Episode 28 – How to Influence the Interview with Chris Delaney

August 13, 2015 Podcast

Welcome to the 28th episode of the Graduate Job Podcast.

This episode I speak with NLP Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, Careers Advisor and author Chris Delaney, who opens up his full toolbox of tips and techniques to help you influence the interview. Chris shares his insight into how you can overcome a lack of confidence or negative self-talk, quickly build rapport with the interviewer, and then influence them with the language you use. Chris also shares techniques for how you can negotiate a higher wage and use suggestion to ensure you get a job offer with influencing tricks that would put a Jedi to shame. If you have any sort of job interview coming up, then this is definitely the episode for you.

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Spotify.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • How to gain confidence in an instant!
  • Tips for overcoming negative self-talk
  • How to quickly build rapport with the interviewer
  • Using scarcity so that the employer is fighting to offer you a job
  • How to unsettle the other candidates you are up against (should you so wish)
  • The importance of developing your ‘God’ voice
  • How to use psychology to negotiate a higher starting salary

SELECTED LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

    • Chris on Twitter – Tweet him and say hello!

Transcript – Episode 28 – How to Influence the Interview with Chris Delaney

James:   Welcome back everyone to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your weekly home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each week I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and bloggers who bring decades of experience into a byte size weekly 30 minute show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had a decade ago when I graduated.

This week I speak with NLP Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, Careers Advisor and author Chris Delaney, who opens up his full toolbox of tips and techniques to help you influence the interview. Chris shares his insight into how you can overcome a lack of confidence or negative self-talk, quickly build rapport with the interviewer, and then influence them with language you use. Chris also shares techniques for how you can negotiate a higher wage and use suggestion to ensure you get a job offer with influencing tricks that would put a Jedi to shame. If you have any sort of job interview coming up, then this is definitely the episode for you. As always, all links we discuss and a full transcript are available in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/influence but without further ado, let’s jump straight in with episode 28.

James:  I’m really pleased today to welcome Chris Delaney to the show. Chris is an NLP life coach, hypnotherapist and careers advisor and he pulled all of those skills together to author the book, Influencing the Interview.

Chris, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Chris:    Hi, James. Thank you for inviting me down today. I’m really excited to be here to share some of my knowledge with your listeners.

James:  Excellent, and before we jump into our topic today of how to influence the interview, would you like to tell us a little bit more about what it is you do as an NLP life coach and careers advisor.

Chris:    Yeah. My whole philosophy is helping people to be more successful in their life or in their career. A big part of what I do is help people to be more confident, to increase their self esteem so they can go out there, set goals and achieve them. One of the biggest blockages is people’s own mindset. So what I do is help people overcome their limiting belief and increase their confidence and that helps people go out there and pass interviews, move up the career ladder and do things that they want to achieve in their life.

James:  Super, and we talked just before we started recording about how often I’ve interviewed people who walk into an interview with the mindset that they’re not going to get the job and the interview goes down from there, really. So mindset is such an important thing to have right, especially when you walk in there you need to walk in confidently.

Chris:    I have to agree with that, definitely. I got told a couple of years ago that the best applicant always received the job offer and that’s simply isn’t true. It’s always the best interviewee, and the best interviewee is normally a confident interviewee and it’s always them who get the job offers.

James:  And today we’re going to explore the topics from your book which will help in that regard. So, Influencing the Interviewer: The 73 Rules of Influencing the Interview: Using Psychology, Nlp and Hypnotic Persuasion Techniques.

So Chris the traditional view is that the interview is the interview and you just have to passively accept how it is. Do people underestimate how much scope they have by influencing both the interviewer and the outcome of the interview?

Chris:    People don’t always realize that we’re influencing people every day. When you walk into a room, let’s say you’re going to a party, if you walk in there dressing smart, your head held high, you’ve got a little bit of a swagger about you, you’re winking and pointing to people as you walk in, you’re going to get a completely different reaction compared to if you walk into that party with your head hanging low, mumbling to yourself and dressing in a scruffy outfit. You influence people with your body language, with your tone, with your facial expressions, your eye contact, everything about you will influence someone else and how they react to you. So what we’re doing is taking these techniques and then putting them into the job interview situation.

James:  So we talked sort of at the beginning briefly about confidence and negative self talk. So often people are lacking confidence and thinking they’re actually not going to get the job in the first place. How can, what tips or advice would you give them to start to begin to change those limiting self beliefs?

Chris:    The way your mind works, it works in a thing we call frame of reference. So when you go to a new situation, your mind decides how you emotionally react to that situation and it does that by looking for past frames of reference. And with situations like public speaking or job interviews, it’s not a common thing we do in a regular basis, so your mind looks for the last piece of frame of reference and for a lot of people it’s that day in school when you’re 10 years old, you have to walk to the front of the class and you have to read out the story in front of your classmates and you got a couple of words wrong or you said something by mistake and your teacher told you off and all your classmates in front of you laugh at you and they make you feel nervous and anxiety. You mind records that and when you go to your first interview after leaving college or university, your mind decides what’s the best frame of reference for public speaking, fills your frame of reference so you’ll feel those same negative emotions. And what we do, we can change that frame of reference by getting a new image recorded in your mind, a new emotional way to react. So as an example, James, have you got a time when you maybe feel nervous or anxious?

James: Well, that example of going up in front of the class has suddenly taken me back to being 10 and reading some Shakespeare book in school; feeling nervous, yeah. I mean, yeah. I just remember going to my first job interview and the first proper graduate job scheme I applied for and having to give a presentation there and I wasn’t very well prepared and yeah, I can remember being nervous then.

