Acing the first few moments of an interview

18 April 2016

While merit processes are designed to overcome bias and prejudice the reality is that powerful unconscious processes are at work when we first meet someone and these play a pivotal role in how strongly you impress, in the first few moments, those who interview you. 

Can I Trust You?

Firstly, at an automatic, unconscious level the interviewer is assessing if you are ‘friend or foe’ and deciding the level of trust they can safely extend to you.  In assessing trust the primary question that gets answered is: “Is this person going to look out for my best interests – yes or no?” If the unconscious answer is yes then trust will, tentatively, be extended and they will be open to listen to you.  If the answer is no, or I don’t know, then they become super alert for information that will confirm their initial negative impression. The tricky thing is that in an interview situation many panel members turn up expecting that candidates are trying to dupe them, so gaining trust is not easy.

How Important and Valuable are You?

The second thing that happens automatically and unconsciously is that the interviewer assesses how important and valuable you might be in helping them meet their own goals – many of which they are also unconscious of.  For example running in the background for the interviewer there are likely to be concerns about how happy other team members might be with the person they choose; whether choosing you will make them look good; how likely you might be to help them in their own career goals; and many other self centred, yet unconscious, motivations they assess when they first meet you.  When forming their first impression of you the interviewer assigns you a rating of how valuable you are to them and their own goals way before they start assessing how valuable you might be to the organisation.

5 Elements of Making a Good First Impression

All this unconscious assessment that is happening in the background means you have to consciously make sure you are creating a positive first impression that signals you are trustworthy and valuable to the interviewer.  Five ways you can do this are:

·       Create Positive Emotional Contagion

·       Be Authentic

·       Attend to Your Image

·       Project Trustworthy Body Language

·       Have Social Skills

Create Positive Emotional Contagion

In a previous post we explored the concept of emotional contagion and how to create positive upward spirals of emotional contagion.  The key idea is that you have to manage your emotions prior to the interview so you enter the interview with positive rather than negative emotions.  The panel members will ‘catch’ your positive emotions and feed these back to you starting a positive spiral.  The danger is that negative spirals are easier to create, especially when your nerves and interview anxiety are the prominent emotion you bring into the interview.

Be Authentic

There is a fine line between managing the impression you want to make and staying true to who you are.  While there are image and body language ‘rules’ that underpin how open others are to extending you trust these ‘rules’ should never get in the way of you being genuine and authentic.  It is exhausting to try to appear as you think people want you to appear.  And I is almost impossible to keep up the pretense for long.  You also don’t want the panel to select you based on who they think you are as once you are in the job the real you will turn up day after day and if the fit is not right you have set yourself up for chronic job mismatch.  Humans also have sophisticated antenna for spotting fake behaviour, and any hint of ‘bullshit’ will lead to mistrust. Don’t try to be other than who you are.  This, of course, takes self-knowledge – you need to know who you are.  In upcoming articles we will explore many of the elements that help you know yourself such as values, beliefs, strengths, opinions and personality.

Attend to Your Image

Your appearance, like it or not, has a significant impact on the first impression you make.  Consistent research shows that attractive applicants, when all other factors are controlled, have higher rates of success.  With lightening speed the interviewer takes in your skin colour, gender and age assessing the degree to which you are similar to them.  The more similar you are, the more they will like and trust you.  They then gauge your personal hygiene for any concerns about contamination or disease contagion threat you may pose and then give you an assessment of fitness, which is used to determine how much self-control you potentially have and the level of attractiveness you have.  And this all happens in a split second - before you have a chance to smile or reach out your hand for a handshake. 

