Paul Boross, The Pitch Doctor, answers a question on how get your interviewees to pitch during a job interview.
Q: I’m a recruiting manager for an IT services company and I want to get interview candidates to pitch so that I can see how they would come across to our clients. How can I set this up to give them a chance to really show me what they can do while making it a fair test of their abilities?
This is a very common idea, and while it is good to see your candidates pitch, what often happens is that you don’t see how the candidates would pitch to your clients, you see how they pitch in a job interview. Therefore, there are a number of things that you can do to achieve your desired outcome.
The second problem is consistency. You might see three candidates who deliver three excellent pitches which don’t actually help you with your decision because they are so different to each other.
Therefore, the two most important issues to deal with are framing and consistency.
Framing will get your candidates into the right frame of mind so that what you see is more like what your clients will see if the candidate is successful.
Consistency means having clearly defined criteria for the pitch. If your candidates don’t like sticking to criteria then they’re unlikely to stick to your clients’ criteria either, which might be good for the candidates’ sense of creativity but bad for your business.
Let’s have a look at these two issues in more detail.
When you walk into a car showroom, how do you feel? And how do you feel when a sales person approaches you? How do you feel when you walk into an exclusive restaurant? And how do you feel at the theatre when the house lights go down? Each of these environments puts you into a certain state, where you not only feel a certain way but see the world in a fundamentally different way, which in turn defines how you will behave and react.
The Pitching Bible by Paul Boross is available from The Best You, here.
Ebook formats are also available.
Find out more about our trainings to help you become a better communicator, here.