Chris:    What I’ll do, I’ll share, I’ll do this technique on you to show people how powerful it is. So when you think about this image, of this past memory, on a scale of one to 10 — with 10 being you’re completely nervous, you’re really scared, and one being like you’re really confident, you’re cool and you’re calm — when you think about this past experience, where are you in that scale?

James:  Probably about a seven.

Chris:   About a seven; quite high. And when you think about this past experience, do you see it like a picture, or is it like a movie in your mind’s eye?

James:  It is a picture.

Chris:    It’s like a still picture, like a photograph?

James:  Yep.

Chris:    And is it coloured or black and white?

James:  It’s coloured.

Chris:    And if you could image the distance of that picture from your mind, do you see it really far in front of you or is it like really close to your mind’s eye? You sort of, you feel like you’re in that picture?

James:  It’s quite close.

Chris:    Quite close. So this is really common with people who are nervous about public speaking, even like spider-phobics, actually in job interviews, this have this image in their mind’s eye. Normally with most people it’s actually a movie where yours is a still picture, but you see it really close to you, and often it’s colour. So what I want you to do, James, think about that image in your mind’s eye and I just want you to push it in front of you so you can see the corners and the edges of that image of that photograph.

James:  Yep. Okay.

Chris:    And then I want you to drain the colour from that picture so it’s completely black and white.

James:  Okay.

Chris:    And I want you to imagine putting like a big old wooden metal frame around it. So when you go to art galleries you see really old pictures from the 1600s; that would be fantastic old frames. I want you to put that picture in one of those old fashioned big thick frame.

James:  Yep; done that.

Chris:    And on a scale of one to 10 at the moment, 10 being completely nervous and anxious and one being calm and confident, where are you now?

James:  Four.

Chris:    So it’s already dropped and we’re not even done the best bit yet. So get that picture and just move it further and further away from your mind’s eye till it becomes the size of a postcard, and further and further away, harder to see, the going out of your image, the size of a stamp and how do you feel now on a scale of one to 10?

James: Reduced, three.

Chris:    And all the way down to a dot in the horizon, and then just let that picture disappear. And how do you feel now?

James: I just feel like it’s less relevant and less of a memory.

Chris:    And that technique is so easy that when you’re sat in your car just before that job interview and you’re thinking, oh, what’s going to go wrong, how am I going to embarrass myself, you can get that image in your mind, pause it, push it in front of you, drain the colour, put a frame around it and then just move it further and further away. And we do that with clients and you get them to do it quicker and quicker and quicker so you can reduce your anxiety just in your own mind’s eye just before that job interview. So it’s a great technique to use just to reduce anxiety.

James:  Excellent. And how would you tackle that limiting self talk that you get when you walk into an interview and you’ve got the little devil on your shoulder telling you that it’s not going to go well and you’re not going to get the job?

Chris:    This is like the second demon really, that stops people being confident in job interviews. People either make this picture, like we’ve just discussed then and that movie makes them really anxious, or people have that devil on the shoulder talking to them. So great technique that I use with that is I get people to turn their voice which is often their own voice, into a shape. So when I say that to people at first they go like, what? But they can easily do it. So if anyone’s got negative self talk about a job situation, about a job interview, about going to have an appraisal with your manager, as an example, imagine that voice in your mind and then turn that voice into a shape. And when you turn that voice into a shape, I want to notice what shape your voice is and I want you to give that shape a colour. And then get that shape and move it in your mind from your brain onto your shoulder and then allow that shape to move down your shoulder towards your elbow and from your elbow towards your hand and just watch it go into the palm of your hand and allow it to drop onto your leg. And then go down your leg all the way down past your knee, down your calf, onto your foot and then let it just drop onto the floor and at this stage most people get an urge to do something to that shape. Some people want to stamp on it. Some people want to kick it away. And then what we do, we get people to do that five or six times, quicker and quicker and quicker. So we get the voice, turn it into shape, imagine the shape went all the way down the body until they kick it away. And we do that really quick like, in a click of a finger and what we find is when we do that repeatedly with someone, you get them to try recall that negative self talk and you just can’t recall it.

James:  So with the shape, do you have it as a speaking shape still? Or is it just a shape that’s not talking to you?

Chris:    Most people will have a shape that doesn’t talk to them, because what this technique does, it disassociates you. So when you’re thinking of a negative picture of a negative future event or when you’re hearing that negative self talk, you are very associated to the situation you’re thinking about. You’re going, oh, you’re going to fail that interview. You’re never going to do well. Everyone is going to laugh at you. You really associate it to that future event and when you associate it to something, you feel that that emotional pull, which in this case will be anxiety and nerves, and by turning that voice into a shape it disassociates you straight away and then by moving the voice away further disassociates you and you start to feel a different emotional pull.

James:  Well, I have not come across that before. I’ll have to use that. As you mentioned putting it on the floor, yeah, I’ve got the urge to stamp on it.   So, I’ll have to try that one.

Chris:   And you know with these techniques as well, like they’re so easy to use and so powerful. Now your listeners have heard those two techniques. You can literally do that yourself this evening or tomorrow, and you’ll feel completely different because the way your mind works, it can only feel one state at a time. You can’t feel happy and sadness at the same time. It can’t feel confident and fear. It’s got to feel one or the other. So if you’re focusing on something negative, you’ll feel negative. If you start focusing on something positive, you’ll feel positive. So these first techniques get rid of the negativity so you can then think about the positivity.

