Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Essential Interviews Tips and Skills To Get You Started!
Home / Interviews Tips / Make Your Eyes Work In Interviews
”Look at me when I’m talking to you.” Is there a person alive who hasn’t heard a parent or a teacher say this to them at one time or another? Why? Because to make eye contact meant you were paying attention. Eye contact meant you were showing respect. To maintain eye contact with another conveys to them that we think what they are saying is important and we regard them highly enough to give them our full attention.
In some cultures, downcast eyes are a sign of respect. But in the U.S. business world, lowered eyes are a sign of passive behavior, which is analogous to weakness. It may even be viewed as a sign of disrespect! Lowered eyes definitely convey a lack of confidence and hence competence to most business interviewers in our culture. Meet the eyes of the interviewer confidently and do it often!
If the applicant exhibits a lack of appropriate eye contact, he will be assumed to be detached or disinterested or even odd! When studies were conducted to determine what elements of a speaker’s behavior conveyed sincerity, eye contact was a significant variable. Those speakers who were rated sincere, looked at listeners an average of 3 times longer than the speakers who were rated insincere. Perhaps this gives true meaning to the perceptions that “shifty eyes” belong to insincere people or that if someone “can’t look us in the eye” they are being devious.
Eye contact must be appropriate to the business situation. It should not be perceived as flirtatious, but as sincere interest in the content of the communication and the person involved. Too long a gaze can be viewed as indicating attraction to the individual that goes beyond the employer-employee relationship. Or too long a gaze, if combined with other congruent body language, can actually be threatening and an indication of anger as is indicated by the common phrase “he tried to stare him down.” If the gaze is too long it can make the other person feel uncomfortable—threatened by either an inappropriate sexual connotation or by the threat of bodily harm. It is never to our advantage to make the interviewer feel uncomfortable.
So we want to establish enough eye contact with the interviewer to indicate an interest in him and the organization he represents. We want to convey that we like him as a person—as a business person. We need to demonstrate that we can interact appropriately with him and hence with others—co-workers and clients—in a business setting. You want to convey that you are an active and enthusiastic individual who can get things done. You are competent. The most positive eyes sparkle with a life that conveys this interest and dynamism. To be interested in the other person and the discussion pays him a compliment, makes him comfortable, and says, ” I fit in.” Of course, the sparkle in the eyes is best complemented by an appropriate smile on the applicant’s face.
