so include photos of
you at that competition as well as any information
about where you placed in it. Include papers you've written, and then include any other visuals, such as a photo as you president of an organization on campus, or a screenshot of where you were quoted in an article for the campus newspaper. So second, you'll also wanna
make sure you obviously have your professional items in there, as well. First thing I would do is
put your resume in there. Include printouts of any articles or blog posts you've
written about the industry. Include any certificates
of trainings you've done. Think about what you've
done professionally and how do you present that visually. I think the most powerful thing you can do is try to put things that
you've accomplished into graphs. People love graphs. - This is a pie chart
describing my favorite bars. And this is a bar graph
describing my favorite pies. - Maybe you work in customer service, and over the course of the last year you've been at your job, your number of people who you've helped each week has escalated. Or if you're someone who handles a bunch of schedules you're coordinating, you could have a graph of how many inquiries are coming to you and how many things
you're scheduling a day. The sheer volume of that
could be very impressive, especially when shown visually in numbers. Also include presentation slides that you've done professionally, and include summaries about
how the presentation went and what were the results of it. This is truly an exercise in creativity of thinking how you can
capture what you do in your job and put it visually in a book, and I really challenge you to do that. Third thing to include in a BAMF binder are some personal items. Include fliers of events that
you've put on or spoke at. Include anywhere that you appeared online, like, on the news or in an article. Simply being out in the
world and doing things and being known is
attractive to an employer. Maybe you have an online
presence or you have a following, and it might not be related to your industry or line of work, but showing those numbers of followers and your analytics of some of your pages. A few bonus things you could even add is maybe a list of your role models. This is not something that
you are gonna go down the list and explain to someone
who is interviewing you, but, you know, if you
just write, you know, a few role models on there and your interviewer's
flipping through your binder and they see that you love Michelle Kwan, and they also love figure skating, and then you two bond over
what hard work it is to, you know, become a figure skater, and suddenly they're in love with you and really have no doubt
in your work ethic. Stuff like that happens. Just throw the kind of
information in there, and you never know where you
might strike a human bond. And then finally, you could also include a
list of your favorite books. So now you have an idea about what could go in the BAMF binder. Let's talk about creating it. (rock music) There are a few different strategies on how to think about best
way to create it for you. One way to go about it is
to look at your resume, and on your resume
hopefully you have listed under each job your key achievements, and look at those
achievements and think about, how can I present each
one of those bullet points in a visual way? Another way to think about it
is think about your strengths. One strength you might feel
is one of your strongest suits is that you are highly organized. Possibly you find your most
amazing organized spreadsheet. It's color coded showing
that amazing research you did and having it so organized. That would really show that
you are highly organized and get that through to the interviewer. When creating visuals about
projects or initiatives you did, take on the PAR approach. PAR stands for problem, action, result. So when you're creating these visuals, instead of putting an entire presentation or study that you did, you could break it down into
the problem, the action, and then the result. Here's an example of a PAR I did. This is for a training
facilitation I put on. So I start out with a summary about why the training was needed, action I took, so how I put the training
program together, and then this page I have the results. So I did a follow-up survey which included both quantitative
and qualitative data, and I included both. I included some percents
as well as some quotes from people who did the actual training, and then a quick summary
of why it was impactful. Another tip on creating this
binder is make it look nice. Originally when I started
making visual tools like this, I had it all in a folder and it was kind of all looseleaf and I would pull it out and it was, pages were folded. Put in some extra time to
make sure it looks nice and neat and professional. Another thing that I've seen people do is put their BAMF binder
in a digital version on their website, though even if you've put
this online on a website, I still think you should
bring in something physical when you come in for the interview, but if you have your heart
set on being digital, I recommend having a tablet
where there's a presentation or a series of PDFs where they
can quickly flip through it as if it was a binder. So this final section is
about using the BAMF binder. This is where it comes to life. (rock music) There are a few key rules about using your binder in an interview. I would recommend you only
show your binder in person. I don't believe that you
should drop off the binder at a hiring manager's desk or that you should send a ton
of PDFs attached to an email and expect someone to read all of it. This binder doesn't really
come to life usually unless you're there
telling the story with it. The way I use my BAMF binder in interviews is bring it in with me to the interview and I'll have my resume out and I'll set the binder and the resume on the table in front of me. I'll hand my resume to the
person who's interviewing me, and then I won't open the
binder until they ask a question where I will want to reference the binder. They might ask me, "What was a challenge that you faced "and how'd you overcome it?" And I might start to tell the story about a project I worked on and do the whole PAR,
problem, action, result, and while I'm telling that story, I'll be flipping through
my binder and saying, "Well, so this is where it started," and then walking them through
the presentation I did. And so it's a tool to
help me tell the story. And then once I've started telling a story about something in my binder, they might be interested
to see it themselves, and so they might ask to look through it, or I'll start flipping through and showing them other things. In some interviews, the binder stays closed the whole time, and that is okay. I just wanna make sure that you all aren't walking into interviews
with a rehearsed speech of how you walk through
each page of your binder, because that just won't
come off as authentic. It will be too forced. And you really want the interview to take itself where it may and have the binder be this amazing tool that will help you at certain points. (rock music) So this is my BAMF binder. It's quite a few years old. But I'll show you a few
things that I put in it to give you maybe some inspiration. On these following pages, I wanted to emphasize how I'm
great at building processes. These are a bunch of guides. A guide to hiring, a training curriculum I built, guide to becoming a manager. I didn't wanna put all
these guides in this binder because no one would want
to go through and read it, but you can kind of see from these images, you can get a glimpse of the kind of things I was
putting in this guide. I was trying to send the
signal that I am really great at taking something ambiguous and putting structure around it. Here's an example of some graphs I put. People loved looking at this page. The numbers really kind of drew them in. There's nothing in this page that's, like, super amazing statistics, but it kind of painted a picture of the population I was working with, some of the results of some
of the projects I worked on, and it just gave, like,
a good visual summary. This is my master's thesis. I just popped the whole
40-page thing in here. I wouldn't necessarily
recommend doing that. I should've done a quick
summary page right here. Here's another PAR-type visual I included. This one was done in a
before and after format. I talked about how I
gathered lots of data, synthesized it, decided
to make different changes, and the results of those changes, thus the before and after style. So those are all the tips
I have for you today. I really hope that you all decide to make your own BAMF binders. I'm serious. It really is a game-changer if done well. If you already do this, then you need to get in the comments and give more recommendations and tell people the results
that you've seen from this. This is a new channel, so please pop a like on this video. Also, please subscribe. I will have these videos coming
at you every single week, and I don't want you to miss one. That's all I've got. Thanks and see you next time. (rock music)
