Go on, shake hands with people....they like it!

Although this post is aimed at people who are going to job interviews, building rapport is an essential life skill. Like most essential skills, including money management, knowing what APR really means when you take out a loan and basic parenting skills, it’s rarely taught. People who need to have great rapport building abilities, in order to help them get their next job and earn bags of cash, have a horrible habit of blundering along in the dark, ignorant of their own faults and foibles.

To help out here are my Top 5 Tips to build rapport. Which ones do you do already and which ones do you need to do more often?

1) Smile. It relaxes people and we appear warm and friendly.

2) Shake hands.This is an assertive thing to do, although be careful not to crush people’s hands. It’s not a test of strength.

3) Use names. Few people are really called ‘Mate’, unless they’re the first mate on a ship. Names acknowledge us as individuals and are important to use.

4) Use social gaze.We can draw an imaginary triangle between the outside of someone’s eyebrows and the tip of their nose and can let our gaze wander round inside it, instead of staring eyeball-to-eyeball.

5) Notice commonality. This is my favourite tip. When we find that we have something in common with another person they cease to be a stranger to us and become a member of one of the tribes we belong to. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an iPhone tribe, or a Blackberry tribe, a football supporting tribe, or a wine drinking tribe; all connections have value. When you hear something that fits with your world, notice it by saying: ‘Hey, I do that too…’

Our Task For This Week

Choose a top tip and and have fun using it. There are many more tips in the book Job Hunting 3.0 which is out on 15th June. Click here to order your copy from Amazon.

Next Monday – Classic Interview Questions

Interviews are unpredictable, right? Wrong! They tend to stick to a well worn pattern and we can influence them, if we anticipate answers to classic questions. Next week, we’ll look at ones that pop up time and again. Which one do you think will be top of the list?

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Missed Last Week’s Post?

Last week was all about 3 juicy questions to ask at the end of an interview. Click here if you would like to find out more.