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Imagine if you could program yourself to ace a job interview. You’d simply walk onto campus and answer questions as if you were an AI-generated chatbot. Aside from being ineffective, this solution is what candidates are virtually wishing for when they attempt to predict interview questions and rehearse their responses. They aspire to be robots.
Interviews are more than delivering information and key messages about yourself.
“There is one thing a well-conducted interview can reveal that no resume, referral, and sample project can offer: an insider look into a candidate’s emotional tone,” wrote psychologist Ron Friedman in his book “The Best Place to Work.”
Attention is less focused on an exchange of facts because interviewers have already seen the candidate’s application materials. Good interview questions will prompt candidates to connect a skill or experience from their past to predict their future behavior at the interviewing institution.
Within responses are opportunities for employers to detect and evaluate emotions that are often overlooked when candidates rehearse for interviews. Candidates should practice answers to sample questions but not to the degree that they are scripting responses and sounding robotic. That strips all the emotional tone away.
Try working on these five tone-enhancing approaches to interviews:
Avoid Negativity
There’s a reason why employers ask candidates about their past experiences when they already know about it from their resume or CV. If a candidate describes their previous job with a negative outlook, then they are more likely to continue finding faults or being disgruntled in their next position.
“When you listen for emotion, you become better at picking out highly skilled candidates who may be hampered in their careers by negative outlooks,” Friedman wrote. “One marker of a challenging personality is the tendency to describe oneself as a victim.”
The repeated use of sarcasm can also backfire. A biting comment intended to draw a laugh or lighten the mood can be helpful, especially if it is self-deprecating, but according to Friedman, too much sarcasm can be perceived as a cover for anger or hostility.
Slow the Pace
Candidates who rehearse responses have a tendency to rush their delivery. A normal rate of speaking is about 140 words per minute, but people can comprehend the spoken word at twice the speed. Our thoughts from which we choose our words are firing way faster (a widely shared estimate is between 1,000-3,000 words of thought per minute).
So it’s understandable that you talk faster when you know in advance what you want to say. You might not sound like an auctioneer but a quicker pace will dilute your emotional tone. Pauses in your speech imbue great emphasis on your points and they signal that you are being thoughtful.
A three-to-five-second pause after a question is asked or between your points might seem agonizingly long to a candidate, but like spaces between cars in traffic, pauses will smoothen your delivery and keep your audience engaged.
With that in mind, don’t combine pace and length. Interviewers disengage when a candidate rambles on. Keep your responses to around 45-60 seconds. You might be tempted to provide interviewers all the context and details, but if they want more they will ask for it and that exchange will sustain a conversation.
Tell a Story
Stories are not facts or assertions about your career. Stories are the emotional transfer of information through a narrative that follows a pattern of elements, such as setting, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. When you tell a story, you are seeking to appeal to an audience’s emotions, which is more powerful than logic and reason, but storytelling is also effective for revealing your own emotional tone.
In a previous HigherEdJobs article, I shared how candidates should rehearse their transitions more so than their complete stories. One area to focus on is building narrative tension by taking the interviewer from one idea to the next. Storytellers refer to these transitions as “beats,” which are the cause-and-effect rising actions within a story that create narrative tension. Practice knowing when to enunciate “and then” or “but” into your delivery to create a dramatic effect and emphasize your emotional tone.
Stories are often referred to as a flight simulator of human social life and experiences. Give your interviewer a glimpse of perspective through stories, not a recital of your CV.
Humanize Yourself
In addition to stories that make people more human, you can ad lib and provide commentary about what you are experiencing as an interviewee.
Don’t be afraid to admit something like, “When I was preparing for this interview, my husband told me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway …,” or acknowledge an awkward seating configuration in the room by apologizing for not equally looking everyone in the eye.
These offhand comments might seem quirky, but they put everyone at ease and remind people that you are a real person with emotions and not an automaton programmed to achieve a perfect score on the interview.
Be Curious (Rising Intonation)
Emotional tone is consequential in the way you ask questions. Some questions can come across as accusatory, critical, or even rhetorical when asked directly: “Who developed this curriculum?” or “How do you get things done here?” A rising intonation, where you raise the pitch of your voice at the end of a sentence, helps you come across more inquisitive and convey an emotion of curiosity. You can also use a windup like, “I know complex organizations have bureaucratic challenges, so I’m wondering, how do projects get approved?”
Simple questions can be off-putting if asked in the wrong tone. One example that occurs often in interviews is when a candidate follows up a long-winded response with, “Does that answer your question?” Said without rising intonation, this question can be placating or condescending, as if saying, “There! Are you happy with that? Any more stupid questions?” Said with rising intonation, it says, “I care about giving you a good response and I want to know if that’s what you were looking for.”
If you approach your questions from a place of genuine curiosity, your emotional tone will often take care of itself.
