Brian

Interviewing is an art. Plain and simple.

I often find myself interviewing all sorts of individuals for subjects in which I am barely knowledgable.

It becomes an art to figure out the right questions to ask and how to engage them in conversation aside from whatever they rehearsed in their bedroom the night before.

At this point, I can instantly spot someone that is just preaching some pre-determind speech at me to convince me to hire them.

This applies to all sorts of things, including when you are making media buys or making deals. Essentially negotiating is almost like an interview where you need to be able to read their voice, body language and words and respond appropriately in that moment.

Even the subtlest of changes in pitch of their voice, odd pauses or a scratch of the nose can speak a lot about somebody.

For example, I was recently interviewing someone and when I asked a certain set of questions the interviewee suddenly began speaking slower, looking up in the sky a lot more and scratching his nose. This was red flags to me, because that behavior wasn’t present before and he didn’t even realize that he was doing it.

I’m not going to make any specific recommendations on where or how to learn more about people as I learned from being involved in movies and acting. But, there are a lot of resources out there that you can pick up at the book store that will help you read people better and ultimately, interview better.

One think to search for is conversation hypnosis courses. It’s not as evil as it sounds. Basically, they teach you how to slightly manipulate people and in the case of an interview get them to open up.

One example of that is a few months ago I was interviewing someone that was “well rehearsed” and was basically just spitting out paragraphs to me that he memorized. I tried to break him but it wasn’t working. So I remembered a tactic from a conversational hypnosis course that was called something like the black mirror. Basically, the idea is to mirror their exact posture and body language and that would help you become more of a “real person” to them and they would drop their predetermined idea of what they were going to say to you. It worked, the guy immediately opened up.

Good questions are also very important too. I always try to think of questions that I would expect if I were the interviewee and come up with questions that are totally different.

Lastly a nice tactic that I’ve used in the past to get people to open up is to do something completely random in the interview. If you are the interviewer then try swearing at a pretend phone call as if the phone was on vibrate and you didn’t want to answer; or suddenly leave the room and tell them to wait a minute with no explanation. You can think of similar things that work on the phone as well.

What experience do you guys have either interviewing or being interviewed? Anything that has or hasn’t worked well for you?