Using Individual Negotiation Skills Best Practices To Increase The Effectiveness Of Your Work Interviews.
There are few more stressful events in your career than interviewing for a new job. Here are 6 key negotiation skills that you can deploy to tip the scales to your advantage.
1. Be careful of how you react to stress.
It is key that you realise how you respond in stressful situations so that you can ensure you prepare an approach that will ensure you come across as composed, settled and confident.
2. Spend adequate time on planning.
Most negotiation training workshops teach that the key to a successful negotiation outcome is the quality of the planning. The focus of your preparation will differ marginally depending on whether you are interviewing for a new opportunity within your present company or if you are chasing a totally new opportunity elsewhere.
Interviewing for a new oppportunity in your current company:
a. Ensure that you understand the vision & the mission of the company.
b. Make a detailed list of the objectives that you have delivered to demonstrate your ability to meet your targets.
c. Obtain references or endorsements from colleagues (your present manager would probably be the best one) attesting to the competencies that are being looked for in the new job.
Important questions to ask:
a. Why is the position available?
b. How will success be measured?
c. What support will be made available to assist in the achievement of set objectives?
Interviewing for a new job outside of your company:
a. Ensure that you read up as much as possible about the new company including taking a look at what is said about the organisation by their competition & market analysts.
b. It is very important to understand the vision & mission of the organisation.
c. Figure out how the organisation's vision & mission overlap with your personal goals & vision for career growth.
d. Make a detailed list of the objectives that you have achieved in the past to show your ability to achieve agreed targets.
Key questions to ask:
a. Why is the role vacant?
b. How will success be measured?
c. What support will be made available to help in the achievement of set objectives?
3. Create alternatives.
If you want to increase your leverage there is no replacement for being creative.
4. Use time to your benefit.
Understand the impact of timing on decision making. If you need to have a result in a short time then you are likely to concede more and vice versa.
5. Lead with your weaknesses.
This will achieve two things:
i. It will prevent you leaving the interview on a negative note having left your weaknesses to be uncovered by the interviewer's questions at the close of the interview.
ii. The likeliness is significant that your interviewer will expose your weaknesses in any event. When they do discover your weaknesses and they happen to be consistent with what you told them it will establish you as a trustworthy & credible resource.
6. Ask for more than you want.
Research into salary negotiation best practice confirms that you should anchor the negotiation by slightly overstating your salary expectations. By slightly overstating your remuneration expectations you are allowing yourself room to make concessions in order to advance the negotiation at a later stage. If you don't have to make any concessions then you will have your bread buttered on both sides!