How To Get The Job You Want

Have you ever felt tongue-tied in a job-interview?

Have you ever wished that you always knew what to say and how to say it?

Then you are in luck, because persuasion solves both of those problems.

Stay tuned, and I’ll teach you exactly how you can use persuasiveness to get any job you want.

A Bazooka to a Stick Fight

Persuasion is a powerful weapon.

Persuasion is a bazooka in a world where people have yet to discover that they can put sharpened rocks on the end of a stick.

Persuasion is so powerful, in fact, that if you understand how to use it to its full potential you can get almost anything you want. This is what Scott Adams refers to as Weapons Grade Persuasion in his brilliant book Win Bigly.

Not many people are at this level of persuasion. My guess is that somewhere between 0.1 % and 1 % of the population of the world have this level of persuasive skill.

Luckily however, there is a gap between the very best persuaders in the world, who can make anyone do anything all the time and the rest of us, who want to be able to sometimes make someone do something.

One such occasion where you’d like to make someone do something is in the case of a job interview.

Interviews are all about persuasiveness.

The more persuasive you are, the more likely you are to get the job. Sometimes you are persuasive on accident, and that’s why you get job. Sometimes you aren’t and that’s why they choose someone else with more experience or who is better qualified.

Trust me.

If you get called in for an interview, you are on equal footing with everyone else. The key differentiator between you is not skill or experience or expertise.

It’s persuasion.

If you can persuade the interviewer that you are the right person for the job, then you are going to get the job. Simple as that.

So exactly how can you go about persuading people to give you a job?

Let’s break it down.

See Things From Their Perspective

When you persuade, one of the most effective things you can do, is what’s known as pacing and leading.

Pacing is when you let the other person know that you see things from their perspective first, before you lead them to where you want them to go.

When you are at a job interview, the person who is sitting across from you has always made it known what they are looking for. It was in the job description. Are they looking for a teamplayer? Then you are a team player.

What is even more effective however is if you ask follow-up questions to get to them to talk. This way, you make sure that you understand what they’re looking for, and you come across as a person who wants to understand them.

What’s important to realize here, is that people care about themselves first. Job-interviews are no different.

The primary concern of the people who interview you is whether or not you can get the job done. If you can then they look good to their superiors, and that helps them advance their careers.

Understanding this is critical, because it moves your focus to where it needs to be.

It moves your focus towards them and once you are able to see things from their perspective, you can tailor your message to suit their needs. When you tailor your message to suit their needs, they will automatically consider you the best person for the job.

Lead them to the Promised Land

Leading is the part of the your message where you take the person you’re talking to, to the place you want them to go. In the context of a job interview, you want to lead them to a place where it’s obvious that you are the best person for the job.

The best way to do this is to use images. Make you message visual. The more pictures you can put in the mind of the person you’re talking to, the more persuasive you’ll be. The best way to make your message visual is to tell stories.

The Streets that Flow with Milk and Honey

We humans are biologically wired to appreciate stories.

100.000 years ago, when our ancestors were gathered around a warm and bright bonfire, they used stories to pass on information to their children. They told stories of their great forefathers who hunted on the plains of the savanna and brought down great game by working together.

They told stories their children knew enough to survive in a world teeming with dangerous animals who were out to kill them.

If they didn’t pass this information on to their children, they would be impaled by a sabre-tooth tiger or trampled to death by stampede of angry mammoths.

Stories are so persuasive, because we are literally genetically hard-wired to be persuaded by story-telling. This means, that whenever you want to highlight your skills in the most persuasive manner, you need to tell a story.

When I interviewed for my current job, I wanted to convey my skills and competencies.

Instead of just telling them what I could do, I told them a story from the previous project I had worked on.

I told them I had been part of a four-person team who developed and tested algorithms underlying a financial product. I told them how we had worked as a team, and hashed out the calculations together.

