How to Read Interviewers to Know What They’re Thinking

0:00 In a job interview, preparation without observation is going to lead you talking past people. You simply won't connect with the interviewers. And in this job market, it's never been harder than it is today in order to develop that chemistry with the interviewers. So, how are we going to do that? We're going to build you a tight bridge between your self-awareness and your social awareness so that you can connect. I'm going to teach you how to do that by reading the room. And I want to I want to go so far as to help you understand how to do that before the interview, during the interview, so while you're in the interview room, so that by the end of the interview, there will be no doubt in their mind that you're the right job candidate for them.

0:43 Who's charged about this? I am totally stoked about this talk. If you're here with me live, get in the chat, let me know you're charged. If you're watching this on the recording, let me know that, too, in the comments. And I'm going to take you through about five different stages here so that you understand what's happening and how you can use that to your advantage so that you can actually demonstrate how you're going to transform their lives. All right, let's talk about the room itself for a second. First thing I'm going to say is really obvious. The problem with what I'm about to say is so few people that I've met or prepared for a job interview actually do this.

1:22 But can we all agree, I wrote this out, the room is already under pressure before you walk in. And the reason that you don't spend any time thinking about this is because you're so worried about your scripted answers and not forgetting it and you're so nervous cuz you need the job that you're not thinking about them. Let's think about them for a second. Start here. So, couple of things related to the room. Just think about what's going on. Right? These are people who were pulled out of their job lest the recruiter who's responsible for getting you into the candidate pipeline. But let's just say everybody else that's interviewing you has another job they get paid for. They have a demanding boss who's probably on their fanny or maybe customers, right? They've got deadlines.

2:12 They've got goals. They've got problems. They've got all kinds of headaches. you're their two o'clock appointment in the middle of the day when they'd rather be doing something else. Now, I get that many of them grud begrudgingly will go and interview you, but you have to understand that that's what their state of mind is when they're walking in the afternoon to talk to you, right? You're mid you're their midday distraction. Additionally, professionally, they have goals and they have problems and things that they're worried about. So, how do you anticipate what the room's going to be like? Not to mention, and equally as importantly, get this thing up here dialed in correctly. Meaning that you are actually in the right frame of mind to communicate. You are fully aware of what's going on around you and you have great perspective. So, let's talk about this from two angles. The first one is before you go in to talk to them, I want you to think about this.

3:11 What are their goals and what are their problems? Every time I come up and I I get here and turn the microphone into the camera on, I know on Thursday when we do these live, many of you, 99% of you have job searching problems. Some of you have career development problems, but many of you that come to the live shows have job searching, acute pain problems. I already know that. I already know even though I haven't met you that you want a great job where you feel appreciated with working with a boss who's wonderful and supportive where you're getting paid a lot of money you have a ton of flexibility I understand you want all those things I might not know all the problems specifically for you standing in your way but I know all the problems standing in anyone's way and I can think about this in advance and I don't want to spend a ton of time on this other than to point you to this tip that says think about what their goals and problems might be. You should be able to do that just like I'm able to do that for you every week when I show up. I do this every day of my life. I work with people like you. I know what your goals are. I know what your problems are. You do the same thing for whatever your profession is. So, from a professional standpoint, thinking about the room in advance is this is what's on their mind. Ask yourself, ask yourself how can I make their life easier? Ask yourself what are they worried about? Maybe what are they worried about as it relates to the goals and the problems? But also, what else could they be worried about?

4:38 Could it be 4:30 and you're meeting with them? Could they be even worried about getting home for dinner or picking up a kid from school or whatever it might be? You just never know. It's possible. The more you think about this, the better off you'll be. And then the other thing is, in order for you to be able to communicate effectively, you always need to get this thing pure. Who knows what's coming next? Does anybody know what I'm about to say next? So, those of you that go to a Andy's school of mindsetting, you know, I'm going to talk about empathy reminders. Don't worry, I'll explain what these are. But I' I've given you this example quite often. Every time I'm about to turn the lights in the camera on, and I did this 10 minutes ago, literally 12 minutes ago up to 2 minutes ago. I was sitting on the love seat behind me that you can't see. And I was thinking about who comes to my Thursday show in the middle of the day, right? They're struggling. They don't know what I know. Maybe they don't have a job they love. Or maybe they're out of work. Maybe they can't put food on the table. They're worried about all the credit card bills they're racking up.