There is not always a lot you can do about your appearance, and most people naturally attend to presenting themselves as attractively as they can.  The following items are a bit of a checklist to make sure you are on top of for the image you present at interview.  Have a good haircut, have clean skin, clothes and nails, polish your shoes, wear smart currently stylish (rather than fashionable) gender appropriate clothes, have clear eyes from a good nights sleep, have neatly trimmed fingernails, attend to unsightly facial hair, cover tattoos, remove socially controversial body piercings, attend to visible skin blemishes and be sun safe, have clean teeth, don’t smell (perfume and aftershave can be offensive to some people), check your breath (have mints before the interview), protect against sweat.  Don’t give the interviewer any cause to feel even a slight level of disgust about your personal image because their own innate and unconscious drive for personal protection will kick in and they will protect themselves against exposure to you.

Project Trustworthy Body Language

Trust is conveyed subconsciously through:

·       Comfort with eye contact

·       An open, upright stance or sitting position

·       A strong steady voice

·       A smile (especially if it is one that reaches to your eyes)

·       Clear diction

·       A firm, dry handshake. 

This package of body gestures signals to other people that you are not trying to mislead them, so they can, tentatively, extend trust to you.

Eye contact is a skill we can all become progressively better at.  Think of it as a muscle, the more you exercise it the stronger it becomes and the more nuanced you become at judging the appropriate level you can maintain in various situations before it comes across as aggressive. Most people stay well back from this dangerous upper limit and can safely increase the level of eye contact they engage with. 

When it comes to posture we are aiming for a straight back, shoulders down and back, head held level with your jaw slightly forward and the comfort to allow your arms to hang at your sides or, when sitting, to rest on your thighs or the desk in front of you. 

The lower and more steady your voice the better.  Rising inflection at the end of sentences is an idiom of Australian language, but is something to curb and control – this takes lots of practice.  Your words need to be clear and free from slang and, as much as you can, free from hesitations such ‘umm’, ‘ah’ and ‘so’.

Smiles are not all equal and the more you can genuinely engage a smile that reaches up to your eyes (these are called Duchenne Smiles) the more trust is extended to you. And finally practice comfortably extending your hand to shake the hand of others ensuring the hand lands palm-to-palm, is firm, but not crushing, and happens at the midway point between you and the other person.

Keep an eye out for a future article in which I will talk about the power of your body language to impact how you feel about yourself, as this is a vital step in how well you perform, not just in how you are perceived by others.

Finesse social skills

These are the things you were taught as a child. Be punctual, and polite, say thank you and please, have manners, know the etiquette of waiting to be directed on where to sit when you enter someone else’s territory. Also look for ways you can be kind or helpful to panel members, for example hold the door open for others.  Keep the conversation focused on the other person rather than turning it back to you, for example they mention they walked at the weekend and you enquire where they walked to, rather than say you went for a walk too.

Practice Making a Good First Impression

How, you might ask, do you do all this under the pressure of an interview?  The answer is that you don’t leave it until the interview to get on top of these things.  Succeeding at having the career you want will involve doing well in interview situations so you need to practice and put in place what you genuinely and authentically can put in place long before any interview. All these things, of course, don’t just add to interview success, but to success in all areas of life.

Here are some actions that may add value in managing the first impression you make.

1.     Self rate yourself against the various elements that are outlined above.  Comparing yourself to other potential candidates for the jobs you might be interviewed for are you below average = 1, average = 2, or above average = 3 in areas such as eye contact, smiling, having a firm handshake, keeping conversations focused on the other person…

2.     Slowly extend the level of comfort you have with eye contact.  Twice a day for two weeks hold eye contact with a stranger for a millisecond longer than you normally would.  The more you do this the higher the level of comfort you will have.

3.     Take every opportunity that presents itself to shake hands with people.  Aim for at least one good handshake per day.

4.     Make a list of things that, when you think of them, make you smile in a way that extends all the way up to your eyes.  Then set a reminder on your smart phone to signal twice a day to think of these things and practice your Duchenne Smile.  The bonus is that doing this has also been shown to impact positively on your happiness levels.

First impressions, of course, are only relevant when you are meeting someone for the first time.   When you are an internal candidate, or already known to the panel your reputation and personal brand is what precedes you so you had better know what yours is.  I will explore this in an upcoming post.