Do you come across in interviews as likeable and friendly? There just might be a big payoff if you do – landing your "dream" job or promotion and with a higher salary than anticipated.
According to Scott Ginsberg, the nametag-wearing record-holder of ‘Hello, My Name is Scott' fame, "Friendly always wins".
Mark McCormack, Founder and Chairman of IMG, a powerful sports management and marketing company, says, "All things being equal, people will do business with a friend; all things being unequal, people will still do business with a friend."
In The Likeability Factor: How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life's Dreams author Tim Sanders says, "Life is like a series of popularity contests." He defines likeability as "an ability to create positive attitudes in other people through the delivery of emotional and physical benefits."
So, if the interviewing process can be compared to a job-winning contest, do you hold the wild card of likeability?
Interview Decision-making
Most decisions, including the hiring or promotion decision, are based on emotions and supported by logic. While interviewers strive to be impartial and logical, they are also human beings susceptible to human connections and emotions. In his book, Tim Sanders postulates a 3 -step decision-making process that is centered on the emotion of likeability. The employment interviewer is using these 3 steps to decide whether to "buy" you or not:
1. Listen – If you are perceived as likeable, your target audience (interviewer) is more apt to really listen to what you are saying and remember it.
2. Believe – Likeability greatly enhances the level of trust and believability accorded to what you are saying.
3. Value – Your likeability factor has an enormous impact on your perceived value. This translates into your perceived value in the functional role, team, department, and organization, as well as the salary and benefits that will be commensurate with your value.
Likeability plays a key role in whether you are the candidate listened to, believed, and valued – and subsequently on the receiving end of a job offer or promotion. Hard to believe? An NFI Research study of senior executives and managers across many industries, reported in September 2006, found that of these study participants:
- 63% rely on a candidate's likeability when hiring and promoting,
- Rank skills second to likeability (at 62%), and
- 73% hire and promote based on a candidate's "likelihood to fit in".
How Do You Convey Likeability?
The heart of likeability and approachability is about building and maintaining trust, and drawing people to you via confident and comfortable interactions.
These interactions potentially include a host of intellectual and sensory perceptions that are clues to your friendliness: personal branding, conversations, questions and answers, phone and email, first impressions, networking, written communications (résumé and cover letters, blog, web site, portfolio), stories, examples, body language (non-verbal behaviors), tone of voice, scent, physical space, open-mindedness, availability, social etiquette, active listening, and more.
Likeability Skills-Building
No matter what stage of the interviewing process – pre-interview, during the actual interview, and post-interview – be aware of these opportunities to market your likeability and friendliness. To increase your likeability, here are some skill - building steps suggested by Tim Sanders, along with tips related to interviewing:
1. Friendliness. Develop a friendly mindset and communicate friendliness at all times. Record possible interview stories that demonstrate your skills and accomplishments and then listen to how you sound. Play back your answering machine message. Does your tone of voice sound friendly?
2. Relevance. Connect with others' needs, wants, and interests. Let others do most of the talking and listen to how you could relevantly connect and be believed. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said in a recent interview with students at Stanford's Business and Design School, "You don't learn very much when you yourself are talking."
3. Empathy. Connect on a feelings level. Recognize, acknowledge, and show a sincere interest in others' feelings, getting into their heads and hear ts. It is the quickest shortcut to meeting them more than halfway and increasing their likeability response to you. Ask for the three most important expectations for the job and why they are important. Show that you understand both the logical and emotional implications of achieving those expectations.
4. Realness. Be true to you and share your realness with others. Your authenticity is embodied in your personal brand. Use your personal brand to attract positive attention and top-of-mind awareness; exude your uniqueness and embed the notion that there is no other candidate quite like you. According to William Arruda of The Reach Branding Club, "Your personal brand is your unique promise of value."
Likeability and Communications
Tell your authentic, personal brand story – stories are memorable. Relate your brand-defining experiences and stories in such a way that it connects to the organization's and department's mission, as well as with the interviewer. Pay attention to both the content and the delivery of the story; you may need to alter them to appeal to your target audience (the interviewer). The more you are perceived as being likeable and like (similar to) the interviewer, the more readily you will engage them in receiving your communication. Your person al brand can be a strategic tool in the "wild-card" advantage of likeability.
To aid you in communicating with individuals of diverse personalities, you may want to read The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language by Paul Tieger. This guide will equip you with the ability to quickly grasp the nuances of others' behaviors and speech patterns and then reflect their personality and communication style in your interactions.
Niceness Will Get You Ahead
The Power of Nice, written by two advertising executives Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, promotes the idea that being nice in the business world WILL get you ahead. Their six principles and how they relate to interviews include:
1. Positive impressions are like seeds. For example, treating everyone in a friendly, positive manner has a multiplication effect – it will resurface in positive impressions that interviewers will hear about you from others.
2. You never know. How important is it for you to treat that person you meet in the elevator at a job interview in a likeable way? This principle says you never know how important the people you are interacting with could be in your job search. Perhaps they have the ear of the hiring manager or may even be on the hiring committee…you never know.
3. People change. That receptionist or junior accountant you interact with now could end up in a hiring capacity 5, 10 or 20 years from now – and it could be exactly for the job you really want. Be nice to everyone.
4. Nice must be automatic. Faking likeability by turning on the charm and "schmoozing" in an interview may seem like a shortcut to success, but generally interviewers can sense when it's not the real thing. Your likeability must be genuine and real, an everyday behavior and not jus t reserved for job interviews.
5. Negative impressions are like germs. Being aloof or rude or even just unaware of circumstances, surroundings, and people will cause others to react to that behavior in a negative manner. That "first impression" you make will spread to color the rest of the interview – for better or worse.
6. You will know. How you treat others – nice or not – is something you will always know, even if the hiring authority does not. You will know if you value niceness, along with skills and talent and intelligence, and that will unconsciously be conveyed in your verbal and non-verbal behaviors during the interview.
Assess Your Likeability – Right Now
Are you nice and likeable already? Are you able to honestly and easily present yourself in an interview and "win" the hearts and minds of others with the "wild card" of likeability? To assess your likeability, here are links to two quizzes:
- The Power of Nice – NiceQ
- Say It Better E-Zine, "Your Likeability Quotient: A Gut-Instincts Quiz"
For more on building your likeability skills refer to these classic resources, as well as newer articles and websites:
- How to Work a Room by Susan Roane
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum
- How to Speed-Read Hiring Managers by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger
- Five Tips to Increase Your Likeability in the Office and in the World by Justin Hartfield, Deputy Editor of The Prometheus Institute