Anyone who has been fully trained to interview candidates for graduate employment would be lying if they said they always gave the job offer to the candidates who gave the best answers at interview. Sometimes some candidates have a good feel about them and others don’t. It is important to realise all candidates who get offered an interview have a fairly even chance of getting a job offer: each has shown on their CV or application that they may have the necessary skills and experience to be successful in the role. So there must be some other factor which gives some candidates a good ‘feel’ or a bad ‘feel’.
Experts have proven that over 70 percent of language is non verbal. This means that there is a big percentage of communication between you and your interviewer which is not the actual words which come out of your mouth. I would suggest that this 70% of communication is what makes the marginal decisions following an interview.
There is a subject called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) which examines the relationships between language and the way we think and behave. A common application of NLP is called matching. This is where you ‘match’ your communication patterns to that of the interviewer. What I mean by this is that if the interviewer is speaking in a high paced energetic way, then it might be best for you to increase the speed of your speech, so that they can understand you better. If you were to speak slower, perhaps with frequent gaps in your speech then this may be difficult for your interviewer to interpret, and may have a negative impact on your graduate employment chances.
A useful but much exaggerated example of ‘matching’ is when a parent speaks to their toddler. The parent will speak in a much higher pitched ‘squeaky’ voice so that the toddler can understand the parent more easily. When they start speaking to another adult they would revert back to their usual style of speech as speaking to adult in the same style as you would speak to a child would alienate the adult, and have a negative impact on their feelings towards you. Hence that it is a good idea to conform to the interviewer’s style of communication in an interview.
It is my view that this hidden communication skill is definitely a deal breaker when it come to graduate employment. If you can get your interviewer ‘onside’ so to speak you may have a better chance of a job offer, even if your answers aren’t quite up to scratch. This skill is also very useful in business, and is very much transferrable. You may look to conform to a clients’ way of communication during a meeting, when you make that big business deal in the future. You may also simply find that you enjoy conversations more when you use this technique.
So my top tip is to match your communication style to that of your interviewer to stay one step ahead of the game!