5:42 All of those things go through my mind so that when I come here to give you a talk, I'm not only in a great frame of mind to have good perspective about what you might be going through. I'm also very understanding that even though I've answered the same question many, many times over, that you might have just found me an hour ago. I'm also thinking about, well, if I was them and I didn't know what I know, would I be worried? Would I be confused? Could I be frustrated because I'm trying what I think makes sense and it doesn't? The fact that I go through all those exercises not only puts me in a more empathetic posture, but the other thing that it does that's so powerful is it gets me to stop thinking about me. I'm not worried about the contractors who are going to be here at 1:30 at my house. I'm not worried about the thing I have to have by done by the end of the day or all of those other things. I'm not thinking about any of that right now with the exception of the had to use it as an example. But my point is I'm totally focused on delivering this for you because I moved my focal point to you. So whatever I got going on and all my worries, those can wait until an hour from now. But that's what it does for you. It gets you in the right frame of mind as you're going into the room and you become more focused. And what does that also do for you? Number one, it makes it easier for you to observe because you don't have a number of things coming out. You're not worried about your memorized, you know, your your answers that you spent hours trying to memorize. You're not worried about any of that. You're focused on them. So, this is a huge huge tip. All right. Now, that's getting ready before you go in and that's also not only helping you anticipate, but it's positioning you to be effective during the session, during the interview. All right. Second thing is, what about the signals while you're in the room? Okay, there's three kinds of signals. Well, there's infinitely many variations of these three kinds of signals. There's the verbal, there's the vocal, the vocal, and then there's the body language or the nonverbal. Let's run through these and how I want you to think about them. First thing, verbal. In terms of verbal, I want you to stretch these things right here, these two things you have on the side of your head. I want you to stretch your ears and I want you to listen for what's coming out of their mouth, especially when it sounds like this. Well, in the past, we've always done that. It's always been like that. Or usually or typically or normally, right?

8:28 Those are typical, usual, and normal. But because you haven't met me yet, right? In the past. Well, I haven't been here yet. So, I'm about to change all of that or I'm about to take you to the next level. Whatever it is, whoever you are, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you're a total pro and an ace at what you do. We don't usually go above this pay range. It's not normal for us to do that. We don't normally do that. All of these are openings. They're they're an opportunity for you to say yes and you haven't met me yet. Right? figuratively. Okay? So, I want you to pay close attention to the language. When you're very worried and you're thinking about what you're going to say next, this becomes an impossibility and it's going over your head. Okay? And it also also usually removes your ability to understand the disconnect.

9:30 I coached a woman the other day and two two nights ago and I I see her about every other week and she was mentioning to me a little disconnect that she had with an exchange she had with her boss. I teach I teach her about high performance in her job. And she said there was a disconnect between something he wanted me to do when he asked me how long will it take you and I said 15 minutes and he said that should take you 30 seconds. So are you listening closely enough to understand that it isn't at this moment for you to explain what you're going to be doing for 15 minutes and why it takes 15 minutes. It's for you to notice that you both have different interpretations of what the end result needs to look like. He wanted her essentially to craft a oneline email. She wanted to flower up an explanation that probably would have taken her 15 minutes. So, if you are not understanding the disconnect with what they're saying, you're not going to be able to score. Okay? It's just an example, but think about that. There's a disconnect. Try to close the gap.

