PsyOps for Interviewing

Welcome everyone 👏

What’s inside this newsletter.

• Psychological Operations: Defined

• Body Language: Simple cues

• Thought Experiment: Argue with your body

• Mirroring: Persuasion technique

• Reading: Basic body language insights

• Control: Use mirroring to take control

Learning to read body language at a very basic level can provide us with critical insight into how we are doing in the interview.

We aren’t brainwashing anyone here. However, we going to use basic persuasion skills to our advantage.

Psychological operations (psyops) are planned activities that use methods of communication and other means directed at audiences to influence perceptions, attitudes, and ultimately the behavior of individuals, groups, and organizations, in support of specific objectives.

We spend a lot of time learning the technical skills we need for a given role and little to no time, convincing interviewers you know what you are doing.

Preparing for the interview is critical. If you’re in a technical role, you get two of them… actually three, if you count the phone screen. During any interview, you have a short time to see yourself and sell your technical acumen.

Make the most of that time by using basic persuasion techniques to move the hiring needle in your favor.

Let’s learn the basics of reading other humans. The more you know, the more you can stack the odds in your favor.

While the focus here is on the technical and behavioral/traditional interview, you can apply these basic skills to anything you do in life that involve social interactions.

 💡 Thought Exercise: Slouch down as far as you can in your chair. Try as hard as you can to feel confident and happy without moving. You might be able to do but it won’t be easy. Why? Because our bodies make way for our emotions.

Time to set the stage for the interview and you’ll never see my legs.

We all have neurons in our brains called mirror neurons. When a human sees happiness in another human, we all tend to replicate that emotion in our mind using mirror neurons. In body language, we tend, as a species, to generally copy or slightly mimic the body language or gestures of people we like and/or trust in conversation. We are also attracted to people we generally like and trust and who like and trust us.

Knowledge of these mirror neurons makes it easy for us to take control of the interview right from the start.

When the first interviewer asks me, “Hi Mike, how are you doing today?” I respond with, I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for asking, how is everyone doing in Atlanta? That’s such a great city.”

Notice what I did in the last sentence? I concluded with a statement about the city where the company is located. This is called elicitation. It’s a powerful technique to get information from others.

When you ask someone a question, regardless of how innocuous it is, it sends up a red flag in the brain telling them to be cautions. 🟥 If you’re responding to a statement, your brain doesn’t send up that red flag.

While I’m genuinely interested in how everyone is doing, I don’t believe Atlanta is a great city. However, I’m doing two very important things using this greeting.

• I’m persuading others to mimic my upbeat and happy demeanor. I don’t won’t pissed off or angry people interviewing me. That won’t help my cause.

• My statement opens the door for conversation without sending up the red flag we just learned about. I’m the one being interviewed but they are going to start by taking. This provides me with basic insights into each of their personalities.

Let’s take a look at a few body language signals. Before we can persuade, we have to probe and learn what they are interested in. We’ve all seen or done this one. Excessive blinking. Blinking more often indicates stress, often stress that person is trying to hide. If you are in a conversation with someone, a new topic comes up, and they start blinking more, for some reason that topic is making them stressed. 

The next signal is lip compressions. Squeezing your lips together is called lip compression. Someone who does it is usually withholding opinions or information. If you as someone, “How do you like your new job?” and they respond, “Oh, it’s great!” but squeeze their lips together, there’s something they’re not telling you.

At the end of most interviews, the interviewer will often ask if you have any questions. You can ask… “what do you like working at company x?” If they all respond with something positive while compressing their lips, run. 😂

Let’s take this up a notch. The next step here is using your body language after you’ve mirrored someone’s actions in order to get them to begin mirroring you. 

This is where the control begins. They don’t know it but they’ve started mirroring you and this is where persuasion begins.

Once they start to mirror your actions, you have a giant bag of tricks you can use. We will cover a few here you can go try out in your next meeting, promotion request or trip to the bar. A great place to start is manipulating your friends. 🙂 

FIRST TRICK: When being mirrored, begin to shift your breathing in line with theirs and speak mostly while they exhale, you are now mirroring their breathing and can shift yours to a slower pace to relax someone with whom you are speaking.

SECOND TRICK: Begin to blink with them. Once you’ve got about 2 minutes of pacing their blink rate, start to slow yours down. Keep in mind you will be slowing down your blink SPEED and your blink RATE. This will keep them very interested, relaxed and softened up for you.

Note: Open posture means positioning your body in a way that is inviting and approachable. Your arms are open and hands bend upward slightly. Closed posture is folding your arms and putting your palms flat on the desk.

THRID TRICK: As they start to mirror you, begin to open your body language using open gestures (from the behavioral table) while they are saying things you like to hear and being attentive to what you want them to absorb. Start to touch your mouth and close your gestures as soon as they bring up anything you want to manipulate them into eventually let go of. Anything you don’t like to see or hear should warrant a negative physiological response from you. If you can make their physiological responses negative while they are talking, their mind will eventually begin to associate the two.

Yes, all these tricks will take practice, however; it won’t be long until you are noticing and understanding how to use mirroring and other body language movements to your advantage.

Thanks everyone and have a great day. 🎉