Best Way to Conduct Direct Selling During an Interview

Effective direct selling in an interview involves three steps: (a) identifying what the “buyer” wants, (b) identifying what your company has that meets those desires, and (c) commu­nicating effectively what you have to offer the candidate.

Determine what a candidate wants by listening and observing, and by asking directly. Listening is on-the-spot market research for you. And listening in itself sells because it shows interest in the interviewee. In any case, selling before you determine what the candidate is looking for is approaching the process backward. Touting virtues the interviewee has no interest in is at best a waste of time and, at worst, counterproductive.

An interviewer must know the company well in order to respond with what you have to offer a candidate. Of course, there’s no substitute for experience in teaching inter­viewers what your company has to offer. At a minimum, each interviewer should review all of the material a candidate is likely to have seen. If an interviewer has doubts about how to handle certain questions or situations, he should speak to the person in charge of your recruitment efforts.

Some companies spend considerable time trying to figure out what characteristics of the company they should be selling to candidates. Though that is putting the cart some­what before the horse, it is still a useful exercise. Make sure that you focus on selling a limited number of characteristics, though. Pretending to be everything to candidates simply is not credible.

Effective communication means speaking in language the interviewee can both understand and relate to. For exam­ple the law-student candidate who says he is interested in challenging legal work is unlikely to respond to your com­ment that you just handled a fascinating 378(q)8(ii) exchange involving a sale-leaseback with a wrap mortgage backed by a Eurodollar loan. Law (like most other businesses today) is extremely complicated. Many entry-level candi­dates will not have a full appreciation of those complications. For that reason, you must make sure you describe character­istics of your company in a way candidates can understand.

Assume you will be struck dead upon the spot if you use more than one of the following phrases during any single interview:

cutting edge

sophisticated

collegial

diversity

early responsibility

These catchphrases are used frequently in investment banks and law firms; others may apply in your industry. The point is to avoid using the types of hackneyed phrases that are calculated to cause interviewees’ eyes to glaze over because they hear them from every employer with whom they inter­view. Find new, fresher ways of expressing what you are trying to get across. Use your own words, instead of the buzzwords of the day. An interviewee is more likely to relate favorably to an interviewer who tells her about the “incredi­bly mind-boggling deal” he just worked on than she is to one who speaks of the “cutting-edge nature of the project” he just completed.

Not surprisingly, the same principles that help an inter­viewer to sell effectively will help the interviewee as well. He, too, must understand what the “buyer” wants, identify what he has that fulfills those needs, and communicate in a language that the interviewer can understand (and relate to).

The language problem from an interviewee’s standpoint is unlikely to be the use of technical terms the interviewer cannot understand. Rather, some interviewees lapse into the latest lingo, which often does considerable violence to the English language. I can attest to the grating sound of an interviewee who says, “so, I’m like,” when he means, “then I said,” or “that would be like rilly cool,” when she means “I would like that.” Apart from the other problems this language creates, it accentuates the generation gap between an interviewee and an interviewer, making the latter feel older than he might like to consider himself. That’s probably not something an interviewee ought to do.