I interviewed a candidate for one of my clients last week and made the mistake of opening the interview with the statement, “Tell me about yourself.”  OK, some of you may have read on Facebook I turned 50 last week.  I was afraid I was going to start receiving Medicare checks before this candidate finished speaking.

Have you ever been near chickens, perhaps on a farm?  They sound like this … bak, bak, bak, bak, bakawwwww!!!!!  Bak, bak, bak, bak, bak, bak, bakaaaawwwwwwwwww!!!!!  I’m a great listener, and having interviewed thousands of candidates in my years of recruiting.  You would think I could listen to someone indefinitely.  But this lady caused me to drift.  I started thinking of my childhood.  The wonderful Sundays after church down on the farm.  The hayrides, horseback riding, berry picking, riding the tractors, playing in the barns and the chickens, that’s right, chickens!  The more this lady talked the more she sounded like a chicken.  It started sounding like bak, bak, bak, bak, bakaaawwwwwww!!!!!!  If Colonel Sanders would have been alive and anywhere near this lady she would have been in danger!

All joking aside communication skills are one of the most sought after skill sets in this electronic, crazy world we live in.  No one can communicate verbally or in writing anymore.  I have been in social settings where if the conversation was not stimulating enough members of the group actually returned to entertainment from their electronic device, their iPad, iPod, iPhone or iwhatever.

If you can’t communicate effectively and succinctly in a job interview forget it, someone else is going to get the job.  First of all, how much time do you think you are going to get from a busy professional in a job interview, thirty minutes, forty-five?  Or maybe ten.  That all depends on you.  Yes, that’s right, you.

In our Essential Interview Preparation Workshop we teach you how to construct powerful accomplishments that parallel the job description.  These accomplishments should do nothing less than blow an interviewer backwards out of their chair, definitely raise their eyebrow and make them think, “Now this candidate is good.”  Most interviewers have limited attention spans…seconds.

When you use an attention-grabbing opening statement describing your accomplishment you will have your interviewer’s attention until you finish speaking, 45 seconds later.  You gain the interviewer’s respect by demonstrating you can communicate, by getting one of your powerful accomplishments succinctly on the table.

Then we teach you how to steer and control the interview segueing in to all of your accomplishments in our Innovative Interview Techniques Workshop.  And your interviewer will continue to listen to what you say…again and again and again and who knows?  You may get 1.5 hours of the interviewers time.  And if you do, you did real good!