James:  So speaking then about the positivity, how can you — we’ve talked about — well, we’ve conquered our negative self talk and lack of belief. How can we give ourselves a big confidence boost just prior to going into the interview?

Chris:    Well, a couple of things you can do. One, people need to realize what their talents and skills are. We have this thing in the UK where we don’t like to big ourselves up. We don’t like to sell ourselves. We’re quite good at putting ourselves down, where when you travel the world some of the other countries are really keen in saying all the great things about themselves. So what you need to reflect on first is all your strengths and all your skills all your big achievements that you’ve achieved throughout your career. So what are you good at? What makes you unique and different to other people? What do your employees and colleagues say about you all the time?

I had a client recently who came to me for confidence and she said, I’m at work and I just feel like people don’t think I’m good enough to do this role. I’m in this position and I think I just sneakily got into this job role where people are starting to realize I’m not very good at it.   So I joked with her and challenged her by saying, well, why don’t you leave the job then? She said to me, I tried to leave three times. Every time I leave, though, they give me a massive pay raise. So people have these very limiting beliefs and they look at themselves from a perspective that is negatively compared to what other people look at them. So the first thing you need to do is realize your strengths, your skills and your unique selling point and when you realize what you’re good at, you’ll start to think about the emotional attachments to that because if you realize you’re good at your job, you’ll start to feel good about yourself.

And then the second part to this is we get people to stand in a confident way because the way you hold yourself, your physiology, changes your state. You can always see a negative person at a party or somebody who is feeling low or depressed because of the way they stand. You instinctively know that one person is a confident person and another person is, not negative person but someone who feels, maybe depressed or sad about themselves. It’s all in their body. I mean, if you change the way you stand, if you stand like a confident person stands, you hold your head up high, express yourself with your gestures, you’ll start to feel that emotion because your mind and your body are really, really connected. So what we do is get people to look at their strengths, their skills. Then we get people to hold themselves like they are a confident person; and those two things, that makes people feel more confident about themselves.

James:  So getting a power pose that they can just go into, whether it’s a nip to the toilet before their interview starts and just get themselves in the right frame of mind.

Chris:    Yeah, definitely, definitely. And there’s other techniques we use as well. We use a technique which is really famous in the NLP called “anchoring” and what we do is we get people to visualize themselves doing something really well and it can be anything. So maybe they’re really good at bike riding, or they’re really good a karaoke, or they’re just really good when they’re with their friends           and the family, that’s when they are at their best. We get people to visualize this in their memory, get it big and get it bright, get it really vivid, imagine that they’re actually there. So they can see things with their own eyes, they can hear what’s going on and when you see something from your own eyes, you can hear that past event, when you’re at your best you start to feel those positive emotions, focus on the positivity, you’ll feel positive and we’re getting to build this feeling up. So we get stronger and stronger and stronger and we get them to anchor it by squeezing the finger and the thumb together. And what that does, that creates an anchor. And we do that with several different events. So maybe they’re really confident with a friend, maybe they’re really confident delivering presentations, maybe they’re really confident when they meet another dog walker in the park. We build up several different events build up the confidence, emotions and then we anchor it by squeezing finger and thumb together.   Then what we do, when someone wants to be confident in a new situation we squeeze that finger and thumb together, then that releases that emotional association.

I’ll give you a real good example how that works. If you ever drive to work and you see some flashing lights behind you, a police car behind you, you get an immediate emotional reaction because there’s a reaction anchored to seeing police flashing lights. And the same thing happens when you want to release your confidence anchor and if you squeeze your thumb and your finger together, you’ll then feel that emotional reaction, that emotional association.

James:  So when you do the anchoring you squeeze your finger and thumb together, do you need to also start to think about the anchor you’ve created or will that automatically happen?

Chris:    Yeah, that will automatically happen. So you build up the state. Imagine yourself being really successful, when it’s at the peak, squeeze your finger and thumb together. Think of a new situation, build that state up, squeeze your finger and thumb together. Do that several times. And every time you you’re out and you’re having a great time, squeeze your finger and thumb together. Every time you do something you feel really good about yourself, squeeze your finger and your thumb together. And then just before the job interview, when you feel you’re a little bit nervous — and you do want to feel a little bit nervous because that shows that you’re eager, you’re keen to get this job and it gives a bit of real life to the interview — but you want to be more confident, so you squeeze your finger and thumb together and that will release that emotional association of confidence.

James:  It’s a good trick. I’m going to certainly put that one to use and try it myself.

Chris:    Yeah, and you know I love these because they are so easy to use. Once you know them, you can use them, you know, instantly.

James:  So we’ve talked about how to get in the right frame of mind before the interview and making sure that we’re confident walking in. So let’s go through the interview situation then. When you go into the, say you walk into the interview, how should you begin to think about your body language when you walk into the interview for the first time?

Chris:    You’ve got to imagine that when you’re walking in there people make an instant impression about you. So as soon as people look at you, your unconscious mind picks up people’s hairstyle, the suit, the posture, everything about them and make an automatic stereotypical opinion about that person straight away and you want that first opinion to be really positive cause then all your interview answers are filtered through this positive perception of you.

