The Nightmare of Job Interviews

Facing a job interview is daunting for many. If you are working you have probably been through a formal interview. Here is a scenario that you might have some experience of.

The night before the interview you diligently sit down and get ready. It might be the pay, the conditions or simply you hate your current role, but you are desperate for this new job.

As you look thought your CV you start thinking there must be hundreds of people that have better experience, they might even have family in the company or just can talk a good game. To calm yourself down you start practicing those ideas you have seen on the internet. Imagining the interviewer naked works for a few minutes until your realise they might be doing the same to you.

Your sleep is disturbed with dreams of turning up to the interview naked and forgetting everything on your CV. You sleep in and barely make it to the company on time. Out of breath, crumpled and flustered you wheeze your interviewer’s name at the receptionist. When she asks your name you go blank and you get the impression the receptionist thinks you are an idiot.

After a short wait you are met by a stony faced old crone who looks like she has murdered someone every time she attempts a smile. Walking towards the interview room you desperately try to appear relaxed by attempting some small talk but unfortunately the weather lasts only a few minutes and you find yourself babbling about how easy the place was to find and the traffic situation.

You eventually make it to the interview room and the old crone offers you a coffee.  After spending a few minutes wiping yourself down from the coffee you just spilt down your front the old crone asks if you are ready to start the interview proper. She then says something like, “Just as a nice gentle start, talk me through your CV.”

You immediately start to worry about what is going to happen when it gets rough. You then realise you didn’t bring any copies of your CV and can’t remember what is on it. A few minutes of you wittering about your favourite holiday destinations and she now things your CV is a fake.

The interviewer smiles like a hunter having spotted their prey and asks about how you rise to a challenge. There is a huge pregnant pause after you reply with “very well” as you sense that she is looking for more of an answer.

Panicking for any answer you realise that she might be thinking of you as prey you try to calm your nerve by thinking of her as naked prey. But the only image you get is of you as naked prey. Now you have completely forgotten the question. The interview seem to go on for ever.

On the point of turning comatose your old hag tells you that you can now ask questions because she has finished all of her’s. In an effort to appear keen you ask her how soon will the organisation make a decision. She answers the question, and leaves you outside the company wondering if you have got the job.

If any of this strikes a chord with you then imagine how different this could be if you had an air of confidence, a way of making small talk that builds rapport, a formula for being able to answer any interview question and deal with any objection. Add in the final element of covertly implanting post hypnotic suggestions that you are the best candidate for the job.

Seem impossible? Perhaps not, many of these skills happen naturally and you have definitely seen others do this as part of their daily lives. 

Consider circumstances where you have met someone just walking through life getting what everything, including the jobs they want. These are the people using these skills, sometimes naturally, sometimes they have been trained. In most cases these skills are quick and easy to learn.

Your CV could be rewritten in less than a couple of hours adding lots of NLP and psychological pull to get more interviews than you could dream of. Having the skill to be able to answer interview questions artfully only takes two hours to learn and you will keep that skill for life, as well as learn to apply it in many more situations.

Building rapport, banishing interview nerves and taking control of the interview can be learnt in as little as half an hour even though they don’t seem easy skills.The only question is how much people are prepared to devote to mastering these interview skills because just a couple of hours is the difference between a great job and just the job you are doing now.
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The NLP Company website run by Rintu Basu can give you more information about NLP and Hypnosis applied to Job Search Technqiues. Rintu has developed a downloadable Hypnotic Interview Skills Course as well as maintaining a high quality coaching practice and delivering exclusive NLP Training Courses for the NLP
Scotland Business Community.

How to Use NLP for Sales

Business is about making good sales and is highly competitive. Any extra techniques a sales professional can have could mean the difference between success and bankruptcy. We will talk about how NLP can make a dramatic change to your sales conversions.

We create meaning from our experiences, this is the subject of NLP. If you knew how people encode meaning on their experiences as a sales professional you might be able to ensure that your products are encoded with good meaning. NLP can help you do this. The following are various NLP processes and how they relate to sales.

NLP Rapport in a Sales Enviroment

NLP Rapport is much more than how much someone likes you. In sales it is about how to create responsiveness in your customer. Using pacing and leading, building anticipation loops and covert hypnosis are some of the techniques used to build responsiveness above and beyond standard matching and mirroring.The benefit of a good NLP practitioner course is making systems that are unique for you and you can apply specifically to your context.

Emotions through NLP Training

Being able to turn negative feelings into positive motivations would be an advantage in a sales context. NLP tell us that we can have the choice about how we feel about an event and there are many NLP tools that can help you do this.For instance you could let go of the fear of rejection, desperation to get the next sale, and any lack of confidence. You could replace all this with excitement about meeting the next customer, confidence in yourself, the product and your sales process.

Whilst having these NLP processes would be immensely useful for everyone think about how much more useful they suddenly become when you notice that you can apply the same processes to other people whether your sales team or customers. Having the ability to get people excited, curious or just interested in you, your company and your products would be useful for any sales context.

