Strategy #33: Master Great Interview Delivery

There are two components of a highly-effective job pitch. The first is strong content that conveys a compelling message. The second is powerful delivery that creates a dynamic impact. By combining great content with superb delivery you place yourself in prime position to influence the outcome of any kind of presentation, including the pitch stage of a crunch hiring meeting of course.

I’ve covered the topic of content development already. In today’s strategy, I’m going to introduce you to some core elements of delivering that content. If you can get to grips with the ideas I’ll present here, you’ll be giving yourself the best chance of impressing any demanding hiring manager and getting the job you really want. 

Now, I need to begin this strategy with a caution. Helping you to deliver a great pitch is hard to do unless you’re directly in front of me. There’s a lot of nuance, subtlety and practice needed, so how do I show you how to do this by way of a written article? How do I assess your individual needs, existing skills and pitching capabilities unless we can see each other? With difficulty, is the short answer.

In my training sessions that are devoted to the delivery aspect of a pitch, most of the benefit comes from in-person observation, rehearsal and feedback. I can sometimes do this by way of Skype or Zoom but it’s infinitely preferable to be in the same room. However, that won’t stop me from giving you some general guidance which I hope will help you.

Excellence of delivery boils down to good use of your voice and effective body language. These are underpinned by self-confidence, high levels of motivation and a genuine belief in the value of what you’re trying to achieve. If any one of these things falls apart, it’s tough to make a solid impact so the first thing to do is conduct an honest inventory of where you stand with each of them.

Do you have a confident voice? A common assumption is that a good voice is deep, resonant and powerful. Think of men like Tom Hiddleston or Sean Connery, or women such as Helen Mirren or Scarlett Johansson. Your voice might not resemble any of these people’s but there are some useful lessons that you can take away from listening to them, or any other public speakers you admire or you’d like to emulate in some way.

If your voice isn’t particularly sonorous, and even thin and reedy, there are things you can do about it and I’ll get on to these shortly, together with some suggestions about non-verbal communication. Do you have an awareness of body language and its importance in delivering a message? It’s hard to overestimate its effectiveness, and this is backed up by lots of research into this topic.

The 1967 Mehrabian study suggest that over 90% of the impact in your communication comes down to non-verbal clues. Other studies take issue with this percentage, but few language experts disagree with the general thrust of the idea. Body language is vital. I’ll be talking about this in more detail in the strategy that follows this one, that’s #34 of this series.

So, here are some of the technical basics of good delivery during a pitch. Think about the topics that chime most clearly with you and practice them assiduously if you believe they need work. I’m getting ahead of myself but you really need to get busy with plenty of sandbox practice to perfect any shortcomings that you perceive. This is something I’ll explain in #39 of this strategy series.

Let’s start by thinking about the way you speak. I’ll divide this into macro-level items such as calmness, visualisation, posture and breathing. These are things you can think about and do before you start the pitch. Then I’ll move on to some micro-level ones which contribute to how well you perform once the pitch begins. These include breathing, the speed and volume of your delivery and effective use of pauses.

In advance of the pitch, calming yourself or minimising your nerves is an essential first step before you go on stage. Even the most experienced professionals suffer from nerves before an important pitch, me included. A reliable way of dealing with this is to spend five to ten minutes in a quiet place. Shut your eyes, try to empty your mind of extraneous thoughts and allow your breathing and heart rate to slow down as much as possible.

Easier said than done, you might think, and there’s some truth to this. This is the essence of mindfulness of course. Even if you’re a sceptic, there’s a lot about the practice that can be very helpful in calming yourself down before an important event if you buy into it. Try mindful breathing to see if it works for you. 

Visualisation is the next technique that I recommend. You can do this concurrently with the previous activity, although some people find that it has the opposite effect to calming them down. Simply run the pitch through your mind and envisage it going perfectly in every way. If this makes your heart race and you feel your nerves jangling, don’t worry.

It’s an activity that conditions you to expect a perfect performance and some people experience a heightened sense of stage fright if they fully commit to visualising their pitch. This is usually a temporary side-effect but if it happens to you, consider doing your visualisation separately to your calm-thought session.

Next up is posture. This also applies to the way you sit during the pitch, but get in the habit of preparing effectively by sitting upright in a well-supported seat while you go through your calm and mindful preparations, possibly while you visualise yourself succeeding in your upcoming pitch. There’s a practical reason for adopting good posture and that’s because it opens up your diaphragm and breathing passageways, both of which have a noticeable effect on the way you speak.

Combine all of these things with long, deep breaths that go in via your nose and out through your mouth. Take up to five seconds for each phase. Five seconds of inward breath, a couple of seconds to hold it, and then several seconds of breathing out. Put together, these activities can have a very positive impact on the way you speak, so give them a try.

Let’s now move on to ways of making your speech as effective as possible while you’re actually talking, especially in front of someone when the pressure is on. I’ve already mentioned breathing and this carries across to when you’re sitting, or standing, in front of an audience.

In particular, make sure that you speak when you’re exhaling and not when you’re inhaling. This relates to strategies for using calculated pauses, which is also affected by the speed that you speak. Trying to deliver any sort of pitch when you’re gasping for breath isn’t a good idea. This usually happens when you breath in and try to talk at the same time.

To do this, practice taking a deep breath, composing your thoughts as you do so, and then say a sentence as you breathe out. It really does make all the difference to the quality of your voice and the way you come across. You’ll be perceived as a person who’s in control rather than someone who’s fighting to keep up with their thoughts. 

As far as speed goes, you need to speak at a reasonable pace without garbling or falling over your words. And how fast should you aim at? During a verbal pitch, when you’re presenting to someone in the same room rather than over a video link, I’d say that 125 words a minute is what you should aim at. This number isn’t cast in stone but it’s what I train people to do on my pitching courses and most feel that it’s about right. To practice, prepare something to say, count out 125 words and see how long it takes you to read aloud at your usual pace.

The caveat to this is that you must be as natural as possible. If you usually speak more quickly or slowly than average, trying to force yourself into an unnatural pattern of delivery might backfire, so take my suggestion of 125 words a minute fairly loosely. Remember that this includes pauses, breaks and gaps that you incorporate into your pitch.

The volume of your speech is important, but even more crucial is the way you project yourself. This takes some practice, but try to speak from your diaphragm and not your mouth. Delivery from deep down in your chest tends to be perceived as more authoritative than words that come from higher up in your throat.

Pausing between sentences or significant points in your pitch gives emphasis to what you say. For this reason it makes sense to purposefully build in breaks and pauses to your script. I do this myself by including the word PAUSE in bold capital letters to make sure I stick to these breaks. Try it out and decide for yourself if it works or not!

Well, that’s about it for this speedy tour around some of the elements of delivery that contribute towards making an excellent pitch. I’m sorry to repeat myself but the best way to crush this crucial aspect of your job-search presentation is to participate in one of my intensive training seminars. I regularly schedule delivery skills sessions so look at my website for details of these.   

In the strategy that’s coming along next I’ll be thinking about three aspects of pitch delivery that will make your content shine. The watchword when it comes to delivery is creating an impact and you make an attention-grabbing impact by displaying sure-footed confidence. And the way to reliably convey a confident manner is to adopt a bold approach at all times. But how do you do each of these things? The answers are coming up in strategy #34.

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

LinkedIn/VocationMaster