Using Individual Negotiation Skills Best Practices To Increase Your Chance Of Winning Job Interviews.
There are few more stressful occurrences in your career than interviewing for a new position. Here are six key negotiation skills that you can apply to tip the scales to your advantage.
1. Be careful of how you react to stress.
It is very important 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 enough time on planning.
Most negotiation training courses teach that the key to a positive negotiation result is the quality of the planning. The emphasis of your planning will differ marginally depending on whether you are interviewing for a new job within your present company or if you are pursuing a totally new opportunity somewhere else.
Interviewing for a new position in your present company:
a. Ensure that you are in sync with the vision & the mission of the organisation.
b. Compile a detailed list of the objectives that you have delivered to show your ability to achieve agreed goals.
c. Obtain references or testimonials from co-workers (your present manager would probably be the best one) testifying to the competencies that are being looked for in the new job.
Important questions to ask:
a. Why is the position vacant?
b. How will success be measured?
c. What assistance will I get to help in the achievement of set objectives?
Interviewing for a new job outside of your organisation:
a. Make sure that you research as much as possible about the new organisation including taking a look at what is said about the organisation by their competitors & market analysts.
b. It is critical 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 development.
d. Make a detailed list of the objectives that you have delivered in the past to show your ability to achieve agreed targets.
Key questions to ask:
a. Why is the position available?
b. How will success be gauged?
c. What assistance will I get to aid in the achievement of set objectives?
3. Create alternatives.
To increase your power there is no substitute for creativity.
4. Use time to your advantage.
Understand the impact of timing on decision making. If you need to have an outcome in a short time then you are likely to concede more and vice versa.
5. Lead with your weaknesses.
This will accomplish 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 uncover 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 salary expectations you are leaving yourself room to make concessions in order to progress 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!