Power impressionsSome interviewers try to delve deeper, but it's hard to ignore initial opinions in hiring 03/06/2001 By Melissa Morrison / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News Preparing for this moment, you've completed four years of college, maybe two years of graduate school, and God knows how many years of paying your dues.
You've done your homework on the company. You've invested in a new suit, gotten your hair cut, cleaned your nails and wiped the sweat from your palms.
Now you've got four minutes to nail the job.
Actually, it may be more like 10 seconds, depending upon whose research you're looking at. The point is: All that work – all the facts and problem-solving techniques stuffed into your brain, those thousands of dollars in tuition and books – may come down to whether you have a stain on your jacket.
The importance of the first impression has not gone unnoticed by bosses or potential employees, especially in recent years.
Behavioral psychologists have dissected the way impressions are made. Business schools are offering classes in presentation skills. And some companies are changing their interview techniques to try to override what may be an inaccurate first impression.
Salespeople even have reading material a bit more hard core than the classic success guide The Power of Positive Thinking: It's called The Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and it studies topics such as the relationship between image and successful sales, complete with regression analyses and flowcharts.
Call it the science of first impressions.
Take that spinach stain on your lapel. Experts have calculated the effect grooming has on your ability to get the job, sell the product or land the client. More than half – 55percent – of first impressions are based on how you look, 38percent on body language and voice, and only 7percent on what you actually say, says author Anne Warfield, referring to an oft-quoted statistic by psychologist Albert Mehrabian.
A good first impression is even more important than it used to be, she says, as employers pay more attention to office harmony. The underlying idea is, if a boss expects you to spend the majority of your waking hours in the office, you'd better get along with your cubicle-mates.
Ms. Warfield, who describes herself as an "impression management consultant" and whose books include Communicating More Effectively with Body Language, points to studies showing that more companies are hiring people who seem a good fit in the company over those who are technically more qualified.
"Companies have realized that a person's personal skills make more of an impact in an organization than their technical skills," Ms. Warfield says. "And since many companies are downsizing, it has become more important than ever to make sure that employee will fit the company culture."
Searching for chemistry
The decision whether to hire someone used to be called "instinct" or "chemistry," says Jeff Kaye of Kaye/Bassman International Corp., one of the largest recruiting firms in Dallas.
"Now, based on the art of behavioral profiling, there are more distinct ways of measuring and quantifying that elusive thing called chemistry," he says. "The way it had worked for so many years was that the first question was, 'Tell me about yourself.' Then the interview would maneuver through questions about your strengths and weaknesses, trying to validate or invalidate this first impression you made."
With behavior-based interviewing, the questioner is likely to ask for specific examples, such as, "Tell me about a time you dealt with an irate customer and how you handled it."
There is a growing belief that, whether accurate or not, first impressions become the filter through which the rest of the encounter is viewed. An interviewer who tags a job applicant as arrogant during the first two minutes of a meeting, for example, will interpret what he or she says for the rest of the interview as cocky, while an interviewer who finds the applicant self-confident will interpret the same statements as self-assured.
"Opinion-based interviewing has about the same possibility of a good hire as a coin flip, some people say," Mr. Kaye says.
More companies have tried to circumvent the capriciousness of first impressions by using more refined methods of interviewing, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. For the last five years, Kaye/Bassman has used a tool called Selecsys, which measures traits such as extroversion, dominance, conformity and patience. Last year, Mr. Kaye says, turnover at his firm was less than 10percent, while the recruiting-industry standard is 50percent to 100percent.
"It links behavioral traits to what's important on a job," Mr. Kaye says. "If you're looking for someone for customer service, you're looking for someone with a high level of patience, such as in a call center, where they're dealing with complaints. Someone with low patience has a high sense of urgency, and is probably good for a sales position."
Projecting a message
That doesn't mean someone readying for a first interview can neglect the cosmetic. Ms. Warfield's clients typically are businesspeople who are gunning for promotions or who want to make more effective sales presentations or negotiations.
