Strategy #18: Manipulate Hiring Meeting Outcomes

When you go into a crunch job interview, your primary objective is to receive an employment offer, most of the time at any rate. One of the best ways of doing this is to make a big impact upon the interviewer. Influencing the outcome of meetings, whether they’re job interviews or not, is a trait that’s highly-valued in the business world. Manipulation, in the sense that I use the word here, is at the sharp end of interpersonal influence and one of the most important of all communication skills that any ambitious professional needs to master.

In today’s strategy article I want to analyse the concept of influence and manipulation and explain how to use it effectively. If you attend hiring meetings, you absolutely must ensure that you exert the maximum leverage over decisions that interviewers take, positively and in your favour of course. If you can do this well, you’ll be virtually guaranteed to succeed.         

Manipulating outcomes and persuading people to take decisions and implement actions that align with your preferences depend upon two things. What you say and do, and how you say and do them. My range of communication-skills training courses teach business people how to master these competencies in a general commercial setting. My Vocation Master programme focuses on applying them during any kind of job search.

I deliberately use the word manipulation and I’d like to be clear about what I mean by this. There’s usually a strongly-negative connotation whenever you hear this term. Manipulation is commonly seen as a bad characteristic and a weak behaviour when it applies to interpersonal communication, particularly between friends, family or other people within your personal network. Prioritising your own needs and interests, irrespective of the detrimental effect on anyone else’s, is a legitimate concern if it’s driven by insensitive or selfish motivations.

But this isn’t what I’m talking about in this context. I have no time for narcissistic or self-centred people, or anyone who thinks life is all about them. People who blunder through life, oblivious of the effects that their egotistical words and actions have on those around them, are some of my least favourite, whether that’s in my private life or my professional one.

However, manipulation in a business setting isn’t about achieving asymmetrical outcomes where one party gains most of the upside while the other suffers most of the downside. It focuses on strong outcomes for everyone involved. From your perspective, you understand the benefits of a deal to you and the other person, based on knowing what’s at stake, the outcome you want to achieve and then doing whatever’s necessary to get there. You do this by deploying the most effective presentation, appropriate to the situation.   

A major component of manipulation is the ability to pitch in the optimum way during important meetings. This is why I deliver regular in-person seminars and workshops because it’s difficult to gauge someone’s strengths and weaknesses unless they’re in front of me, let alone teach them what to do in any meaningful way. My individual coaching sessions almost always include lots of hands-on delivery work, too.

The other part of developing an ability to manipulate an audience is the substance of what you want to convey, and how you structure this content during key meetings. For obvious reasons, it’s this latter aspect that I’ll concentrate on in this article, and in others that are coming along soon. Incidentally, if you’re interested in honing your performance skills, through face-to-face training or by way of my personal coaching programme, just get in touch with me.         

First, allow me to set the scene. I’ll then move on to an outline of some techniques.

The crux of almost every hiring decision, from an employer's perspective, is to identify a potential new staff member who not only has the necessary professional skills to perform the job in question but who’s also got the right personal attitudes. It’s a relatively simple task to discover whether or not a candidate possesses the technical ability to do a job. A recruiter can look at qualifications, experience, do some job-specific testing and so forth. These are things that CVs, resumes and pre-checks usually cover, despite their significant flaws.

A lack of job-related skills is rarely the reason that a new employee fails. The real cruncher is what lies beneath the surface when questions of attitude and mindset come into play. Any half-decent interviewer is fearful of making a hiring error which happens when someone with a bad attitude somehow sneaks through the interview process. Therefore, the best way to manipulate the outcome of a hiring meeting is to comprehensively allay any such doubts in the mind of an interviewer.

I’ll explain how you do this in a moment but first, some background. These are the big questions for any independent recruiter or company interviewer who’s on the lookout for new people;

• Does the candidate have the right mindset to go with the required skillset?
• Have they got a solution attitude or an attitude problem?
• Will they fit in well with the current team and the business culture?
• Can they learn new skills and develop themselves and their subordinates or not?
• Are they a co-operator or a disruptor?
• How will they create profits, make savings or do things better?

These are the very real and pressing questions that an interviewer needs to be comfortable about before they’ll offer you a position. Their principal recruitment challenge is to identify the answers to these difficult questions as quickly as possible, and preferably before a contract is offered and signed.

Half of all new employees fail within 18 months which is bad news for employers with weak recruitment procedures. But here’s the good news for you, the savvy job hunter. This grim failure situation is one that switched-on employers would prefer to avoid and this presents a golden opportunity for you to manipulate the outcome of any interview.  

Which brings us to the guiding principles of the transformative hiring meeting that I recommend, one which lets you influence an outcome as effectively as possible if you get it right. As with many parts of this job-search method, it confronts standard job-interview problems head-on, turns them around and delivers exactly what an employer and a potential employee most need. Doing this well plants you firmly into solid outcome-influencing and manipulation territory.

In a meeting when you pitch yourself to a decision maker who has the power to employ you, you’ll be demonstrating two things: first, that you have the technical skills to do the job that you’ve chosen to pitch yourself for. That’s the easy bit. That’s the entry ticket to the game. If you’re not a skilled player, don’t even think about running onto the pitch. The second thing you’ll demonstrate is your flawless attitude. You do this by way of a subset of three actions which are taking control of the meeting, differentiating yourself and by displaying your authenticity.

These three ideas create the foundation of a highly-persuasive presentation that will hugely influence your desired interview outcome. This is the basis of manipulation as I use the idea.

Taking control requires good pitching techniques and adopting the right mindset. I’ll be covering the precise techniques you use to assert and maintain control over a hiring meeting as this strategy series unfolds. Learning what to do to be in control is fairly straightforward, but being prepared to actually do it in the heat of battle takes the right approach and a little bit of practice.

Differentiation is the second principle that lies at the heart of the hiring meeting. Most recruitment drives feature cookie-cutter candidates who blend into the background. They play the conventional job-search game by the normal job-search rules and suffer badly as a consequence. Employers need staff who can make a difference. They don’t want average people who go through the motions. Top teams need top players who are demonstrably better than average. Melding into the norms of what’s expected so as not to rock the boat isn’t the way to do this.

Following a conventional job-search strategy is a sure-fire way of showing that you’re one of the herd. Doing things the Vocation Master way sets you apart and instantly differentiates you, whatever else you do. That makes a recruiter sit up and really take notice. This is what gives you the power to manipulate any meeting outcome.

The third principle is to display genuine authenticity by exploiting your knowledge of the company, showing an understanding of what its priorities and problems are, and demonstrating supreme knowledge of yourself and how you’re able to solve the company problems that you’ve already identified. This is the essence of doing the job in the hiring meeting, another fundamental influence and manipulation technique.

Again, we’ll get on to how you’ll be doing this in upcoming articles. For now, just know that authenticity of this type is something that’s in very short supply in almost every conventional job interview. Lack of authenticity dismays every interviewer, although they get pretty used to it. An authentic, well-informed person, on the other hand, comes across incredibly well. You’ll be demonstrating and exploiting these qualities in a way that will have the person on the other side of the desk marvelling at your acuity.

To summarise, take control, differentiate yourself and display your authenticity. Keep these three ideas at the forefront of your mind at all times because they’re the keys to manipulating the outcome of any hiring meetings you attend.

If you prefer to watch training materials rather than read or listen to them, follow this link to my YouTube channel where you can access the video version of this article;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FSkKwbwplM

And finally, if you have any questions about the issues I raise here, or if you'd like to contact me personally, please get in touch via LinkedIn;

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vocationmaster/