Listening Skills

Listening is a skill designed to encourage the candidate to speak up more and to prevent you from doing all the talking. We often assume that as we have two ears and don’t have any hearing defects then listening is not a problem for us. But most of us are poor listeners, and need to develop our skills. It is very easy to be distracted by noise or movement and our attention
spans can be quite short. Sometimes when we like someone we listen intently to what they say, whilst with others we mentally switch off. In an interview situation not listening can put the candidate off. In other words we need to actively listen and this can be done by using the following simple techniques:
Eye contact – shows you are listening and encourages the candidate.
Nodding – gives encouragement.
‘Mirroring’ – matching your body posture with that of the candidate subconsciously relaxes them.
Encouraging – ‘Yes, go on’ or ‘Mm, yes’ is another form of prompting them to continue.
Paraphrasing – ‘So, what you are saying is…’ shows you have the gist of what they said.
Summarizing – may be useful when you want to be very clear what they said.
Minimal Note-taking – taking too many notes means you break eye contact and can be off-putting for the candidate in any case.

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