So what you want to do is imagine someone who is really confident, someone who you aspire to be like in an interview situation and think about that person, think about how they hold themselves, their body language, how they walk, how they hold their head, the eye contact, the gestures that they use, even their facial expressions and you can imagine this person standing in front of you, and walk around this person and just become aware and notice everything that makes this person you aspire to be like a confident person. And imagine stepping into their body so you can take on their posture, take on their gestures, their facial expressions. You can take on their positive self talk and their positive state, how they hold themselves and what they say to themselves and you can imagine being this person and walk the way they walk, hold yourself the way they hold themselves, if you hold yourself like a positive person, hold themselves, you will feel their positivity inside you. So you can use your model, the person you aspire to be like, to help you feel more confident.

James:  Does it have to be a real person or can you create an avatar, almost, in your mind?

Chris:    Yeah, you can create avatars. I’ve had people do on famous people from movies or famous people walking on stage who have given presentations, other people use their friends or often their managers. So you can, yeah, you can use anyone imagined or real.

James:  So you talk in the book about the God voice technique. Could you run us through what this is and why it’s important?

Chris:    So many people don’t understand the power of your tonality. The way you talk expresses your emotions and when you can express your emotions through your tone, it affects the person listening to you. So if I sat there today saying, you’ve got to be really good at that job interview; you’ve got to hold yourself really well; you’ve got to look at people’s eyes; it’s not going to inspire you. But I’m trying to create an inspiration through my tonality by using long sentences and rising them at the end and emphasising keywords. You can use tonality to really influence how people respond to what you’re saying. So what people need to do is improve their voice and one of the techniques we use in the book is getting quiet people to imagine shouting their interview answers or relay it to a person on the other side of that lake. And when I mentor people, and I’ve joined an international Toastmasters and I mentor people there, and we get people to imagine shouting to the person at the back at the stage because so many people whisper what they’re going to say and if an employer can’t hear your words, they’re not going to listen to your — if your voice is monotone, they’re not going to be emotionally affected by what you have to say. So you need to have like a power voice, like a God voice that comes from inside you, that comes from your stomach and your chest. Don’t just talk from your mouth. Feel the emotions that you want other people to feel and that will be expressed through your tonality.

James:  And this is something the people should practice while in front of the mirror, or just by themselves while they’re walking the dog?

Chris:    Yeah, definitely. When we teach people to public speak and to improve those skills, you first get people to — and you do this for interview answers as well. So predict the questions, write out your answers and you’ll probably edit them three or four times, and then you want to say them out loud in a room. And then you ought to be looking at the mirror and saying it into the mirror and each time you ought to be thinking about tweaking a little part of your speech, a little part of your interview answers. Then if you have got a quiet voice, you ought to be standing at one end of the room and shouting your answers to the other end of the room because what you find is in your body, the way you talk sets your emotions. So people who are very quiet, they feel often their voice at the top of their chest; where people who have a strong powerful voice will talk from their stomach or the bottom of their chest. So when you’re shouting from one end of the room to the other, you’ll feel that voice coming from a different part of your body and when you anchor that feeling, you can then use that in the job interview so you can talk from that part of your body. It doesn’t mean you have to shout in the interview, but the part that come from when you talk from.

James:  Moving on to the interview itself, how important is it with the language that you use and to use the same language as the interviewer?

Chris:    It’s so important. The way our mind works is that we filter lots of different information through several filters. So we filter things through our experiences, through our own state, and then we all have our own way of learning. Some people are kinaesthetic learners; people are visual learners; people are auditory learners and these learning states are also our filters. So what you can do is listen to how the interviewer expresses themselves and you can use the language they use to influence them. So as an example, some people who are really visual will always use visual related words. I want you to imagine yourself achieving this goal; so that “imagine” is a visual word. So if you can pick up on what motivates the interviewer through their language, you can then use the same language to motivate them. And one of the key ones is the way people are motivated through, towards or away from motivation. Some people are highly motivated about achieving goals where other people are highly motivated from getting away from problems. You’ve got problem solvers and your goal achievers and people who are interviewing you will express their motivational pull through the words that they use or use goal orientated words or problem solving orientated words. So you can phrase your answers meeting their motivation pull, and people just understand what you’re saying in a clearer way when you’re using the words that they used to express themselves.

James:  As an example there, say I was in an interview and someone said, how does that sound? And I said, oh, that sounds really good. What’s the impact then of using the same language that they’re using?

Chris:    It just takes your interview skills to the next level. Have you ever been in a situation where you’re talking to someone, you’re trying to express something over to them and they just don’t get it?   You say it several times and they just don’t understand what you mean and then you reword what you’re going to say and they go, ah, I get it. So as an example, when you said, “Oh, that’s sounds really good,” you can use words like, oh, it’s crisp, clear as a bell, because they’ll filter those words in a way that they just understand it on a deeper lever; because we all make our decisions and our choices, who we’re going to offer the job to, not logically but emotionally. So the more people have rapport with you, the more they understand where you’re coming from, the more you talk their language, the more associated positive emotions they have towards you and it’s that emotional pull, that emotional decision-making is what we want to influence.

James:  So, you mentioned rapport there. What other ways, apart from the language are there to begin to build rapport with the interviewer?

Chris:    It’s so easy these days to build rapport with interviewers because people like people who are like themselves. Years ago we used to teach people, when you went into an interview, make small talk as you’re walking from the reception to the interview, get chatting with the interviewer, find out what they’re like, then try to imbed that into your interview. These days you don’t even need to do that because we have the internet and we have places like LinkedIn where people share their hobbies and their interest and what they want to do. So going into an interview, with the interviewer you can sort of say, oh, I was on LinkedIn when I was doing some research about the company. I was really impressed about, you know, some of the career achievements that you achieved and I’ve also noticed that you’re a part-time rock climber. And then you can express how you are interested in rock climbing or whatever it is that you have in common because people will associate positive emotions to their hobbies and their interests and when you talk about that, they’ll bring those positive emotions.