How we’d stood around a white-board and argued about mathematical equations. How we’d run it through our testing framework and how we’d felt like Alan Turing when he was developing the Enigma code-breaking machine.

On top of that we needed to balance it with optimal product development to ensure our customers got the best possible product. I concluded by telling them that this is the product that they know today as Flex Life.

This story has a standard arc and it helps illustrate that I’m a team-player who they can trust to work on complicated projects. I can undertake highly complex projects and make them work in real life. I even managed to put myself and Alan Turing in the same sentence, and even though we are nothing alike, the association alone is enough to say I’m smart.

By the way — did you see what I did there?

I told you a story.

Did you find it more persuasive and entertaining than you would have, if I’d just told you the facts?

The research says so, and my personal experience backs it up.

Do you see the value of story-telling in interviews now?

Great, then let’s move on to the final step.

Tongue-Fu

A part of the interview process is about trying to make you crack under pressure. Or at the very least, to see how you fare on shaky ground. This means that you will be thrown curve-balls, fast-balls and other types of balls that are hard to hit out of the park.

But we can take a page from the playbook of law-enforcement and the art of Verbal Judo — otherwise known as Tongue-Fu.

The main aim of Tongue-Fu is to take the pointed words that come at you, and turn them upside down. This means that you take the energy from the words of your adversary and use it against them.

In an interview you will be asked tough questions.

You will be asked questions that you are not going to like, and if the interviewer is worth their salt, you will be asked questions that feel personal and uncomfortable to answer.

What they are trying to do is to unearth your weaknesses and hit your nerves, to see how you respond under pressure.

The best way you can respond is to take the words that are being aimed at you, flip them around and point them at your ‘opponent’.

This means that when your future employer is fishing for a weakness, you need to tell him why it is actually a strength. You need to tell them that you acknowledge the fact that it looks like a weakness (pacing), but here are the reasons why it is actually a strength (leading).

In order to illustrate this, I’ll tell you another story.

When I was interviewing for my current job, part of the process was getting interviewed by an HR-person based on a personality test. The test is designed to tell them a thing or two about the interviewee, and my impression is, that although it’s not perfect, it is right more often than it’s wrong.

My interview started out in a friendly enough manner, and I answered some basic questions about my personality. Then the conversation took a turn down a dark path as the HR guy asked me about my temper. He said that people with this kind of personality usually had a big temper.

My initial urge was to jump on the table and yell “I’ll show you temper!”

Luckily for me, I managed to keep a cool head and explain to him calmly and politely that yes I do have a temper, and that is what drives me. That is what makes me competitive.

I told him that I was of the opinion that in a performance oriented job, like the one I was applying for, I considered it a big advantage. I explained that I want to win, and in this job they needed a winner.

I explained that the inner drive that comes with having temper is a huge positive because it would spur me towards achievement. I asked him if it wouldn’t be worse if they got someone who didn’t have a temper? Someone who didn’t care what happened one way or the other?

He agreed to that and we moved on.

I flipped everything that he was saying on its head and used it against him to my advantage. This is the essence of Tongue-Fu.

It takes a lot of practice to use in real life, but the rewards are huge.

If you think a bit about how to use Tongue-Fu in your own life, I’m sure you can find some ways to put it to good use.

When you do, you’ll start seeing tremendous progress.

Repetition = Mastery

Let’s sum up the things we’ve gone through so far.

In order to be as persuasive you as possible in a job interview you need to do the following:

Empathize with the people who are interviewing you

Put yourself in their shoes, and actually take the time to understand their angle, their need and the way they see the world, you will be better equipped to…

Lead people by telling persuasive stories.

Remember, we are genetically hard-wired to find stories persuasive, so the better stories you tell, the higher the chance, that you’ll get the job.

Use Tongue-Fu

Take what people say, flip it upside down and use it against them.

This is how you bring a bazooka to a stick fight.

This is how you get any job you want.

Now go out there and start persuading.