Selling in a Job Interview: How to Apply Sales Techniques When Being Questioned

We’re told to think of a job interview as “selling ourselves.” We enter to show whether we are the best qualified candidate. In this, it is similar to selling a product, where we try to determine whether our product is the best qualified to fill a particular need. The particular challenge of a job interview is that rather than asking questions, you are being asked questions. Since most of our techniques revolve around asking questions, how can we apply them in this environment?

Let’s look at one or two of our non-questioning sales techniques; the 70-30 split and negative reverses. Applying the 70-30 split is challenging, especially since the interviewer is attempting to find information about you, and may himself be attempting to enforce the same split. However, if you try to keep your answers concise, and try to get the interviewer to talk more, maybe about the reasons behind a particular question, you can bring more balance into the interview. Negative reverses, however, are available to you quite readily, on the condition that the interviewer is including positive statements in their questions or are presenting questions with “expected” answers. As long as the interviewer is presenting you with opportunities, you can use a negative reverse or two without having to use questioning techniques.

However, there are a couple methods to sneak questioning techniques into the interview. Two of the easiest ways to do so are questioning statements and the usual call for questions at the end of the interview. Questioning statements are answers that call out for a response or for additional information. Even without asking a question outright, you can still turn phrases that push the interviewer to respond. This lets you get a two-for-one: you answer a question and gain more information. The call for questions, though, does give you an open field to flip the script on the interviewer by transposing the roles of the interview. Since for most of the interview you aren’t needing to worry about “asking your question and shutting up,” you can take note of two or three points the interviewer raises and bring them up later. This lets you gain the information you feel you most need, without straying too far from the established format.

If you are intentional about how you communicate with and respond to an interviewer’s questions, you can still find the means to apply ABC selling techniques to a job interview, even if the majority of questions are still being asked of you rather than by you.