10:42 That's paying attention. All right. There's the vocal nature. All right. Vocal comes in a lot of different things. The speed at which I'm talking, whether I'm slowing down, whether I'm speeding up, whether my sentences become short, whether it's h nods or whether it's I'm not sure. You have to detect what are they doing? What are they saying? Do is is a short is a short sentence with a frown not getting into the body language so much yet. Does that mean they're skeptical? Does that mean they're wondering if you truly know how to do that? So, you got to read these cues and adjust. And what I always talk about is I want you to be setting I want you to be setting the energy in the room. So, I want you always to get the energy to where you want it. You never want them skeptical. So, you need to do something to diffuse the situation. Are you paying attention to the cadence that they're using? Do they sound stressed? Could they be talking fast because it's 3 minutes to 4:00 and they have a hard stop and need to leave. Right? These are things you need to be paying attention to. Another another thing that's really powerful, these all go together, but the nonverbal cues. Now, there's posture. Are they sulking? There's eye contact. Do their eyes drift away from you when they're trying to make a point? That means they're dismissive and you may as well just get up and walk out. Or when they end a sentence, do they have eye contact? That's engagement. That's interest. That's I'm interested in you. That's I want to keep the dialogue going.

12:21 What about leaning in or leaning out? Now, you can use mirroring when it's positive. If they're leaning in, you lean in. If they're leaning back and folding their arms, you don't want to mirror that. You want to lean in. You want to you want to make sure that if if their posture is silent and they're telling you, "I'm disinterested." Then you need to stop what you're doing. Read the room and then get them to speak. Don't you fill the silence. Get them to talk because why? Because you want them out of this posture. Looks like you're thinking. Then stop. Right? So you need you need an ability to see that and then stop what you're saying. note they're not listening effectively or disinterested and pull them back into the discussion to understand why. Who gets what I'm saying? This is a big deal because people say, "Well, what do I do when they're not listening? I just told you." You got to get them to listen by what? Activating them. That's a way to do that.

13:20 Now, if you want a heck of a lot more on body language, I love this video I created. It's called Total Job Interview Mastery Words, Body Language, and Presence. A lot of this has to do with your words, Body Language, and Presence, especially as it relates to being on camera or in person, but you get the idea. There's a lot more tips in this if you want to dive deeper into that. Now, so far, we've got the before observation prep homework. We've got the during what am I going to be doing with their signals? Now, I want to move you to mind readading. So, we're going to take take it up take it up a few levels here. Now, you might say, Andy, I'm not a mind readader. Well, neither am I. But you certainly could do things that make you look like a mind readader. Here's how this works.

14:18 Many of you, the people that I prep, tend to be so worried about their answers in in a job interview. Well, what's my answer to this question? And as much as I love navigating you through my car stories, my C A R, right? And as tight as I want those three minute, four minute stories to be, and it's just full of highlights and awesomeness, this is what's really happening. So what when an interviewer sits down, this is what happens. This is the moment that you start opening your mouth.

14:53 Here's what's going through their head. Can I trust this person? Would I trust this person with the tasks? Does this person actually get me and understand what we do here? Will they make my life easier? Let me tell you a little story about these things. And this is so true. I did a lot of recruitment with organizations who I developed fantastic relationships with. I placed a number of people at those organizations and I developed great relationships with whomever my contact was. Sometimes it was an HR business partner. Sometimes it was the chief operating officer. Sometimes it was the head of talent acquisition. But in many cases, several of them asked me, "Andy, could you just come in and coach us on how to interview? We just aren't really good at it. We we don't give these guys a lot of training. They're ineffective. They kind of wing it. We're not sure how to how to get them to listen." Like, "All right, number one, I love that you're that self-aware." I said, "Okay, let's do this in stages. the first stage before I can get there and before we can go through any kind of training to help them understand what to do, the fastest way to get an interviewer better. So, any of you that are interviewers, open your eyes and stretch your ears on this one. I want you I remember this this client of mine, Erica, and I' I said, "Erica, listen. Get all the network engineers, get the head of the network ops, the knock, and everybody who's who interviews these people that we're recruiting for you, and I want you to give them the questions you're going to ask in advance. I want them to know the test questions before they interview." And she looked at me a little puzzled and I said, "No, I don't want you to tell them what questions to ask the candidates, mine or anybody else's. What I want you to do that will immediately improve their ability to interview is I want you to tell them what you're going to ask them about the candidate and they when they walk out of the interview, these are the questions they need to answer for you." Things like, "Would you trust this person?

