Who is the Interview For?

One of the real problems with job interviews is that candidates tend to walking in with a begging bowl mentality that makes them subservient to the interviewer. This can make it very easy to be taken advantage of. Whilst I wouldn’t expect people to face extreme negative feedback like the video below I have heard some really reprehensible questions asked of candidates in interview situations.

Categories of Dumb Interview Questions

At least in the UK most forms of discrimination are illegal. Unfortunately discrimination is alive and well in the country and I suspect in many other countries too. If you are asked a question that you think may be discriminatory the first think to do is to check out the intent behind the question. For example you might be asked about your age as a way of determining something about your relative level of experience. In which case it should be easy for the interviewer to explain or reframe the question to get the point they were looking for.

If you are not satisfied with their explanation of why they are asking the question just refuse to answer and let your interviewer know why. At this point the interview will be very defensive and the likely hood of you getting the job are probably quite small. The reality is though would you want to work for an organisation that are willing to put you in that position even before you start?

The sad thing is I’ve spoken with quite a few people that have left companies and they knew right from the interview that it was not going to work for them. They ended up accepting the job because it was offered to them and they felt obliged to take it. So the first thing to be able to react better to this sort of thing is to have the self esteem to stand your ground and the confidence to know that there are other jobs out there. The reality is that when you frame your experience and aim it at the kind of work you want to do there are usually lots of jobs for you. My NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills System is based round creating that winning attitude first and then framing your experience so you can target jobs in a way that interviewers will be begging you to come for interview. Once you are there it is far easier to negotiate from a position of strength.

Some of the people that have been through my system tell me that after setting the interviewer straight on the issue they have walked out of the interview and addressed it by writing to the CEO of the company.

Ego Driven Questions An interview should be a two way process designed for you to give the company the opportunity to explore the benefits of employing you and for you to decide if the company can provide you with a rewarding and fulfilling environment to work in.

Some interviewers mistake the interview context as an opportunity to act up and try to act clever. They ask questions designed to trip you up or they just play silly games. Any difficult, awkward or plain stupid question just needs to be redirected to something more intelligent. I like doing this by including a soft verbal bitch slap for the interviewer for being stupid. If you don’t feel like being that adversarial then you can easily soften the approach. The general approach is:

• Acknowledge the question
• Redirect it to something more sensible
• Answer the new question with your prepared material

Let’s look at how this might work in a couple of different examples. Typical dumb interview questions focus on negative or the past that don’t give you the opportunity to open up the real issue, which is how you can provide benefit to the new company or role. A typical question might be something like; “Why do you want to leave your current position?”

Using our general formula the answer might look something like:

“The issue is not about leaving my current position. The issue is about why I want to come and work for you. I want to do that because based on my research I think I can provide you with a great return of investment for example…” and then you can launch into one of your prepared examples.

Here is another rubbish ego driven question that does deserve the interviewer being gently bitch slapped. The question is something like, “What is one interview question you would hate to be asked?” After you answer they obviously follow up by asking you that question. You can tone this down if you want to be easy with the interviewer but my preferred response would go something like:

“The worst question you could ask me in interview is any question that is ego driven and designed to play games rather than to explore the benefits I can provide for your organisation. The issue is not about playing games but being able to demonstrate the things I can do in the role that you are offering. For example I can…” and again you can launch in to one of your prepared examples.

As you can see both examples follow the general formula we discussed earlier. In my NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills System we discuss how to develop answering difficult questions so you can respond to almost everything (extreme negative feedback excluded) with a prepared example that links you directly with the role and the company values as well a leaves the interviewer with an image in their head of you being the ideal candidate for the role. The system is full written up in the Persuasion Skills Black Book of Job Hunting Techniques. 

Buy it from Amazon.com: Paperback orKindle

Buy it from Amazon.co.uk: Paperbackor Kindle

Why do you want the Job?

As an interviewer I often ask candidates the question why do you want this job? I ask that question because however it is answered it gives me a great deal of information about the candidate. Let’s go through the pit falls and then we can look at how this interview question is a golden opportunity for you to get the job.

Attitude Makes a Difference

Many people going into job interviews just begging for a job. They think the balance of power is with the employers. They have low self-esteem and think there are other people out there that can do the job as well if not better than they can. They have a mistaken belief that the interview is about them.

Look at this from the employer’s view. Imagine a candidate is walking in with an attitude based round things like “Please employ me…I’ll do my best…I’ll try my hardest…” Would you employ them? I wouldn’t.

Imagine how someone with this attitude is going to answer a question like “Why do you want this job?” Even if they are desperately trying to hide their attitude what sort of answers would they give? Have a think about it and compare your answers to those from a different mindset below.

