Without knowing it, many job applicants turn out to be gifted hypnotists in job interviews. The amazing thing is that even the hypnotised usually do not notice this.
How does a candidate conduct a successful job interview? You will find countless articles and even more well-intentioned tips and tricks on this question. The advice literature offers you the most important interview questions and the perfect answers. What often comes up short is the individual. There are no best answers that apply to everyone. The result is that many applicants answer the same questions in exactly the same way. They give standard answers to supposedly standard questions.
Sleep-inducing communication
As a result, they communicate in an abstract and impersonal way. This has a soporific effect. The interviewers lose themselves in personal fantasies and their associative thinking is activated. This means that they no longer perceive the reality of the applicants’ lives and do not get to know them, which would be the goal of the job interview. Instead, they drift into their own inner reality.
This immersion in the inner world is often desired as an intervention in coaching or therapy. The well-known hypnotherapist Milton Erickson has described techniques to put clients into a light hypnotic state. Among other things, he achieves this by using nouns instead of verbs: “I am in charge of client care”. Nouns are descriptions of states and do not create images in the listener. The use of indefinite subjects such as “we” or “one” is another means: “We then took the following measures”. This does not reveal who is meant by “we”. Generalisations also cause interlocutors to drift: “Whenever I meet a new customer…”. This formulation is also too general and does not create images. These and other methods, such as passivation, are used unconsciously by applicants in job interviews.
Storytelling as a remedy
If you communicate in this way, you will not be visible in the job interview. Your interview partners will find it difficult to distinguish you from your competitors who communicate in a similar way. How can you escape this communication trap? There is a simple remedy: Storytelling.
In storytelling, you tell concrete stories from your everyday professional life. You choose a personal experience to illustrate a professional skill or to show a strength. And you tell it as a story in the first person. You describe concretely and use verbs. The STAR method is suitable as a structure for your stories, with the description of the situation, your task, your concrete actions and the result. This way you invite your interview partners into your world and let a film run in their mind’s eye.
If the eyes of your interviewers take on a dreamy expression at your next job interview, quickly bring them back to the here and now by telling a concrete story!