17:07 Would you want to work with this person? Do you think you could learn something from this person? Would you be would you would you be confident if this person needed to talk to our meanest client? Those kinds of things. Because what'll happen is the interviewer, even if they're not skilled, is going to be evaluating you with that lens. And as long as they can answer those questions, that's going to be way better than, "Tell me about yourself. Tell me about a great challenge that you overcame." They're going to know how to evaluate and how they feel about that person. That's the first part. But it's it's even it's even better than that. When they are actually listening to you, here's what's happening. They're leaving themselves notes. Okay? So here's what the mind readading will do for you. What crumbs do you want to leave them? So here's what happens. So Erica would go and ask them, okay, I'm going to ask you these questions. You you need to be able to come back and answer that. And in order for them to answer those questions, they're going to be looking for different things and feelings that they have about you. If it's a project manager and somebody who has to drive projects, they are while you are talking that beautiful story that we work on, right? The car stories. While you're talking, they're not paying any attention to the details.

18:31 What they're doing is they say, "I have a mental checklist. I need to know she's organized. I need to know she's influential. I need to know she can convince the board of directors. Does this sound like somebody who can run a million-dollar project?" They have a list of these questions. These are the notes that they're trying to take. their mental notes. They have little boxes next to them. The when you start talking, what the what the meter's doing is they're trying to check the boxes. Okay? So, you're spending a lot of time worrying about memorizing something that they're never going to remember because you think you need to say it perfectly, just like you think you need to write your resume perfectly. When a recruiter looks at your resume, they're spot-checking it for things that they want to see that you have, like keywords and skills. When an interviewer is listening to you, what they're doing is they have a meter running. Check, check, check, check. Box isn't checked. Nope. X. That's an X. That's what they're doing while you're talking. So, I want you to think in advance. Well, what what do I need? What do I need to to do to get them to check the boxes? Well, you'll likely have a job description, and even if you don't, you likely have an idea of what they want you to do. It doesn't even matter if you don't. based on your job, what are the traits and the skills you know they need? What are the accomplishments that you know they want you to to be able to help them achieve? So, they're doing things like, has she done this somewhere else? Has she been able to help another company achieve what we want her to achieve? Then they go down to the next one that says, and and although she told me that she did, do I feel comfortable that that's analogous enough to what we do? That's what they're doing while you're talking cuz they can think four times faster than you can talk. So, are you leaving them the breadcrumbs? I Is my story organized? Did I give them a map? Why do you think the second part of the car story is give me the steps? There are five steps. There's eight steps. Great. They're going to tell me eight things. That sounds organized. Those are the eight things I thought they would tell me. Yes, it sounds like they know what they're doing. This is what's going on in their mind. And when you look at them, when they're doing this, you know they're following along. When they're doing this, you know they're lost. You're either giving them too much detail, you bored them to death, or you're talking in circles, or you don't what you're saying doesn't make any sense. Okay. Mind readading.

20:56 All right. Next item. This might be my favorite. It really It really is. Real time adjustments. Okay. Why is this so important? Insertions during the discussion that demonstrate you were paying attention. This this matters every bit as much as your power story. So, what do I mean? Well, when you get there, if you talk for 3 minutes uninterrupted and it sounds eloquent, you could have rehearsed the hell out of that. I don't even know you're listening to me. I asked you a question, you told me a story. That's great. I like the story. Wonderful. But as I'm going back and forth with you and we are talking about a future scenario or we're talking about a problem that I already have or something like that, if you are not engaging using connection and language that can that actually shows that you understand or have been listening to what they're saying.