So when we talked about the classroom experience, about talking in front of your school friend, you can remember that situation and felt negative, where if I talk to you about something I know you’re interested in, you remember that situation and feel positive and then you associate that positivity onto me. And because we’re talking about something we’re both interested in, you’ll just naturally start to like me.

James:  And how important is using the other person’s name when you speak to them?

Chris:    There’s a really great book called — oh, what’s it called — Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Cialdini, I think his name is, and he said that they did like a load of research on why people buy products from certain people and it said that when people used something that they have in common, such as a name or even they come from the same place, we talked about we both come from North of England, when you find commonality, it increases likeness straight away. So you can find that with names. You can find that with hobbies and interests. You can find it with anything but you get — commonality it increases likeability. Some people, though, are very professional and want you to call them mister or missus. Some people want to be more friendly and laid back and are quite happy to use first names and you’ve got to use the thing that will increase your rapport with that particular interviewer.

James:  So there’s no hard and fast rule. It just depends on, you know, how they’re introduced to you and then go from there?

Chris:    Yeah, definitely. It’s all about thinking about what that particular person, the person who is interviewing you, what ticks all their boxes, what motivates that person. And that’s why one person will use visual words and another person will use auditory words. One person will use the surname and are very professional and other people will be more laid back in their approach and more joking in the interview. It’s all about finding what will motivate that individual person and there’s so many clues on the internet; especially when you read stuff like LinkedIn, people will express their motivational pull, that towards-pull or that away-from-pull with the language they use in their LinkedIn page. People will share their hobbies and interests. People, when they introduce you, the way they come across to you will give loads of clues away. And there’s a part in the book where we talk about people’s personality profile, personality types and that really gives you great insight into that individual person’s, you know, the way they see the world and the things that motivate them and if you just use that to express your answers, it just gets inside their head a little bit more and they get that emotional pull towards you. So, they just like you for some reason. They don’t know why they like you but there’s something likable about you. Then you can add on your selling points and now you can meet the job criteria and add on extra stuff in that job interview, how you will make a real impact. They’ve got to employ you because they like you, they’ve got a natural liking towards you. You’ve got a great rapport but you’ve got all this experience, the unique selling point and you’ve already told them how you’re going to use that to impact their company to increase productivity, to reduce overheads or increase profit.

James:  So getting to the more Jedi level of the persuasion techniques, you mention in the book about using suggestion to demand the interviewer gives you a job. How would you go about doing this?

Chris:    So, this is getting into like the hypnotic language part of the book. So what you need to do first is, for your interviews you have to be confident but being confident isn’t enough to win you job offers. Confidence gets you into that state where you can address yourself clearly, but the other part of it is the way you structure your interview answers. Loads of people just mumble their answers or don’t have a good structure to answering the question. So there are three steps you need to use when implementing the interview. So when you’re asked the question, you need to answer that question positively straight away.   So as an example, let’s just take the common question like teamwork. Have you got any experience working in a team? Most go, oh, well, you know, well, I used to work in a team. I’ve been working on my own for a couple of years, actually, doing some independent work. Or people go, oh, yeah, teamwork. It’s about everyone working together to achieve more.   These are really, really weak answers that aren’t going to inspire the interviewer. Whatever question you’re asked at the interview, they’re asking for a reason because it’s part of the criteria for the job that you’re applying for. So they want to hear that you have that skill or that experience. So if someone asked me, what’s your experience with teamwork, I’d answer that question positively straight away. ‘Yes. I have over 10 years experience working within a team’. So straightaway you’re saying yes, I have this skill and what that does is ticks the box of the interviewer. Now they want to listen to what you’re going to say, because you’re saying, oh, yeah. I’ve worked independently for the last five or six years but I did work in a team. You already turned the interviewer off and I’ve interviewed so many interviewers who said that. You start daydreaming when people are talking about things you’re not interested in. You know, they just don’t listen to what people are saying or they’ve not got the right tonality.

You need to be inspiring in getting your interviewer to be interested in you and the way we do that is part 2, by creating intrigue. So you answer the question straight away, yes, I have 10 years experience working with a team and then you create intrigue. An example of this. . . and that’s when you give your real life example. By giving a real life example you can get people really emotionally attached to you. So you can use like a catchy headline as part of your real life example. So an example of this is when I worked as part of a team, worked as part of a team where I was able to get a 10 million pound deal while saving the MDs life. So people are like what? You’ve got this 10 million pound deal but you saved the Managing Director’s life? It just creates intrigue and people are going to want to listen to what you have to say, and then you deliver your real life example and when you deliver the real life example, people visualize what you’re saying and that’s why we teach children how to act in life with stories rather than giving them a set of rules because with stories people visualize what you’re saying. And when you visualize something, like when we visualize being negative in an interview, you feel that emotional association. So when you give a real life story, the interviewer will visualize what you’re saying. When you talk about how you’ve been successful, you’ve been positive and you’ve achieved all these things, you’ve got all this unique selling point, they’re visualizing this stuff and then feeling those positive associations.

And then finally to put that cherry on that cake, you explain how you can use that skill, that unique selling point in their company.   So if I was going to work for your company, I’d take these 10 years worth of teamwork experience and do A, B and C. So it’s all about answering it straight away so the interviewer wants to listen to you. Use real life stories so people can visualize what you’re saying in their mind’s eye and try and create intrigue into the story so people want to listen to you more, and then explain how you can use that skill in their company to help them increase productivity, profits and reduce overhead costs.

