Ways to impress a potential employer

Getting an interview is a highly intellectual task. When you send in a cover letter and resume, you’re sending it to a big giant conglomerate; a behemoth corporation that devours coal and spews steam. But when it comes down to interview time, things become personal. They become human. And impressing a potential employer, once you’ve got their attention and a foot in the door, is reliant not on your intellectual intelligence, its reliant on your emotional intelligence. While qualifying for a job, and being good at a job, is a systematic skill you learn and hone over time, being hired is a social skill that you adapt ‘on your feet.’

While your natural charisma plays a role in this process, it turns out that the majority of your emotional intelligence can be learned and honed just the same as any intellectual pursuit! All that’s required is for you to frame the problem in the right light, and pursue the skill with a deliberate and well planned manner. Just remember that this article isn’t just about the workplace. People are human everywhere they go, and this article is as pertinent to home, team games, and dating as it is to an interview!

Learn to recognize a person’s core motivations. There are four types of people in the world: people who want to be correct, people who emphasize taking action, people who are supportive to those around them, and people who gather resources (human or material) to support themselves. Recognizing which basic motivation is behind your interviewer’s questions will lead you to more effectively respond to their questions by enabling you to recognize which of your many traits will be most enticing to them.

People who emphasize informational correctness are typically analytical, and their success comes from knowing what response to a situation will be most effective. This sort of person is characteristically thoughtful, and can display this trait both assertively or passively. They tend to stray away from making generalizations. They are unlikely to respond with their gut instinct, preferring to carefully consider a situation from an objective standpoint. This sort of person is impressed by others when they listen carefully, and give time for silent contemplation during conversation. They will rarely interrupt others, because that behavior prevents the entire message from being conveyed and leads to a lack of information.

Those who are motivated by action, however, are precisely the sort of person who will interrupt others. They commonly see conversation as an engaging discourse, in which two people form one sentence through collaboration. They are characteristically creative, and are impressed by others when they see a willingness to act quickly enough to try a few different possible solutions to a problem in the time it would take an analytical person to try a single ‘correct’ approach. This sort of person is typically successful because they’re able to find new ways to do things, and often find that invention is more effective than research in their field.

When someone is motivated by their supportive role, they are team-players. They characteristically view the success of a team that produces more than the sum of its members as a greater motivating factor than their individual success. They are usually adaptable, fluid, and quick to pick up new skills. This sort of person might be thoughtful, or they could be reactive, depending on their personality. In all cases, this is a sort of person who is impressed by someone’s ability to pick up the slack, or their propensity to do things without being asked. Their success comes from their ability to create teams that work together effectively, and will seek to integrate people in to those teams if they see that those people will value the end result more than the details of getting to it.

Alternatively, there are people who view a team as a support structure for an individual, instead of individuals as the supporting elements of a team. These are typically ‘high-power’ individuals with extremely specialized jobs in fields like medicine, law, forensics, and research. Much like a supportive personality, they are motivated to produce more as a member of a team than they could alone, but view the hierarchy as a system of specialization instead of a more fluid