22:01 This is what I mean. So when you are making those insertions, they sound like this. Wow, that must have been rough when that occurred. Based on what you told me, I'm wondering if you did A, B, or C. Did any of those work? This demonstrates your experience. This part here demonstrates you were listening. It sounds odd and it sounds silly and you might think this is automatic, but it's not because many times you're just so worried about what your next thing is that you're going to say that you're not actually paying attention for opportunities to do this. This is this is gold. The person that does this is going to get hired. This also tells me that you were listening. It also tells me that you're not rehearsed. It also tells me that you can think quickly on your feet and a bunch of other things. All right. Now, listening. Here's the tip. Don't rehearse while they're talking. Listen, okay? Get get out of your own head.

23:02 Second thing is intent checks. Those of you that go to the Andy School of Communication that want to raise your communication intelligence, use intent checks. What are intent checks? If you are listening to what someone says, remember this. Your communication quotient, your communication intelligence is an exchange of information to gain a mutual understanding of something. That's my definition. I wrote about it in a number of my books. Okay? Well, when you say something to someone or someone says something to you, repeating back to them what they said is ridiculous and a waste of breath because that doesn't mean that I'm sure that you understood what I said. You heard what I said. I don't know that you understood what I said. Got it is not is the same thing. It's terrible. Don't ever say got it to me ever. It makes my skin crawl because if you say got it doesn't necessarily mean you got it. In order for me to know that I have message transfer with zero distortion, I need you to give me an intent check back that says to me, okay, Andy, so what you want is and then is after that is new language, different words that tells me we understand each other. You use different words to confirm for me what I said to you. Now I know you got it. All right. What is the ultimate intent check in an interview? Who's got the book for seven US bucks? I'll send it anywhere. Plus, you get the ebook and the audio book. What What's on page 80 and 81 in this book? How to close, right? One of the best intent checks you can ever do to score points at the end of an interview is this, the CAC. And it's not the coronary artery calcium score. It's the confirm, assure, and close. Okay. What does this sound like? Okay. So, I want to confirm this is what you're looking for. And then you're going to restate in a sentence or two exactly what they told you they wanted in the candidate or what you what they want you to accomplish. So, you want a person with this background who could come in and do this. Great.

25:20 You tell them that. All right. Paraphrased. Then you say, "Okay, I want to assure you based on that and from what I told you about, echo something that you exchanged during the interview that confirms you meet what they're looking for." That's the assurance. Then you close with because we're such a great match cuz you just told them, you made it explicit. They agreed that you are a great match cuz when they nod that's what I'm looking for. And when you assure them that this is what you are and they nod they've now told you yes we're a match. You were explicit and you said because we're such a great match and then you close. I'm more interested. What's the next step by who's when's that going to happen? Who's going to contact me? All right. This to me is the ultimate paraphrasing to confirm that you have a mutual understanding of what they're looking for and the fact that you are that thing, you are that candidate, you are that person. So when you when you roll this all together and you talk about the different areas, we want to get you that bridge between self-awareness and social awareness. You do that by thinking in advance of the interview room. You go through your preparation professionally as well as your mindset, your empathy reminders. Then when you get into the room, you pay attention to the verbal, the vocal, and the body language cues. You prep by anticipating and being a mind readader of think organizationally about what the feelings are you want to elicit from them.

26:58 She's organized. She's influential. She's managed large teams. They're only storing, right? We talk about their memory in interview intervention. We talk about how they store this stuff. And then make sure you're demonstrating that you're listening, right? By real time adjustments and commentary that can only be made because you actually were listening because you couldn't have prepped for that cuz that was new information that you got during the interview. That's thinking on your feet. And then what you're going to do at the end is you're actually going to confirm for them that you're the right person by marrying back what they want to what you are and showing them your level of interest. All right, I hope you enjoyed that. If you're here with me live, we're going to the chat. If you're watching this on the recording, I'll see you next week. No matter who you are, lots of luck on your job search. If you enjoyed this, please click the like button, share it.

27:51 People need help. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel and lots of luck on your