You have been invited to interview for a job. Is the hard work in the job hunt over? No, just transitioning to another phase: You are now competing with the best candidates for this job and doing well in the interview sessions is critical.  Once the interviews of all the candidates is over, the interviewers cull all the candidates into a final list of 2 or 3 finalist for the job.  Making a positive impact on the interviewers during the interviewing sessions may trigger their advocacy for you to join the finalist group.

You should assume that all candidates being interviewed can do the technical part of the job. Is there another skill that most organizations would greatly favor? Is there a skill that you could demonstrate during the interview sessions that could give you an advantage?  There is, and it is your communication skill when delivering your answers to interviewer questions. Communication skill is always one of the top three job skills that are most important in contributing to successful job performance.

Let us assume you can carefully craft your answers for the expected interview questions, and you can even deliver them in the preferred STAR format.  STAR format is the answer format when you are expecting Behavioral Based Questions. These are the type of interview questions that ask, “Tell me about the most recent time you made an improvement in your lab operations.”  STAR format requires a response that presents the Situation you faced, the Task you had to accomplish, the Actions you personally performed, and the Results of your efforts: STAR.  But, just about every candidate knows about STAR and this alone may not be enough to get the impact necessary to make the final cut.

OK, let us raise the communication performance bar and add a “social intelligence” strategy and technique.  The strategy of “Social Intelligence” calls for you to tailor your answers to interviewer questions in a manner that will add value to the work responsibilities of the interviewer.  In other words, we go beyond having one answer you would recite in STAR format for all the interviewers. Instead, you will modify your answer for each interviewer based on their role, job, or position in the company.

Example:

You have been informed by Human Resources that you will be interviewed by your future Boss, a Project Manager, and a representative from Human Resources.  Let us use the same question about an “improvement in lab operations” and add the social intelligence modification to the answer.  You can use the same most recent work experience situation as requested in the interviewer question.  How will the socially intelligent answer vary for each interviewer if they were to ask the lab improvement question? Here are the socially intelligent considerations that will drive your tailored answers for each interviewer:

Future Boss will most likely want a detailed description of the technical aspect of your decision to improve, the technical considerations of your alternative solutions, the technical changes in the process, the performance results of your improvement and current status of the improvement that also reveal your deep technical knowledge.

The Project Manager may or may not have a technical background and will be more interested in how you coordinated the improvement with users of the lab, the impact on work schedules, were there cost considerations and will this improvement provide additional work capability for the lab.

And Human Resources will want to know how you organized the group to make the improvement, did any individuals have special training in the method used to discover alternative solutions, and would this improvement and/or the improvement process be of benefit to other company operations.

Point:   The social intelligent technique tailors your answer to the focus and responsibilities of each interviewer. You are making yourself “valuable” to the interviewer by communicating in a manner that is inclusive and respectful of their work contributions.  How you can make their job easier if they hire you!

There are three opportunities for an organization to assess an individual’s communications capabilities for a job match.   First, there is the written record of the candidate in the form of a resume, publications, social media sites and correspondence to include emails. Second is the candidate’s verbal responses to specific interview questions. And third, the communication demeanor of the candidate throughout the hiring process, to include the final job negotiations. No one person in the organization will experience all these communication opportunities with a candidate. However, any one person can generate a negative report about their candidate experience in any of the three communication opportunities.  Any negative report will “flag” a candidate and require additional time for consideration by the interviewing team. This delay may be enough to drop the candidate from being a finalist for the job.

There is a “natural evaluation hierarchy” in the staging of the three communication opportunities.  The first written communications stage is focused on the resume which serves as the initial introduction of the candidate.  The day of the generic resume is gone.  Candidates generally will invest time and seek assistance in preparing their job-specific resume recognizing that the resume is key to the selection as a participant in the second communication opportunity, the interview.

The verbal communication opportunity in the interview presents the most difficult evaluation stage in being selected as a finalist for that job you seek. For many candidates, this is their first exposure to the sophisticated behavioral based interviewing process which is the gold standard for interview questions and response evaluations.  Also, the inherent difficulty of preparing for verbal spontaneous responses to difficult questions from a variety of interviewers can be overwhelming. If a candidate does not prepare for this communication stage, they have little chance of advancing to the finals.  Here are four classic behavioral based questions you could be asked in the interview about your communication experience. How would you answer these questions, and would your answer vary if the interviewer were the CEO, or the Project Manager, or your future Boss?

1.     Describe a recent event when your audience had difficulty understanding the technical details of your research and how did you resolve the issue?

2.     When was the last time you needed to get some detailed facts from another person and all you could got were “yes or no” responses? What did you do to accomplish your task?

3.     Tell me about your own ability to keep from blowing your top at someone who has criticized your work. Give me a recent example and how you handled the situation.

4.     Let us say I am a fellow worker here at our company and we are meeting for the first time. What would you tell me about yourself? What would you want to know about me? Walk me through the last time you met someone that you wanted to develop a relationship with. It can be work or any other social setting.

If you follow the STAR format in your response (Situation, Task, Action, Result), practice your “STAR Story” in mock interviews with colleagues, and do your research on the company, then your interview results will both demonstrate your verbal communication skills and make a positive contribution to the third stage of communication evaluation. Your third communication demeanor opportunity is the summation of all the communication interactions along the way.