What do employers want?

Now here is something people need to recognise. The “best” person for the job revolves around two things:

• Can you do the job i.e. skills, qualifications and experience
• Does your face fit i.e. do you hold the company values, do you have the right attitude, ambitions or more succinctly, will you do a good job.

The things is companies hire based on the first and they fire due to deficiencies on the second. Your job in the interview is not about demonstrating the first, it is demonstrating incontrovertibly that you fit the second.

How does this help?

I could tell you about a particular situation when I was researching job hunting techniques where I got offered a £60 000 (almost $100k) a year job after I told the recruiters that I had lied on my CV (never do this to get a job – I was researching job hunting techniques so I had to fake credentials to get to different types of interviews – lying on a CV can be classed as a criminal offence), that I didn’t have any of the qualifications or experience that they were looking for. But here is an email I received a while ago instead:

What is the Difference that Makes the Difference?

What Drew did in preparation for his interview was to look at what he would bring to the new role. He looked at what would make him the ideal candidate and how he could drive the role forward, what he would enjoy about the job and how the company would benefit from it.

He then looked through his professional life looking for examples of where he had demonstrated the exact qualities that made him the perfect candidate. Imagine how different Drew must have looked when he walked in to that interview.

I don’t know if he was asked that question but imagine he was. The sort of answer I think he would give would be something like, “I want the role because I am a great candidate, here are a couple of examples of how I have demonstrated the key qualities that you are looking for in the role and here are some specific results you can expect from me when I am working with you.”

How different does that look as an answer compared to someone that has a “Poor Me. Please give me a job because I’ll try my best,” attitude?

And if you have a system for doing this you can generate these answers like Drew did, in a couple of hours the night before the interview.

As a recruiter I was desperate to just hear someone say, “I want the job because I would be great at it and here is my evidence to say so. If you employ me I will make you money / save you money / save you time and effort. Here is specifically how I would do that. I will enjoy doing it and that is why I want the job.” It didn’t happen often enough and in almost every case where it did they got the job.

But what if it is just a job to me?

Imagine if you were confident enough and with enough tools and techniques to get any job you wanted. Would you have a different attitude to job hunting? My guess would be that you would go for jobs that you would enjoy or jobs that gave you the experience that you need to further your career or has some personal meaning to you. And then you would simply move on when your criteria had been met.

To me this makes more sense than doing a job that does not fulfil any of your needs. Think about this, most people spend at least forty hours a week at work and many people spend a lot more, especially if they have to commute. Once you have finished with sleeping and chores this is longer than you spend with friends and family, hobbies and interests or doing the things that bring meaning to your life.

I think you owe it to yourself, your loved ones and any employers you choose to work with that you only apply and do the work that has some sort of personal meaning to you. If you want to know exactly how to do that then have a look at the NLP CV Writing and Interview Skills Course.

Influence

Ciadini’s book Influence is required reading for anyone in the persuasion field. And whether you have read the book (you really should) here is a video that very neatly summarises most of the key points brilliantly.

Using Cialdini’s Principles Linguistically

Having watched the video means you are committed to developing your persuasion skills. You will get a great result if you to explore some of these ideas through some examples and I can help with a few of those.

As a bestselling author on Persuasion Skills many people suggest that I am good at demonstrating persuasion concepts like Cialdini’s ideas. For example here is what Kevin has to say about my courses:

But the reality is I am only as good as the results you get from my teachings and in that we are similar. I want you get the best result possible for you. It has been shown that motivation drops off dramatically if you don’t put the principles in place as soon as you have the information. So do us both the favour of reading this little section again looking for how I have applied Cialdini’s Principles throughout.

 Teaching Through Principles and Demonstration

If you like the idea of learning persuasion principles on multiple levels in the way this article demonstrates then you may want to find out more about the Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed Course. Click through and find out more here.

 NLP Practitioner Course 2012

During the practitioner course we interviewed the students. I was going through some of the videos when I realised that there is a really valuable exercise in spotting linguistic models for you to try out here. Before watching the video just have a quick scan through the rest of this article so you can see the few bits I have spotted and then see what else you can spot in the language of these students.

Juggling; a Metaphor for Learning

The course is set up to use learning to juggle as a metaphor. But notice how powerfully Annemieke talks about juggling. You can hear how she creates what I would call an inductive pattern for herself. My definition of an inductive pattern can be summarised by the phrase, “Now that I can do this, what else can I do?”

Annemieke goes even further by taking the strategy for learning to juggle, places it over how she has learnt things in the past, and reconstructed her model of learning to take on the new strategy. In fairness she probably did that before the interview but notice her language and you will hear her talking herself through the new strategy.

