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.
