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Time to prepare for the interview. I’m pretty much skipping interview basics in this video because this really isn’t geared towards people who need to be told to wear shoes to the interview. I’m assuming if you’re watching this, you already know the basics, like, don’t be late to the interview, don’t get there more than 15 minutes early to the interview, bring a copy of your resume for every person you’re going to meet with plus one extra just in case, and dress appropriately (which means 1 step above their daily attire for the office). When in doubt, dress formal. Grab a conservative suit, dark colors, show them you understand the importance of this meeting. If you want detailed explanations of all the basics I do have a blog article on Interview Basics with a link to it below. At the very least that would be a good review for you of some stuff I’m sure you already know, so you can check that out another time when you get a minute.

In this video I want stay focused on the most important element of interviewing, and the job search process as a whole for that matter, but it’s especially relevant for interviewing, which is that these companies are hiring the person that they like the best, not necessarily the most qualified person. And I know that’s not fair because now interviewing is more like a High School popularity contest, but you know what? This is not entirely bad news, even if you’re not a naturally outgoing, immediately likable person. In fact I would feel safe in saying that MOST people are in that category of “you have get to know ‘em first, and THEN you’ll like ‘em” kind of people. And when you’re going on an interview, you just have an hour or two, sometimes just 20 or 30 minutes to be likable! There’s not enough time to “get to know you” the way you wish they could, and you have to establish that same level of rapport in a very short period of time, but that’s not all bad. Actually that’s going to give YOU an advantage over everyone else because you’ve seen this program, and I’ll tell you why. Just like I discussed in the video under the Home tab of this site about defining what it is to be likable, I approach interviewing from a sales person’s perspective. You’re going in there to sell your best product, right, which is you, and sales people have put such an emphasis on being likable that that they’ve almost broken it down into a science, into a step by step formula that anyone can follow. They’ve identified some universally likable human characteristics, and they know if they can display those characteristics at strategic points throughout their sales call, that their percentage chance of being perceived as more likable will dramatically increase. And it can be done through a lot of little things, like the quick example I used in that 5 minute Define Likable video under the Home tab about what to say when they ask why you left your last position.

In this video I want to give you a couple more quick examples of how to sell yourself in the interview with some more advanced techniques, and this will really set the tone for the rest of this section, because if you approach every single aspect of your interview by having likability as your guide you’ll find that you’ll be changing a LOT of your answers to ensure they reflect being likable. Which again, being likable is something you can manufacture, you don’t have to be born dripping with charisma to be likable.

I’ll show you what I mean with one of my favorite techniques which is called the Slow Pitch Down the Middle. Here’s how this works: When you’re doing your research before the interview, look for some good news happening at the company. Something that, if you worked at this company, you would be proud to know this about your company. Let’s say for example you see that the company’s sales revenues just shot through the roof last year, they’re up over 25% in one year. Well now, having that information, you can casually mention during your interview, “When I was doing my research for our meeting today, (which by the way says hey, I was doing research for our meeting today because I’m very interested in this position), when I was doing my research for our meeting today I noticed that your sales revenues have jumped quite a bit over the last year. Did you hire a new sales team, or what’s happening to cause that?”

Okay that is a slow softball pitch right down the middle. Even if he wasn’t intending on it, hes going to feel compelled to pick up a bat and knock that thing out of the park. He’s going to feel compelled to start sharing the good news happening in his company, he is going to start selling you on why it’s so good to work there at that company and in that position. Now, why do you want him selling you on the company or the position? Obviously you’re interested already or you wouldn’t be there interviewing for the job, right? Well think about the psychological foundation of that scenario, of one person selling another person on anything. The person doing the selling is using their own personal opinions and their own personal persuasive skills to achieve a specific result, which is, the interest in whatever it is that they’re selling. In this case the Hiring Manager is trying to get you interested in this position. So at this point you have a choice. You can either reject him and make him feel awful about his personal convictions, OR you can start buying into what he is selling! Becoming more and more interested in the position by what he’s telling you. That’s going to make him feel great. That’s going to give him the feeling of accomplishment he set out to achieve when he started selling you on the opportunity. That’s going to affect the gut feeling he has about you and little conversation he has with himself after you leave, “Boy, I don’t know what it was about that person, I just liked ‘em.”

