Monthly Archives: May 2015

Hired or Rejected Within Seconds

Coaching, Job Search, Problem Solving, , , ,

Could it be that interviewers make a hiring decision in less than a minute and are unaware that they’ve made this decision? I believe this happens in almost every case. To understand how this might be you need a brief and simple introduction to the two mental systems that everyone possesses.

We have a subconscious mental system called, by some researchers, the cognitive unconscious, and a system we are very familiar with, the conscious, rational mind. Unlike the rational mind the cognitive unconscious is effortless, automatic and very fast. It also influences the conscious decisions we make. The following study shows how this subconscious decision making takes place.

RED CARD OR BLUE CARD

An experimental subject (called “the subject”) was faced with a red and a blue deck of cards. The blue deck gave the subject bigger wins, but even bigger losses. The red deck gave him smaller wins, but even smaller losses. Ultimately the blue deck produced a loser and the red deck produced a winner, but this was not immediately apparent.

By about card number 50 the subjects began to express doubts about the blue deck, but what was precisely wrong with it they could not say. They had a feeling, but not a rational, conscious conclusion. By card number 80 they knew what the problem with the blue deck was.

What about the cognitive unconscious? Is there a way to measure when it concluded the same thing? The cognitive unconscious communicates to us through the body. It has no voice. So to determine when it began to “speak” to the subjects they were hooked up to devices measuring heart rate and sweating. By card 10 their heart rate accelerated and their sweat glands activated. Without the subject realizing it, they began to make fewer blue card choices after card 10. The cognitive unconscious was already influencing conscious decisions. The cognitive unconscious detected the pattern much faster, because pattern detection is one of the many talents it possesses.

So a subconscious conclusion was drawn at card 10 that was communicated to consciousness by card 50–the uneasy feeling. We see similar things occurring to interviewers. They often have  difficulty articulating why a candidate is not right for the job. It is a feeling they have in their bones. They are like the subjects at card 50. Some pattern has been detected and it is influencing conscious thought. What could those patterns be?

ASSESSING TRAITS BASED ON NON-VERBAL BEHAVIOR

We have an amazing ability to assess people on just a few seconds of non-verbal data. People who viewed three two-second video clips, minus the sound (a mere six seconds of non-verbal data) assessed a teacher on traits such as confidence, optimism, enthusiasm, and likability. Their assessments were highly correlated with those of students who sat through the entire semester watching and listening to the same teacher.

Non-verbal behavior is the language of the cognitive unconscious. It is what enables us to immediately recognize an angry, sad, or happy face. We don’t have to rationally process this. And so, during an interview a subconscious assessment is automatically and effortlessly made on non-verbal behavior. It is a highly accurate assessment and it steers the conscious mind toward a decision. It is also an assessment that occurs quickly, resists change and assimilates all incoming information to fit the existing image. This assessment is called a mindset, but when people meet for the first time this mindset is called a first impression. And just like the blue and red decks, we are unaware of this assessment made by our subconscious system until “the 50th card,” or, depending on the individual, 5-15 minutes have passed. At that point we have an uneasy feeling about this candidate and a great feeling about that one.

THE DOMINANT VOICE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

One reason why non-verbals are so powerful is because so much of it is visual. The cognitive unconscious processes 11 million bits of data per second, and 10 millions of these bits are visual. The rational mind? It is slow. About 40 bits per second. Yet what do we tend to focus on in job search? Those rational 40 bits, ignoring the 10,999,960 bits that shape decisions in seconds.

Non-verbal behaviors express feelings like anxiety, nervousness or confidence. These feelings are felt and generate feelings that influence subconscious assessments that then influence conscious decisions.

THE PATH TO JOB SEARCH SUCCESS:

The following link will take you to my eBook, The Path to Job Search Success: A Neuroscientific Approach to Interviewing, Negotiating and Networking. It details the system that will enable you to gain control of your non-verbal voice.

http://amzn.to/1dETvOC

An Antidote to Negative Self-Talk

Coaching, Job Search, , , , , , , , ,

anxiety2A private client of mine, who I will call Tess, was like a soldier suffering from PTSD. She had been out of work for nineteen months and had failed in fifty-nine, straight job interviews at twenty-nine companies. She was very smart (MBA from the University of Chicago), accomplished, likable, and engaging, but she no longer believed in herself. A tape kept playing in her head that said, “Loser! What happened to you? Your career looked so promising. Why did you screw it up?”

Nineteen months of negative self-talk can make you a stranger to yourself. She no longer knew who she was, and she desperately needed to reconnect with her real self before she disappeared. So, we had a conversation:

Me: Are you smart?

Tess: Yes. I believe so.

Me: What makes you think that?

She looked at me a little surprised. My tone was challenging. I was saying, “Prove it.” She then said:

Tess: Well, I went to a distinguished undergrad program and did very well. I also did well in a post grad program at one the top universities in the country.

Me: Oh, so you have objective evidence that you are smart. This is a fact, not a fantasy, am I right?

Tess: Yes.

Me: Are you likable?

And so the conversation went. It became something of a game, and she would smile with each question. I finally ended it by saying, “When I tell you that you have every reason to be confident because you are smart, likable, and engaging, I am not saying things that aren’t true just to try and make you feel better. I’m sharing objectively verifiable facts. So will you please start believing me and believe in yourself.”

After our conversation she would wake up each morning and say, “I’m smart and I have objective evidence to prove it. I am likable and engaging for the following reasons….”

dreamstime_xl_19169606Her negative self-talk was now replaced by positive self-talk based on reality. A week later she interviewed with a company and was hired. Their salary offer was $20,000 more than her previous salary. This indicates she was able to transform their “need to fill a slot” into “an intense desire to have her fill this slot.”

