Best Way to Sell to Your Potential Employee During an Interview: Specifics Versus Generalities



Wherever possible, sell with specifics, not generalities. Can­didates are numb to platitudinous claims of significant responsibility early on, an excellent training program, and fine prospects for advancement. So instead of talking about your excellent training program, pull out a copy of the training schedule for the next month and review it with the candidate.

Interviewers who point to personal experiences are espe­cially effective. For example, instead of talking about how rewarding work at your company is, in general, talk about the time you . . . and how you felt about accomplishing that. This will humanize you to the interviewee, and help to lend credibility to what you say. (Of course you’ll want to avoid lapsing into a series of war stories that consume the entire interview.)

Interview Candidates 1 Best Way to Sell to Your Potential Employee During an Interview: Specifics Versus Generalities

In conducting interviews at companies to help them identify what they should be selling to candidates, I often ask those I’m interviewing what they think the company should be selling. I generally get a reply from a young employee that goes something like, “I think we should be selling the early responsibility new people get.” Typically this is said in a flat tone with no discernible interest or conviction.

But if I then ask the person what she did yesterday, it is as if I am speaking to a different person. Her eyes light up, she smiles, her voice is alive, she is energetic, often picking things up or pointing to them. All of this animation occurs because she is talking about something real that inter­ests her, rather than an abstraction. Which do you think is more effective in selling an interviewee?

Where appropriate, use statistics or specific examples. For example, compare the different effect on an interviewee of a company representative talking about “the great diver­sity of people at the company” and one who points to “employees in the division you would be joining attended twenty-six colleges and twenty of them hold advanced degrees, outside their initial majors.”

For interviewees, it’s extremely important to speak in terms of specific, personal experiences, rather than generali­ties. Employers are unlikely to be impressed by blanket state­ments such as “I’m a resourceful person.”

But try telling them about the time you had to have something photocopied at midnight in order to deliver it to a client waiting up for it at her home, and the copy machine broke down after thirty pages of a seventy-page document. The local photocopy store was closed for the night. You remembered, though, that a friend of yours knew one of the people who worked at the photocopy store. You called your friend, explained the situation, and convinced him to call his friend to open the store. In the meantime, you delivered the first thirty pages to the client, and told her you’d bring the rest within the hour. You rushed back to the photocopy store, picked up the remaining pages and got them into the hands of your client, who was reading page twenty-seven at the time. The next day, you sent boxes of candy and a note to your friend and the person who opened the photocopy store. You asked your friend for the home phone number of his friend at the store, and put that number in your phone book for future reference. Now that’s a resourceful person.

Interview Candidates Best Way to Sell to Your Potential Employee During an Interview: Specifics Versus Generalities

Visual aids can be useful for an interviewer. Don’t be afraid to pull down a book from a bookshelf, point to a picture on the wall, refer to the telephone messages on your desk, walk over to the window to show the interviewee some of the buildings your clients or customers are located in, or open to the company telephone directory to show an interviewee the extent of your support staff. These things will make your point come alive.

Visual aids will be more difficult for an interviewee to use, because pulling objects out of a briefcase during an interview is bound to appear staged. In some circumstances, though, it may be appropriate for you to draw a diagram or map to explain something you are talking about to the interviewer.



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