James:  Brilliant. I can definitely see that working. I know there’s been many times where you interview people and you ask them a question and they just start talking and you just think, where is this going? You’re not answering the question at all. That’s a really good point.

Chris:    And you know that happens because we’re nervous as well. When you go into the situation, you are a bit nervous. Someone say something and you begin, I need to answer this straight away. I need to say something straight away. So people say the first thing in their mind. Then that leads onto something else, that leads onto something else, and before they know it they’re in 30 seconds talking about an irrelevant piece of information. Whereby answering it straight away, by just saying yes, I have that, it gives your mind a couple of seconds to think what real life story should I use? And one of the things to talk about, loads and loads and loads with clients is, it’s all about preparing for your interview. You should be researching the company. You should be reading the job criteria. You should be on forums asking people who work for that company what are the aspects of the daily duties, what the boss is interested in, what the values of the company because when you know the criteria for the job, you know what’s important for the company and you know parts of the personality of the employer, through reading their LinkedIn profile, you’ll get an idea of what they’re going to ask you in that interview and then you can prepare your questions and answers and by preparing your answers, rehearsing, practicing, shouting things across the room in front of the mirror, visualizing yourself answering these questions in the interview, you will be ready with these stories so when they ask the question, you’ll answer it straight away. And then one of your stories have been practiced and rehearsed will just pop into your head naturally and then you can deliver that story.

And when I did some research a couple of years ago, and I modelled loads of people who are really successful in job interviews and I modelled loads of people who were unsuccessful in job interviews, and one of the key things came out is the amount of time people dedicated to preparation. And the people who were successful in job interviews on average dedicated, I think it was nine hours to prepare for job interviews over several days and the unsuccessful people dedicated about 30 to 45 minutes.

James:  Wow.

Chris:    Yeah. It’s crazy that isn’t it? And the reason was when the people who are negative, unsuccessful — sorry — about the job interviews, they visualize themselves being negative in that interview and that fear of failing in the job interview is so strong that it stops them from preparing because every time they went to prepare, they thought about the negative emotion and that stopped them from preparing. I mean, it’s like a negative cycle that you want to do something, you feel fear, you don’t do it. So when you want to do it again the fear is increased. So you don’t do it and it’s a negative cycle. The positive people, the ones who are successful in job interviews, are just overconfident and imagine themselves doing well in the job interview. So was keen to prepare, was keen to practice, was happy to put in the time to research the company, they felt good about themselves.

James:  And you can always tell so quickly in an interview if people have put the preparation and put the effort in. Those who do stand out so quickly, especially with the first question, when you ask them, why do you want to work here?   You can always tell with that question whether they’ve done the research or whether just spent two minutes looking on the internet.

Chris:    Yes, definitely. And you know, there’s always some standard questions that they will always ask in your sector. People always ask; ‘Tell me a little bit about yourself?’ or ‘Why did you apply for this job?’. They are standard questions that are asked in most interviews. When you’ve worked in the industry for 10 years, you know the job role inside and out. It’s something that you’re an expert in, often an authority in. This is a job that you should be offered because you’ve got the skills and experience to do that job. You can use those skills and experiences to work out what questions they’re going to ask you and we always hear about the random questions often asked at places like Microsoft or Google or Amazon, like why are man holes round instead of square. So when you get asked one of these oddball questions, the first thing you need to do is think, what skill or criteria do they want me to talk about that’s related to this question? So often it’s about being creative, or your engineering knowledge, or how you analyze problems. So you think about what do they want from this oddball question and then use one of your stories to answer that question.

James:  That’s a really good point. A couple of final questions, Chris, because time is, unfortunately, running away with us but I just really wanted to cover how can people use psychology to negotiate a higher wage?

Chris:    I love this, actually. So many people, when you go for salary negotiations, let the employer take the lead and they do that in job interviews as well. You go to a job interview and you wait for the employer to ask all the questions and you just respond to their answers. I recommend you don’t do that. I recommend when you walk into the interview room you start talking to the interviewer, you start asking them questions, you build up your rapport. When they ask you a question about a certain aspect of the company, you give your answer but then you ask them questions about that. So they’re asking you questions about how would you problem solve X and you give your answer, you can then ask questions about what type of problems do they need solving on a regular basis, and you get a two way conversation and then that puts you in an equal footing which increases your confidence.

And the same goes in salary negotiations. Always take the lead. What happens when you’re negotiating a salary is that we have a thing called a baseline and whatever the baseline is, all negotiations are affected by that. So let’s take an example that you go in for a job and you want, you want to earn about 30 grand. I know that’s a low one when your negotiating salaries, but let’s use that as an example. So you want to go in there and your aspiration is to get 30 grand. You go into the negotiations, the employer goes, right, I’ve reviewed your experience, your skills. I’m very impressed. I want to offer you 25,000 pounds. That’s the baseline. The first offer is the baseline. What we do from there is we will increase that negotiation but we’ll do it by comparing that baseline to what we want. So because the baseline is lower than our aspiration, we won’t ask for 30 grand. We will ask for something like 27 and the employer will negotiate that and you will end up with about 25 or 26 grand.