And this whole scenario you’re in, him selling you on the opportunity and then you buying into what he’s selling and then that positively affecting your likability factor during the interview, this whole scenario that you’re in happened because YOU came prepared with a slow pitch down the middle question from before the interview. THAT’S an advanced selling technique, and that’s what every video of this Interview section is going to be focused on. How can you take an ordinary interviewing activity, or a typical question, and turn it into a selling opportunity without it LOOKING like you’re selling.

Selling is a natural part of every conversation. It’s just encouraging desired results through a variety of psychological influences, and anybody can do it, you just have to know how. Try this slow pitch technique, and you don’t even have to be on an interview to use it. Think about a recent success that one of your friends has had and throw them a softball pitch like this and watch them light up and start telling you about something they’re proud of. Then when you show genuine interest and excitement back, notice how they appreciate you in their tone of voice and body language because you’re interested in something that they’re proud of.

If you’re thinking, “I don’t want to use a “technique” on a friend of mine!” you’re not. Showing interest and excitement in something your friends are proud of is not called a slow pitch technique, it’s called being a friend, and friends are likable. Get it? Okay, let’s keep going.

There are a couple of selling opportunities right at the beginning of the interview that I would recommend for you. However, rather than run through ALL of them here in this video, I’ll point you to a couple of links on this page you can click on to listen to an audio explanation of them. They are directly from my Tricks of the Job Hunter’s Trade audio program on interview training. If you’re a member of this site and you’re logged in, then you’ll see them here on this page. If you’re not a member, you can still have free access to them, just fill out the form on this page and I’ll send you a link where you can access them. They will cover the icebreaker conversations, as well as some tips on how to approach completing the application efficiently.

However here, I’d like to skip ahead past the initial icebreaker conversation and start talking about how to open the interview to your advantage. Any good salesperson will tell you that you can’t sell anything to anybody unless you know what they need. You can’t solve a problem unless you know what the problem is, right? So that’s why you’ll see really good salespeople will always start their conversations out by asking questions trying to uncover needs. and I recommend a similar approach for your interviews. It’s important to find out specifically what they’re looking for as early as you can in the interview. So here’s a good question to ask:

“I already know a little bit about the position from my recruiter, but I’ve found that everyone usually has a different take on exactly what they would like to see from the ideal person in any given job, so I’m curious to hear exactly what YOU would be looking for in the ideal candidate for this position.” Preface that you’re not walking in there blind to the position, having no knowledge of it, because you’re not: “I already know a little bit about this position from what my recruiter has told me, but…” or wherever you heard about the position. If it was from what you saw on their website, or what you saw in the posting, or whatever, and then ask them what they are looking for.

Once the interviewer explains the answer to that question, now you have all the information you need to do well in that interview. You have a target, a benchmark if you will, to sell at for the rest of the interview. You know what they want, so now you can accurately bring up the relevant experience in your background to fill their needs. Let’s say they are looking for a Web Developer with ASP.NET, VBScript and SQL Server experience. You don’t need to talk about your Java programming experience, or your Oracle database experience. Now again, I’m using a technology example here, but it truly doesn’t matter what it is. If they say they need someone with experience in A, B and C experience, then you don’t need to tell them about your experience with P, X and Q.

Obviously if they ask you about your experience with A, B and C, you should address it by talking about your experience with A, B and C. Anybody would know to do that, regardless of whether they asked this opening question or not. But where this information comes in handy is when they keep their questions more general and ask you about the most challenging project you’ve worked on. “So tell me about your most challenging development project.” “Well a few years back I had this one project in Cobol that was a real challenge. We were running a DB2 back end and…” No, No No! They don’t care that you had a challenging Cobol project, why would they? How does that relate to what THEY do? It doesn’t. But if you didn’t ask that opening question, just like the majority of candidates who do not, well then you might end up telling them a 10 minute story about your P, X and Q experience that they don’t care to hear.

