Proven Interview Skills
An interview is a sales pitch and you are the product. Unless your skills and experience are in short supply, in which case you will be interviewing your prospective employers, rather than vice versa. But, if you are just one of many well-qualified and experienced applicants for the same few jobs, you will have to do some competitive selling.
If you have the intention of actively selling your skills, you will feel more in control. And most people feel better and perform better when they have some control. Of course there will be surprises and unexpected questions, but there are many ways of staying in command: by asking questions, by actively listening, and by taking notes so that you can refer back to difficult points.
Awareness of some basic sales techniques can take you beyond feeling comfortable in interview and on into enjoyment of the adrenaline rush and challenge of the situation.
Selling the benefits is the most important sales technique of all. Every salesperson knows that they have to sell the benefit of the product rather than the product itself.
Use your CV in the interview. Refer to it whenever you feel you might be losing your way. You wrote it, so you can use it as a means of getting back on track and staying in control. Interviewers like talking through a CV - they can make notes on it and refer back to it afterwards. A well-written CV gives you lots of hooks for mini-presentations about your good points and achievements.
You must decide what to sell. Analysing the criteria for a job will have given you a pretty good idea of the benefits you need to sell. Nevertheless, it's important to listen carefully in interview for live, on-the-spot clues.
You may think you will get a job by what you say in interview. But listening is actually more important than talking - if you don't listen carefully you may answer the wrong questions - or give the wrong answers to the right ones.
Leading the interviewer can bring positive results. There are two reasons for asking questions:
- to get more information about the job
- to get a 'yes' response. This puts the interviewer into a positive thinking mode which is much more likely to lead them into a buying (hiring) position. For example:
'Would it be true to say that you are you looking for somebody who will be a good team player?'
Once you are getting consistent yes responses, you can slip in some questions which start from the premise that you are already an employee:
'If I were to join you, what would my first assignment be? '
Without thinking about it, the interviewer will already be allocating your first task to you and picturing you doing it.