So what you want to do is negotiate a higher baseline. So when you go into that salary negotiation, start higher than what you want. So when the employer is saying, I’ve reviewed all your stuff, you can go in there and say, well, the salary I’m looking for is about 35,000. So that becomes a new baseline and the employer doesn’t want to offend you by offering you such a low salary that it won’t meet your aspirations. So they might offer you 30. You might negotiate to a 32 or 33 which is about five or six grand more than you would have got if the employer set the baseline. The baseline is always key with this. The only time it doesn’t work is if you’re working in a sector where the salaries are pretty much set and you can only negotiate a little bit more, or a little bit less. But when you’re working in a sector where you can negotiate your salary because what you do affects the profits of the company, you’re going for 80,000 pound job, 100,000 grand jobs, you can set your own baseline but you’ve got to go in there, set the baseline and be confident about delivering that.

James: That’s an excellent point and if you ever want to see, well, baseline pricing in action, just walk into the nearest SportsDirect and see the 70 percent reductions on everything. Just set your baseline nice and high, then work it down to a bargain.

Chris:    Yeah, definitely and it works on that. Don’t know if you watch Deal or no Deal, but that’s all about the psychology and the baseline of people, deciding how much they’re going to take but they do it off what they could have won on the previous round and people lose, loads of money on that program because of negative baselines.

James:  Good point. And also, how does reverse, or how could reverse psychology work in relation to getting a job offer?

Chris:    Reverse psychology. Well, what happens is you need to build up this expertise, this authority about yourself throughout the job interview. So you need to be talking about your skills, how you meet the job criteria, but what you have to remember is that everyone who has gone for the job interview has met that criteria. That’s why they are being interviewed.   So what you need is a couple of unique selling points, things that you can offer that other people can’t, things that will make a real impact into that company. So imagine that your key skill is turning around companies under the threat of closure and make it into profitable organization. If you’re being interviewed for a position with a company in that situation, they can’t not employ you because you’re an expert in this skill. So what you need to do throughout the interview is build upon a unique selling point so the employer has just got his rapport with you, they like you, they’ve got all this experience but you’ve got all the unique selling points that they know is going to impact them. This employer wants you. You’re going to get offered the job, but what you need to do is make sure you’re definitely going to be offered that job. And what you do is use a little bit of scarcity because we all want what we can’t have. That’s why eBay is so successful.   You go, I’m going to buy this product on eBay. I’m going to go up to this amount of money. And then as you bid on that product you realize that someone is going to bid higher than you and you see it, it goes up. You think, oh, I’m going to miss out on that thing. I was only going to go up to X amount of pounds. Well, actually I’ll just go up a little bit more. And then you go up, and up, and up and before you know it you’re paying 50 percent more for that product because you don’t want to lose out. That’s why rare things are so valuable. People want what they can’t have.   So you need to do that in the interview as well. Build yourself up so the employer is desperate to take you on and then take that away from them at the interview and talk about how their competitor has already offered you a job and how you’re really thinking about taking that job offer and that you want an answer in the next couple of days. If the employer likes you and thinks they’re going to lose you, especially to a competitor who is going to make money off the back of you, they’re going to want you even more.

James:  Very true. That’s very true and I’ve seen that personally when I went for two jobs and had one offer on the table already from a rival because originally they said, oh, you know, it’s going to take six weeks to come back with an offer. But when I mentioned I had already gotten an offer from one of their rivals, yeah, they got back to me the next day to offer me the job.

Chris:    Yeah. It’s so powerful. And even like on, you know, when we talk about jobs that are maybe in the twenties, 30 grand bracket. So let’s think of, like a hairdressing as an example. You talk about being a hairdresser and you’ve got this clientele that follows you everywhere you go, and you might have like 100 clients which might be worth X amount of pounds for whatever company you go to, cause some clients are really loyal to their hairdressers. So you talk about that throughout your interview. If you take me, you’re going to get my skills, my experience but you’re going to get all these clients who are going to come with me as well. The employer is like, I’m going to pay you X amount of money but just from the clients you’re bringing over, I’m going to earn X amount of profit. They just desperately want to take you on. So then when you say, your competitor, the person over the road is also interested in you, it’s like alarm bells inside themselves. They panic because they don’t want to miss out on this fantastic opportunity.

James:  Brilliant. And one final question, Chris, before we move to the quick fire question round. You talk in the book — and I wasn’t sure whether to bring this one up because well, we’ll see as we talk about it — but you talk in the book about turning your rivals into nervous wrecks beforehand. Now, not that we would condone this behaviour, but if someone did want to do it, how would they go about doing it?

Chris:    So basically this is like the opposite to what we talked about before where if you’re feeling nervous, move that picture away and you’ll get rid of those negative emotions. Now if you want a competitor to feel nervous, you can get them to focus on that negativity and they will feel nervous. So when you sat in the waiting room or in the reception room, you bring up a conversation, oh, hi. You’re here for the interview? You get that sort of conversation going. It’s quite an easy flow to get into them. So, how are you feeling? You feeling a little bit nervous today? And most of them are like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.   And you go, yeah, you know what? It can be really scary going to job interviews. I mean, when you’re start there and you don’t know what to say and you start to feel nervous and you can feel that feeling, that anxiety in your stomach and you can feel really bad, can’t you?   So you can talk to someone about feeling nervous and weak in a job interview and they’ll start to picture that and start to feel really, really nervous and the more nervous they are, the less likely they’re going to perform well in that job interview. Then if you perform well in the job interview, the interviewer has this thing where they automatically contrast people. So someone comes in who is really weak and nervous and then you come in who is really confident and powerful, that contrast makes you seem even better than you are.