The hiring authority can feel what we feel. Human nature was designed to have this capability through the mirror neuron system. When the hiring authority feels our anxiety, fear and a lack of confidence this can outweigh the objective reality that each one of us may actually be a great hire. So we need to regain our confidence and when we do, and the 60th opportunity comes around, this same person who failed the previous 59 times can hit the ball out of the park.

When I spoke to Tess after she received her job offer, I could feel what she felt: the pure joy that accompanies the end of a nineteen-month, brutal slog through a wilderness.

THE PATH TO JOB SEARCH SUCCESS:

The following link will take you to my eBook, The Path to Job Search Success: A Neuroscientific Approach to Interviewing, Negotiating and Networking. It details the system used to help Tess and others.

http://amzn.to/1dETvOC

Non-Verbal Behavior: Our Most Powerful Form of Communication

Job Search, , , , ,

WHEN VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL BEHAVIORS ARE INCONSISTENT

You are nervous before an interview. But you’ve rehearsed what you are going to say, and during the interview you say the words you planned on saying. However, your nervousness expressed a different message through your non-verbal behaviors—your facial expression, the tone of your voice and your body language. They said, “I lack confidence. I’m nervous. I’m anxious.” Unfortunately, the interviewers, like everyone else, have a Mirror Neuron System (MNS). It enables them to feel what you are feeling and expressing through your non-verbal behaviors.

You have experienced this yourself. When you are around a person who is depressed they don’t have to say a word and you will feel slightly depressed. We feel what others feel and their feelings are expressed non-verbally.

Now here comes the bad part. Studies show that when your non-verbal behaviors and the words you speak don’t match, people believe the non-verbal behaviors and not the words that were spoken. In other words, you can work on what you are going to say for months and have it come undone by what you are expressing non-verbally.

https://i0.wp.com/www.pauwelsconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Verbal-and-non-verbal-communication-during-job-interviews.jpg?w=604&ssl=1In Amy Cuddy’s TED talk (I highly recommend viewing this), the high-power posers and the low-power poses went through mock interviews and their videotapes were graded by coders. The two groups scored the same on the words they said. But the high-power posers scored higher on the non-verbal expressions that she defined as “presence.” They spoke with confidence, and the coders felt this confidence and wanted to hire them and pass over the low-power posers.

IT TAKES SECONDS

The non-verbal problem gets worse. A 1993 study by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal illustrates how we can quickly and accurately evaluate people after seeing only a few seconds of non-verbal behavior. They took videotapes of entire class sessions from thirteen teachers and extracted three ten-second video clips from them, and then removed the sound track. Nine college students rated these instructors on attributes such as confidence, enthusiasm, optimism, likability and warmth on a scale from one to nine. There was a high degree of consistency between the student’s ratings, even though they only had thirty seconds of non-verbal behavior to go on.

At the end of the semester the instructor’s actual students rated them on these same attributes. The evaluations of the two groups were significantly correlated on nine of the fifteen measures.
Wow! Thirty seconds of non-verbal behavior produced assessments that were similar to a semester’s worth of in-class evaluation. This indicates we have a sophisticated evaluation capability based on the observation of a small amount of non-verbal behavior. And that amount of non-verbal behavior was about to shrink.

Next, they had a student, who was unfamiliar with the study, randomly pick five-second and two-second clips from the original ten-second clips. They picked a new group to rate the teachers based on these shorter clips. The correlation between the end-of-semester evaluations and the five-second and two-second clips was not as high as the ten-second clips, but there was still a high degree of correlation. [1]

People who observed just three, two-second video-clips of non-verbal behavior were able to accurately evaluate another person’s confidence, dominance, warmth and likability! This suggests our non-verbal map of the world—something that is stored in our cognitive unconscious—is vast and capable of immediately generating assessments of others. These assessments, or intuitions, are automatic, and they influence the decisions of the conscious mind.

THE GOOD NEWS

We are often unaware of all of the fast assessments of non-verbal behavior that are made by the cognitive unconscious. But we don’t need to be aware of them for this to affect our conscious decisions, or those of hiring authorities, as you will see in my May 12th seminar on mastering non-verbal communication. It is free and open to the public.

The good news is this: Non-verbal behavior, even though it is a subconscious phenomenon, can be controlled.

You may have experienced this as well. At the end of an interview, hiring authorities sometimes struggle to provide reasons why they did not hire you, and you seemed to be such a good fit. You want to know why you weren’t chosen and the recruiter was given no clue. He presses the hiring authority to give you some helpful feedback and can only extract the following default response, “Oh, that candidate was a poor fit.”

One of the reasons why they struggle to provide feedback is because their decision was heavily influenced by suggestions from the cognitive unconscious, and they have no direct access to this powerful subconscious mind. No one does. In other words, this interviewer’s decision was partly the result of subconscious processes of which he was and is unaware.

We need to master non-verbal communication if we want to ensure stronger interviewing performances, and this is within everyone’s reach.

THE PATH TO JOB SEARCH SUCCESS:

The following link will take you to my eBook, The Path to Job Search Success: A Neuroscientific Approach to Interviewing, Negotiating and Networking. It details the seven techniques that enable you to gain control of your non-verbal voice, among other things.

http://amzn.to/1dETvOC

[1] The following nine traits were highly correlated: Optimistic .84, Confident .82, Dominant .79, Active .77, Enthusiastic .76, Likable .73, Warm .67, Competent .56, Supportive .55. The other six traits were less so: (Not) anxious .26, Honest .32, Empathetic .45, Attentive .48, Accepting .50, Professional .53. As can be easily seen, four of the six traits that failed to make the statistical cut were still within ten percentage points of the “Supportive” trait that did.

This research appeared in: Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1993). Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 431-441.