Interview Communication Skills: Making a Great Impression

I recently had the opportunity to coach a friend’s son who has been preparing for an important interview to get into a particular college, and it gave me the opportunity to test the principles that we’ve been saying for years work anywhere and everywhere.

The right communication skills will take you a huge distance in winning over the interviewer.

It’s funny — I found myself going through the same process that my clients go through when they’re out there “in the wild.” Whenever they’re in a new context, they question what they know. But ultimately, I found what my clients find — that what works when it comes to effective communication, works anywhere.

Here are three of the basic tools I gave my friend’s son for the interview which I absolutely know will work for him:

1) Make eye-contact when you talk.  Our body language says more than our words do in an interview — some studies say as much as 93% of our face-to-face communication comes across in nonverbals. And eye-contact is one of the few nonverbals that is easily under your control. Understand that eye-contact doesn’t mean staring. Be okay with blinking, and be okay with occasionally glancing away at times, but seek out the interviewer’s eyes. Just reaching out to them this way shows a tremendous amount of confidence (even if you don’t necessarily feel confident). As Dean puts it, reaching out to make eye-contact is the nonverbal word for “confidence.” It’s a leadership communication skill, and it’s a great way to stay focused on the other person, and improve the quality of your listening to what the other person is saying.

2) Appreciate the person you’re speaking with. Appreciation is a feeling, not an idea, not a theory, not a notion. It’s a word that has been massively misused in the world — particularly the business world. And as a result, we can forget that its value is less in that we say the word and more that we actually feel appreciation when we interact with someone. When we focus our attention on someone and make eye-contact with them, we forge a powerful connection with them. We experience a moment with them. So if we fill that moment with a feeling of appreciation, we feel it, and they feel it. We appreciate them, and they appreciate us appreciating them. Then we appreciate them for appreciating our appreciation of them, and the spiral just goes up and up. This, more than anything, is what gives two people an experience of really “clicking” together. It’s not just finding stuff in common, it’s feeling the same feeling at the same time, and being aware of sharing those feelings at the same time.

3) Remember that it’s not about you, it’s about them. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that an interview must be all about you. If you’re looking to get hired, the interview could make all the difference in the world to you. Same goes if you’re a student looking to get chosen by a college. Or if you’re representing a business looking to win a game-changing project. But no matter who you’re talking to or what the circumstances are, you will always make a phenomenally strong impression if you push aside your own agenda and ask questions about them before you start to talk about yourself.

So in working with my friend’s son, we came up with a couple great questions about the college. I want you to imagine being a college interviewer talking to a student who begins the interview like this, and tell me how it might land:

“I’ve been researching the college, and am really impressed with what people are saying about it. Your reputation just seems phenomenal. I’m curious, from your perspective, what are the challenges that the college is currently facing?”

Then, after conversing about the challenges:

“So, what’s on the flip-side of those challenges? What goals is the college working towards?”

What we determined is that it really doesn’t matter what the interviewer says in response to these questions. The interviewee just needs to be interested, and needs to show that he’s interested by communicating that he’s hearing. And if the interviewee is indeed authentically interested in being a part of what the interviewer represents, then it should be pretty easy to be authentically interested in what the interviewer has to say. So the interviewee needs to communicate this interest — with something like, “You know, that’s one of the reasons why I’m so interested in joining this college.”

And this happens to be a perfect bridge back to talking about himself so that the interviewer can get a sense of who he is.

All of this goes a tremendous distance towards winning the interviewer over because no one else will be doing this. They’ll all be nervously avoiding eye-contac, and talking about themselves right off the bat. By reaching out to others with appreciative eye-contact and starting the interview with questions about them, an interviewee can communicate with confidence that he cares more about the institution than about himself, and optimize his chances of being chosen.