James:  Not that we would recommend or condone such behaviour but you can see why it would work. It reminds me of before I used to walk into say exams, whether it was A levels or at university and there would always be someone who, you know, ah, did you revise this, or you must have revised this or I’ve done so much revision. Not what you wanted to hear just before you walked in.

Chris:    Yeah, definitely. Definitely. There’s a great book called Snakes in Suits and it’s about psychopaths in the workplace and how psychopaths generally like move up the ranks or the career ladder really, really quick, because they’re quite happy to pull people down, to step onto people to get where they want to be and they use techniques like this without knowing that they are NLP techniques.

James:  Thinking about some of the senior people at some of the places I’ve worked, I can definitely see that would be the case.

Super, Chris. So moving onto the quick fire question round, which one book would you recommend our listeners to read?

Chris:    The one book I would recommend would be Anthony Robbins, UnLeash — I’ve forgotten what it’s called — Unleash the Giant (Awaken the Giant within)

James:  Unleash the Power Within?

Chris:    Yes, that’s it, yeah.   It’s a fantastic book. It’s all about motivation, how your mind works. It’s a really, really good book. It’s not about job interviews but will help you to get into that state to be really confident. And he talks as well, loads about repetition. So when you want to learn something, you need to practice and practice and practice and I always say this to people, if you want to be good at job interviews, you need to practice and practice your answers, your tonality, the way you communicate things, the way you structure your interview answers. So it’s a great book to learn about being motivated and it’s a great book to learn about why repetition is the key to learning any skill.

James: I completely echo that one and I was looking up to see Tony Robbins, Unleash the Power show in London this year and it was amazing.

Chris:    Yeah, he’s really a great guy. He’s great as well because he’s got another book come out, out of this year or last year about finances and all the money from that book — because he wants people to be financially successful and the idea is that if your financially successful, the country gets more taxes. So you’re more successful, the country is more successful — and all the money from that book has been given to his charities that help homeless and feed homeless people. And so, yeah, he’s a great guy.

James: Yes. It’s a big meaty tome, that one.

Chris:    Yeah.

James:  And what one website would you recommend that our listeners visit?

Chris:    The website I — I just entered this website really recently. I wrote a couple of articles for it. It’s called Addicted to Success and there’s lots of different professionals, coaches, people who are successful, Tony Robbins has been on this website as well. It’s people sharing their advice and support, and it’s done in very chunk size information. So you can read at a bus stop, or while you’re waiting for someone to come out of the shop and you have nothing to do. It’s one of those websites where five minutes you can flip through one of the articles and then go back to it five minutes later and read something else. Very chunk bitey inspirational motivational articles.

James:  Oh, super and I will link up to that in the show notes. So I’ll find Chris’ articles and link up to that in the show notes. So check out Graduate Job Podcast for links to that.

And finally, Chris, what one tip can listeners implement today to help them on their job search?

Chris:    Practice is definitely the thing you need to do; practice, practice, practice. So you know what you’re good at at job interviews, you know what thing you need to improve, go practice that thing. If you feel negative, move that pictures away. If you want to talk more powerfully.   Think about where your voice comes from. If you want to structure your interview answers better, practice, practice and practice.

James:  Chris, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Before we finish, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Chris:    You can go on my website which is www.employmentking.co.uk which is my interview website or my personal coaching website www.Christopher-delaney.com and I’m on all the social media as well.

James:  Excellent and I’ll link to everything you just mentioned, in the show notes.

Chris, many thanks for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Chris:    Thanks James, and I appreciate you inviting me down today.

James:    Thanks again to Chris Delaney.  I really enjoyed our chat, slightly longer than usual but we covered some fascinating ideas. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be a Guinea pig myself. He covered some great tips and techniques, but the top takeaway for me is probably one of the most basic……the need to practice.  Practice practice practice.  You can have all the NLP tricks in the world, but ultimately your success will come down to the effort you put in. As he said successful candidates put in an average of 9 hours research, ones that fail put in 30-40 minutes. Have a look at your recent application and think about how much you have put in. Can you see a correlation between applications you quickly fired off and where you consequently didn’t get past the first round? Have a think, are you setting yourself up for success or failure?

The second takeaway for me is on the importance of confidence.  You need to walk in believing you are good enough to get the job, and to do the job. If you don’t really believe it, it will come across in the interview. Chris went quickly through some techniques which can help you deal with a lack of confidence. Try them out. See which ones work for and resonate with you, whether it’s anchoring or dealing with your negative self-talk or imagining yourself walking into the interview as James Bond or George Clooney. Take what works, and run with it.

Which leads to the final point which is an amalgamation of tips 1 one and 2, have the confidence to practice and try these tips and techniques. Try and consciously think about building rapport or developing a sense of scarcity in the interview. These are there to be used, because they work, and they will help you get that amazing job. Remember, to know and not to do, is not to know.

There you go, episode 28, done and dusted. For a full transcript of everything that we’ve discussed and all the links check out the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/influence.

If you’ve enjoyed the show let me and Chris know on Twitter, I’m @gradjobpodcast, and please feel free to leave a review on ITunes or Stitcher radio, as I say every week it’s the best way other than sharing us with your friends to show appreciation for the podcast and it helps massively in the ranking on iTunes. Also if you’ve not already subscribed via Itunes or Stitcher radio, you need to sort your life out, it’s the easiest way to get each episode delivered to you for free and to make sure that you don’t miss a thing. Finally, I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly I hope you use it and apply it. See you next week.

 

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