30-60-90 Day Plan for Job Interviews
Writing your 30-60-90 days strategy is challenging, even if you are quite confident in your skills, knowledge, and competencies. We decided to facilitate this task and provide you with some actionable tips, hacks, templates, and samples to reuse for your 30-60-90 plan creation.
Writing your 30-60-90 days strategy is challenging, even if you are quite confident in your skills, knowledge, and competencies. We decided to facilitate this task and provide you with some actionable tips, hacks, templates, and samples to reuse for your 30-60-90 plan creation.
Planning your career advancement is essential. However, should you plan your future actions in a certain position if you haven’t got a job offer yet?
Even if the final decision is out of your zone of influence, thoughtful planning of your development strategy presented to a potential employer increases your chances of getting a job offer. A 30-60-90 day plan is one of the best practices for this purpose. Here is the ultimate guide to coming up with this written strategy.
What Is the 30-60-90 Plan?
The 30-60-90 plan is a document that describes your development direction for the first three months in the company. It reflects your vision of your future activity, similar to a roadmap, and is a written promise for your employer at the same time.
Since this plan is drawn up before the direct job offer, its quality allows the hiring manager to assess the depth of the candidate's involvement in future business processes. It also ensures that the candidate's goals coincide with the company's goals and that they are prepared to implement them.
The 30-60-90 plan is a step by step strategy that divides your future activities into three milestones.- The first 30 days usually go for onboarding, learning, and evaluations of business processes.
- 30-60 days. During the next month, you should describe how you will use the knowledge obtained and contribute to achieving the company’s goals.
- 60-90 days. During the last period of this plan, you should outline the tasks you will perform independently, suggesting changes or initiatives.
Why and When Do You Need It?
Making a 30-60-90 day plan for an interview makes sense when a candidate is applying for an executive position. However, the process of hiring executive candidates is quite specific, and the cost of an error is significantly higher.
Requiring a 30-60-90 day plan is one of the best practices to filter candidates and make the best hiring choices. Therefore, if the company you want to work for requires you to write it at one of the hiring process stages, this is the right approach. Moreover, creating a 30-60-90 day plan will significantly increase your chances of success.
- Show you are serious about this position. Drawing up a 30-60-90 day plan requires careful preliminary research, analysis, and reflection. These actions take time and effort, showing that you are truly serious about the job, the company, and your potential role in it.
- Get a competitive advantage. If drawing up a 30-60-90 day plan is not a mandatory requirement for all candidates, this document can become your significant advantage. It distinguishes you from other applicants for this role and helps impress the interviewers.
- Show your goal-setting, strategic thinking, and planning skills. These skills are crucial to executive, managerial, and leadership positions. In addition to your education, experience, and accomplishments, your 30-60-90 day plan clearly shows your ability to set achievable goals, focus on tasks, define your personal success criteria, and think strategically.
When Do You Need to Showcase Your 30-60-90 Day Plan for a New Job?
It makes sense to ask the recruiter and senior management to review your plan at the final stage of selection and interviewing when you are two steps away from victory. It doesn't make sense to develop this plan earlier, as you have not yet had the opportunity to get a complete impression of the company and hear management's expectations of your role. The 30-60-90 day plan is one of your last and strongest arguments. It is your actionable response to the question of “Why should we hire you?”.
How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan
First of all, it is necessary to split your plan into equal time intervals of 30 days each. Next, you need to be very clear about your focus areas, priorities, goals, and corresponding metrics. Below we will provide a 30-60-90 day plan template, example, and tips to help you draft it more easily.
30-60-90 Day Plan Template for Interview
It will be easier to write your plan if you have a template in front of your eyes. Use it as a skeleton of your plan, customizing each item according to the specific job and company.
30-60-90 Day Plan Example
For instance, here is a sampled 30-60-90 day plan for a sales manager.
What Documents Do You Need in Addition to Your 30-60-90 Day Plan?
