More on the science of persuasion and getting a new job
In my last post I shared how my wife, Lynette, used the principle of Social Proof that Dr. Robert Cialdini explores in his book, Influence, to get a new job.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen anyone using Social Proof before to help influence folks in the job interview process. It dawned on me that there might be a couple other great ideas right out of behavioral psychology to improve someone’s effort in getting a job.
I’ll focus on two other principles of persuasion here that came to mind: Reciprocity and Anchoring. Reciprocity is another principle Dr. Cialdini explains in his book, and Dan Ariely has often talked about Anchoring on his blog and in his book Predictably Irrational.
Reciprocity
Reciprocity is the principle that if I give you something, you’ll want to do something for me. That’s why so many salesmen like to give away free gifts. You’ll often feel persuaded to give them more of your attention to what they are actually selling. You eventually might even follow through with some cash.
What has always struck me with job searching is how little people do to frame their resume and cover letter in a way that comes across as being a benefit to the company the resume’s owner is trying to interview with.
Most resumes sound like “I did this, and I did this. My objective is to work at a company where I get to do more things for me…”
One of the worst examples of this is just sending a resume to someone’s email at the company and explaining “Hi, I’m a developer and here’s my resume. Let me know if there are any jobs.”
Yet, of the resumes I get, that accounts for maybe 6 out of 10 of them.
So to incorporate Reciprocity into your job search, I recommend you attempt to give something to whoever you’re emailing. Not something of any dollar amount to you, but something like:
Signup for the online community around my or your target employer’s business and help someone. Either help me or help the community itself. Get in there and help answer a question. There’s forums galore with most companies. And they have users asking simple questions like “where’s the link to change my password?” Get in there and even help with just one of those.
Or go a little deeper and come up with a feature idea or a bug you noticed.
Just do a tiny bit of effort to contribute to the software or the community.
Or find something online that might be pertinent to what I’m working on. An article, a piece of open source software that might make something better on my site, a free conference that’s coming up that you might think I could get something out of. Just find something that doesn’t cost me anything that I could use to improve myself or my company.
Do any of those things and THEN send me your resume mentioning what you just did for me. You will be at the very top of the pile for my attention and most likely everyone else’s. I guarantee you.
You’ve given me a gift. You helped someone so I didn’t have to email them. You helped me find something I didn’t know about. You’ve already contributed something to me and my cause, and we haven’t even met yet. You have my attention!
Anchoring
Anchoring is the phenomena by which we as humans while making a decision become anchored to some kind of reference point that occurred before this decision is being made. It’s the reason why when a company sells 3 tiers of something (small, medium and big), the medium plan is usually the plan they are trying to sell the most of. If they had only tried to sell the medium plan without the other tiers, they’d probably make less money overall.
A great example of how odd this phenomena is, if I asked you to send me the last 2 digits of your social security number right now. Then I asked you to send me an amount you would pay to read my hypothetical new book coming out. The people with the higher social security numbers will generally outbid the lower social security number folks for my new book.
The social security number has nothing to do with my book. But still, your brain anchors onto that number and influences your decision.
So how can you use that to your advantage when looking for a new job.
This is a bit more hypothetical than the Reciprocity example above, but might be worth it to you to brainstorm on.
Well, there is the most dreaded single question of all job interviews.
The interview went great. You thought you nailed it, and they nod and voraciously agree to everything you say.
Then they ask, “how much money are you making at your current job?”
They haven’t even asked, “how much money do you require to work here?” Some do of course. But then immediately follow it with the previous question.
Their goal is to obviously keep the cost as low as possible to recruit you to their company. One method of doing that, is to make sure you stay anchored to your current salary when coming to work for them.
So it got me thinking about a technique to reverse the tables.
When someone in an interview asks you what you currently make, you must resist telling them immediately. You need to get a higher number out there to anchor your interviewer to your new number.
One method could be to just say “Well I’m interviewing with some other companies, and my salary requirement with them is X” X being the higher than your current salary number.
If they ask again about your current salary, you might have to cough it up. But at least the higher number has entered into their consciousness first, as a way of anchoring their perspective and your discussion with them.
Well that’s just a couple maybe non-obvious ways to improve a job search via methods of persuasion. Any others come to mind as you brainstorm? If you want, email me some and I’ll follow up with more of these ideas in another post.