The course was deliberately structured to overlay this metaphor, but how could you use the same idea in a different context?

One example if you were in sales might be to tell the story of a previous prospect turned client. As part of the story you could detail any common values for the industry and link them to the product as well as take key objections and reframe them.

A teacher for another example might create a story where the hero demonstrates a problem solving strategy and after the telling of the story you might send the class to solve maths problems using the strategy.

Internal Communication

All communication is communication with yourself. Think this through for a second. When you talk to someone you are not actually talking to who they actually are; you are talking to who you think that they are. A simple and obvious example is that you speak differently to a police officer to your best friend, to your mother, a lover a foreign tourist that doesn’t speak your language well.

The fact that you do that means that you are tailoring your language to suit who you think that person is. The reality is that however much you try not to the whole situation is packed full of assumptions that you are making. Hence my statement that all your communication is self-communication. You are only communicating with who you think the other person is.

As you watch the video notice how Billy explains the impact of being able to communicate with himself. The interviewer Ali, runs a great inductive pattern on Billy. My idea of an inductive pattern can be summed up by the phrase, “Now I can do this, What else can I do with it?”

Once Billy explains what he got from the course Ali is straight in with, “…and how is that going to affect the work in the saloon?” She takes Billy’s grand concepts and drives him straight down to the reality of how does this make a difference in your work place.

There are two things you can do with this concept immediately. Firstly; if you change who you think someone is in your head you will change how you communicate with them and their reaction to you will change. This is a more specific, detailed version of a lot of the airy-fairy new age tree hugging philosophy and is a quick way of making your communications more effective. The second thing you can do is keep asking yourself and anyone else variations on the question Ali uses on Billy e.g.

Linguistic Deletions

Notice how Julia starts with, “I think I was always good at this stuff, BUT what I’ve never done is…” The way Julia stresses the “But” suggests to me the revelation is a pretty big one for her which is obviously confirmed by the way she speaks about it a few seconds after.

Also notice how in the space of a few seconds she switches referential index several times. She starts with “I have never done…” moves through “Always ask YOURSELF…” and moves through, “WE talk a lot in counselling…” and then she comes right back to “I’m there” It starts from about 5:12 through to 5:36

Julia’s revelation is about shifting points of view (referential index) and she unconsciously demonstrates a variety of different states in as many seconds via her language. This is a great example of these points of view switching naturally in a conversation.

This is how I use this frame of reference concept. I start by a conversation talking about a personal situation using my “I” frame of reference. You can then move into a “you” frame of reference to give people direct suggestions of what you want them to do. If we need to collaborate then we can look at incorporating some “we” references. But so long as I remember to close it of by going back to the “I” references people rarely notice what happened.

There is a lot more going on

I’ve only picked on a few things that jumped right out at me. There is a whole lot more happening in this video from the way Ali is using Presupositional Questioning and controlling the conversation right through to how Billy connects with what Julia is saying (watch for the head nods).

A great way of practising your skills is to just notice what is happening in unscripted interviews. And of course I win as well because not only do you watch the video on multiple levels, I get to sneakily show you more about the Practitioner Course that we have planned for later in the year.

Here is the video:

And you can find out a lot more about the NLP Practitioner Course that they are talking about when you click through here:

Train Honestly in the Real World

The short answer to the training question is simply the more you practice using the skills, the more you will find that you don’t need to practice using the skills. It will happen naturally.

The trick to getting this right is to break patterns down into little chunks and just start using them. If you make a commitment to using a pattern several times in a conversation you will, all of a sudden find yourself:

• Understanding the impact the pattern has
• How to steer the conversation to get the pattern into the conversation
• Getting comfortable thinking on a different level
• And often finding “outs” for when someone queries why you are talking the way that you are talking

But most importantly you will build the attitude that makes the difference.

Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Take it the right way, imagining yourself using the patterns is better than nothing. Saying the patterns out loud in front of a mirror is even better. Practising with a study buddy is really useful. Logging on to chat rooms, forums and eGroups to practice your patterns in real time is good as well. But if you really want to get good at hypnotic language you just have to get out there and flap your gums at some unsuspecting innocent member of the public.

If this is an issue for you perhaps a good place to start is Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed. As part of this course you will see me work with a student to develop and install their hypnotic persuasive PERSONALITY. You can then build and develop your own. But what is even better is that you can then read the notes that show you all the sneaky persuasion tricks I use with the audience. You will get to see the effects being used with the audience with written notes to explain how they work and explanations about how you can practice, develop and use the same tools for your particular circumstances.

With this course you learn to develop a persuasive personality as well as see active demonstrations of a huge amount of hypnotic persuasion skills with a live audience and how you can use them for yourself.