A 30-60-90 day plan is a powerful document that will give you an undeniable competitive advantage if written correctly. However, you also need other, equally important documents before the final stage of the interview.
Here are three main documents that your hiring manager will review again before making a final decision.
Resume
The resume is the primary document in the hiring process. There are a million guides on how to write your resume correctly; however, there is universal advice for all candidates. Your resume should be customized and tailored for a specific position. It should reflect precisely the knowledge, skills, experiences, and competencies required for applying for a particular job. Simply put, you should show your potential employer the things they are looking for. Start by checking our customized and industry-specific resume examples to come up with an exceptional one!
Cover Letter
Your cover letter should be even more customized than your resume. It is the first thing the hiring manager will read and analyze, so this document is the right one to show that you are a worthy candidate who is already passionate about the open position.
Recommendation Letter
A recommendation letter is no less important than your resume and a cover letter. This document is a kind of quality assurance that allows the recruiter and senior management to make sure that they are hiring a valuable candidate whose experience was useful in the previous job.
Creating a 30-60-90 Day Plan - Tips and Hacks
Here are some more actionable tips that will be useful when combining 30-60-90 day plans for an interview.
Start with Researching the Company
Most likely, you did this even before the start of the first stage of the interview, but now that you already have some first-hand information about the company, it is necessary to do some follow-up research. At this stage, it will be useful to focus on customers and employees of the company.
- List the main customers of the company, and find the answer to the question of why they are customers. It will allow you to find a perfect match between the company and its customers, and adapt your plan in such a way that it matches the principal value that the company is delivering to its customers.
- Next, if possible, try to find out more about the key employees of the company. Who are they? What background do they have? Is there something that all employees of this company have in common? For example, if each of the employees strives to complete their work plan ahead of time, it may make sense for you to shorten the time frame for completing your tasks, too.
Proceed with a Role Description Analysis
Next, review your role description again. Pay particular attention to the requirements. Try to match each of the requirements with the points in your plan. By the way, this is also a useful exercise when customizing your resume and cover letter.
Analyze Your Previous Interviews Within This Company
The labor market is not very different from the market for goods and services. The only difference is that you are not selling goods or services produced or provided by someone, but instead selling your knowledge, experience, and competencies.
For anything to be successful on the market, the value proposition must meet user expectations. By this logic, your value proposition as a future employee should meet your prospective employer’s expectations.
Therefore, as you work on your 30-60-90 day plan, mentally return to the previous stages of the interview. Recall what the hiring manager and senior management have said about this position, the goals they want to achieve by hiring a new person for that role, and their expectations of the candidate. You need to align your 30-60-90 day plan to your employer's expectations as closely as possible.
Be SMART with Your Goals
A SMART goal is a versatile concept used for goal setting regardless of the industry and goal-specifics. It can be used to set professional, personal, sport, or lifestyle goals, so you should remember this concept when writing your 30-60-90 day plan.
SMART stands for:
- S - Specific
- M - Measurable
- A - Achievable
- R - Relevant
- T - Time-bound
These are the features the goals reflected in the 30-60-90 days plan should match. So, your goals should be:
- specific to the position you are applying for;
- tied to specific metrics or indicators of achieving;
- possible to achieve;
- tied to the company’s business goals;
- have preset deadlines and time frames.
Follow the Optimal Length
30-60-90 day plan is neither a graduation paper nor an essay. It is a roadmap, a first but meaningful outline of your steps to take over the next three months. Therefore, this document should not be too long. The ideal length of a 30-60-90 day plan is three pages - one page for each stage.
Conclusion
As Brian Tracy wrote, “Failing to plan means planning to fail.” Fortunately, the 30-60-90 plan significantly reduces the chances of rejection and substantially increases your chances of seamless onboarding and becoming an integral part of the team. Feel free to use our 30-60-90 plan template to develop your strategy and become the candidate that recruiters desire!