NLP Processes for Understanding the Customer

People respond to their deepest values, beliefs and identity. NLP is about studying what goes on beneath surface behaviour and what drives people to be excellent or successful at particular things. Using the same techniques you can understand what would make a customer buy one product yet reject another and then match your products to their deepest drivers. If you could attach your product to your customer’s deepest needs how many more sales would you make? A good NLP Practitioner Course could teach you to be able to do this.

Covert Language Patterns in Sales

There is a lot about hypnotic language patterns and covert hypnotic techniques talked about on the internet. If you take away all the hype and false expectations there are some exceptionally good uses for this in a sales context.

Language is just one filter that we have operating on our subjective reality. By understanding how this filter works we can use it to capture and lead the imagination to where you want it to go. By passing objections, changing beliefs or just getting excited about buying the product. Having NLP hypnotic persuasion processes as part of your tool kit will allow you to lead the thoughts of your prospects in a buying direction. For example, you might lead your prospect away from the expense of your product and towards the massive return of investment. You might completely do away with buyer’s remorse through a hypnotic technique such as future pacing or just attaching good feelings to your product. Future pacing is a simple technique where you can get your prospect to imagine themselves with all the benefits that your product or service brings.

Sales, the perfect NLP Application

The issue isn’t how NLP can help sales professionals but it is much more how can any committed sales professional not study NLP. A good NLP practitioner course will give you a significant advantage in any area of your life. In the context of sales dramatic increases in conversions and the quality of sales can be achieved easily. For sales managers the benefits can expand exponentially because they are in a position where they can train their teams in the NLP techniques that they have learned.
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Rintu Basu manages The NLP Company, the NLP Training provider of choice for the NLP Scotland community. NLP Hypnotic Persuasion Skills Training is undertaken in Glasgow exclusively by Rintu. He is delivering high quality NLP Training Courses as well as maintaining a restricted NLP coaching practice. More NLP Persuasion Techniques  for sales and wider applications can be in The Persuasion Skills Black Book.

Amazing Interview Answers to Hard Questions Made Easy

This article applies NLP Persuasion Techniques to difficult interview questions.

Imagine a situation in the interview where you get you suddenly get that one question. You flap your gums but your brain has frozen and you can think of nothing intelligent to say. Many people have faced this and many more worry about it happening. Yet it is easy to prepare for.

Some people have jumped on this concern and published books of interview questions and answers that you can waste your money on. Now when you get faced with a difficult question you have to remember the right page in the book, the right answer and then make it sound as if you came up with it. You were probably better of flapping your gums aimlessly at your interviewer until you think of a good answer for yourself.

Here is a simple way of making sure you have some great answers prepared whatever the question. But first let us look at what constitutes a good interview answer.

Interview candidates don’t generally give enough detail in their answers according to the latest research. We will use examples to illustrate our interview answers. The format we will use for our answers is commonly known as STAR and is usually use to answer behavioural and competency based interviews.

You usually use this format to answer questions such as “Tell me about how you dealt with a difficult team member” or “Describe how you deal with difficult customers” and any behavioural or competency based interviews. But you could use this format for the basis of any interview question.

STAR stand for:

Situation or Task

Action you took

Results you achieved

All you need is to carefully select the right sorts of experiences and you can answer many different types of interview questions with an illustration. For example let’s use talking down an angry customer as the experience we will use. Being able to explain this experience as a Situation or Task, Action you took and the Results you took you will be ready to answer many different types of interview question.Now, for all your standard interview questions all you need do is top and tail your example. A few interview questions as examples:

How would you describe yourself?
Why do you want to change jobs?
What are your career aspirations?
Tell me about your key strengths

Each of these questions can be answered using this example as the illustration.

I would describe myself as a great communicator, for example…
I want to change jobs because I prefer working in a customer facing environment for example when I…
I have career aspirations to work in challenging environments for example when I…
One of my key strengths is empathy, for example…

Each of these questions can be answered using this example as the illustration.

All you now need to do is run this example through a few questions to make sure it is generic enough to fit most interview questions. If you had half a dozen pre-prepared examples that fit most interview questions, how differently would you be feeling in interview? We are only just starting. Here are a few concepts that you might want to consider.

Finding and feeding back the company and the interviewer’s hot buttons and values in these pre formatted answers is something I will show you on my psychological CV Writing and Interview skills programme.

A hypnotic benefit statement that keeps the interviewer thinking about you doing a perfect job would be great a great end to all of your answers. You could construct these separately just like the examples and then bring them out when necessary.

The direction of a conversation can be changed easily with particular NLP Language Patterns. Having some patterns ready you can switch the conversation away from a problem area back towards one of your prepared examples.

An interview situation is easy to prepare for and you could be completely bullet proof for it using these techniques.

You can find out more about NLP and Hypnosis applied to Job Search Skills through The NLP Company run by Rintu Basu. Rintu has developed a downloadable Hypnotic Interview Skills Course as well as maintaining a high quality coaching practice and delivering exclusive NLP Training Courses for the NLP Scotland Business Community.