Image seems to have universal interpretations. Ms. Warfield says she frequently silences those who complain that their work should speak for them by showing photographs of two men, one dressed in short sleeves, the other in a natty suit. Then, she asks the group to come up with words describing the men.
She's been using the presentation for a decade both in the United States and abroad, she says, and invariably the same words are used.
"One guy gets 'geeky,' 'nerd,' 'conservative,' 'boring,' 'trustworthy.' The other guy gets 'slick,' 'successful,' 'nontrustworthy,' 'a leader,' 'smooth,'" she says.
The lesson, she says, is that certain images are a lingua franca, so you'd better be conscious of what message you project.
As for body language, beyond the obvious – make eye contact, shake hands firmly, don't slouch – it may matter whether your interviewer is a man or woman.
"Generally, men form an impression faster than women but take longer to change it, versus women, who take longer to form the impression and less time to change it," she says.
Women also tend to hold eye contact longer and look more at body language for clues than men, she says.
Business schools, such as McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, have recognized that no matter how gifted their students are in cost-benefit analyses and sales techniques, it's also important that they know how to converse at a client reception. The school added a presentation skills class to its schedule last fall.
Greg Pins, 32, was one of the students who lobbied to add the class, and then signed up for it, even though nine years in three different industries had given him plenty of field experience. Mr. Pins, who will receive an MBA this spring, estimates that he went through as many as 30 job interviews last fall.
In other words, he's a veteran of the first impression.
He made sure his shoes were shined and that he didn't look too relaxed in his chair. But in one of his first interviews, he was so nervous that he short-circuited all those behavioral-based questions that were supposed to go deeper than whatever first impression he had made.
"My brain totally shut down. I started to get sweat on my forehead. I felt like the room turned up to 130 degrees. I was entering the third level of hell; the room was caving in," he says.
Needless to say, Mr. Pins did not get that job.
Practice and practice
Science or not, it was good, old-fashioned practice that helped him in future interviews.
The more he did, the more opportunities he had to polish the examples he used to answer interviewers' deliberately designed questions.
"When you've done a few of them, just like any story or joke, you end up getting better at telling it," he says.
"It got really easy after that. If I were to draw a learning curve, it would go way up."
This spring, he starts a consulting job with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.
Here are some techniques for making a good first impression:
Beginner
Maintain eye contact. Don't shift your glance away a lot, or you'll appear untrustworthy.
Dress professionally.
Don't slouch.
Shake hands firmly.
Don't fake it. If you don't know the answer to a question, be honest.
Intermediate
End the interview with a confident, "When can I expect to hear from you?" instead of a doubtful, "So ... you'll be in touch?"
Use body language to show confidence, interest and respect. Lean forward slightly. Don't sling your ankle over your knee.
Carry a portfolio or something similar. Some people feel more confident going into an interview carrying something.
Your initial contact may be made through e-mail. Take care to spell, punctuate and capitalize properly (despite the dominant e.e. cummings style of Internet exchanges). But don't write in ALL CAPS (or you'll look like you're shouting). "People reading those are seeing what your intellectual level is, how well you put things together," consultant Anne Warfield says.
Immediately acknowledge a physical problem that may be misinterpreted, Ms. Warfield advises. For example, if you have a back problem that requires you to shift in your chair a lot, mention it so your movements aren't seen as fidgeting or boredom.
Advanced
Observe how the interviewer communicates and mirror that. For example, if the person speaks slowly, do likewise. But take care not to go overboard or you'll seem phony.
While dressing and grooming for an interview, write down 10 words describing how you want to be perceived. Then take an objective survey of what you see in the mirror and check whether your look matches.
If the initial meeting is informal, such as at an introductory reception, try to converse about something other than the company since every other wannabe employee already has asked the same questions.
Melissa Morrison is a free-lance writer.
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