Or maybe they tell you in response to your opening question that they need someone with a straightforward personality who isn’t afraid to communicate with their team when they need correcting, like the last guy who was in the position. Hey, that’s information that won’t be printed in a job description, but it’s helpful for you to know when you’re talking about that most challenging project that you worked on because now you can say, “It was an A, B and C project, but one of the team members was not performing with the B skill very well, so here’s what I didn’t get him back on track…” I think they’ll be a little more interested in that project than the Cobol, DB2 project that you worked on as an individual. See what I mean?

So you want to open with the question about the position and what they are looking for. Make sure you’re being specific to that person, not just a general, “So what type of skills are you looking for in this position?” I know most of the interviewing books out there will recommend something like that, but seriously, as a headhunter, when I’ve seen candidates do that it just comes across as being completely unprepared. Whereas if you focus on that person’s opinion of the job it justifies the question. So that one word of ‘YOU’ makes a big difference, and I DO recommend asking everyone you meet with this same question because each person will have a different opinion. When you ask the HR department they want one thing from this person, but the Legal team wants something totally different, and the Customer Service Manager wants something else. But when you ask each of them what they want to see from the ideal candidate, and they then respond with, “Well I’d really like to see this skill set, this work ethic and this personality. So, tell me about yourself.” “Well, I’ve got this skill set, this work ethic and this personality.” And you can tailor yourself to the position based on the preferences of the person you’re talking to, only talking about what’s relevant, and not about what’s not relevant. That’s going to make a world of difference in how much they like you as a candidate, and how many offers you can get, all from just taking a deliberate approach to how you start your interviews.

Another key strategy to create likability and get them interested in you, is to make sure they know you’re interested in them. That will actually generate interest in you. And before we go any farther, I know I’ve said this a time or two already in this program, but I want to say again now for emphasis: Rule number one of interviewing for me is to be honest, so at no point will I ask you to misrepresent the truth. I want to be clear about that. I will only be showing you how to present the truth in the most likable manner possible so as to generate interest in you. It’s like trying to sell a great car but it’s filthy, you haven’t washed it in more than a month. Does that make it a bad car? No, of course not! But it would sell a heck of a lot faster if you washed it up and gave it a wax. That’s all I’m doing here. I’m going to wash up your answers so you can present the truth for your situation in the most likable way possible. You with me? Okay, first thing you need to know is how to handle illegal questions, and if you feel you could be discriminated against for any reason, especially for your age, then you need to know how to attack that issue. The next video under this tab takes that topic head on. Check out this quick assignment here for this video first, then we’ll take on discrimination.

For this section, first make sure you listen to the 2 audio tracks I mentioned earlier that are on this page here for you, both are from my audio interview training program but I have links here for free. The first one is What You Should Know When Completing Applications and the second one is Ice Breakers to Use, and Others to Avoid. If you’re not logged in as a member, just fill out the quick form on this page and you’ll get a link to these tracks.

Next, if you need some help with interview basics, check out the blog I wrote on that, and you’ll see the link available on this page below the video.

If you have an interview coming up, do some research to find some good news you can talk about with them that would serve as a nice softball pitch down the middle. You may want to find a couple of these so you’re not throwing the same softball to multiple interviewers, or if after you get there you find out for any reason you shouldn’t use the one you had already prepared, always good to have a back up. In the Interview Preparation video under the Prepare tab we talk about specifically where to look for that information and what you’re looking for, and in the Planning Your Day video we talk about having a form you can fill out for each company you’re interviewing with to make sure you have this information prepared before every interview you go on. If you’re not a member and can’t get to those videos, I would just recommend for you to create a form on your own and make sure you’re looking for this type of information on every company where you’ve scheduled an interview. This really will make a difference in your likability factor with the employers after your interviews.

Last, I recommend practicing how you’re going to get the opening question out that we were talking about. It seems like a great idea to ask that question, but it’s much more difficult to actually do. There’s a few places you can get that question out, like at the end of your “tell me about yourself” elevator speech, or even after the icebreaker depending on where that conversation is taking place. It’s going to take practice, but when you get it down it’ll make a huge impact on how well your interviews go.

I talk a little more about the importance of practice when you get to the assignment section of the next video which is on discrimination. Both of these videos have some elements you’re really going to want to know cold before going into your interviews so you can use them whenever you need them, and sound completely natural when you do. First things first though, work on your assignment from this video and then you can get started on the next one. You can do this, let’s get going. It’s time to get to work.