Are You Making People Spend Too Many Brain Calories
Concentrated thought requires us to burn more brain calories. The more we require people to think about what we say in an interview could raise their brain’s metabolic requirements and encourage them to tune you out, or worse, turn you off.
The Brain Is Designed for Survival
The brain is one of the last things in our bodies to go when we part from this earth. It is literally designed for survival. All day long, your brain is automatically, without you even being aware, tuning out anything that it deems irrelevant for our survival. And imagine what life would be like if it didn’t. We wouldn’t be able to make any decision. OUr lives would be completely meaningless. We would be like the dog in Up chasing squirrels all day. Imagine going into an interview, you would think, “oh wow, look at the pattern on that tie,” or “look at that pen they’re using, I wonder if it writes with think ink or thin,” or “wow, look at this one’s resume, I wonder what it would look like with Calibri instead of Arial, would it fit on one page still.” You would randomly go into information that had nothing to do with your survival.
So what does this have to do with your interviews? Everything.
If you don’t communicate simply and concisely in an interview, you require the other person to spend more brain calories to figure out how you will help them survive, and ultimately thrive. And if you make them spend too many brain calories, they will shut down, move on, and start to tune you out.
It takes a lot of calories to process information. Anyone who has sat for a certification exam, spent a full day teaching in a classroom, or spent a day in back-to-back meetings knows at the end of the day, you are completely exhausted. All you did was sit there and think. You didn’t burn any real physical calories stocking shelves or lifting weights, but your brain burned a lot of calories processing all that information. And it’s tiring.
When our brain has to process a ton of information and burn extra calories on data that it deems to have nothing to do with its survival, it turns off. Your brain says, “I don’t need this information.” So when someone asks you to tell them about yourself and you start talking about your college experience and the awards you’ve won, and about what you really want in your next job, the person listening says, “I don’t think I’m going to burn a bunch of calories on this one.” And they start to tune out.
Or worse, during an interview, the hiring manager asks about your current job and you say, “it’s complicated.” What did you tell the other person? You told them that they are going to have to burn a ton of calories to understand why your last job experience is relevant and important to their problems and the job they need you to do. This could put your interview at risk.
Why do we conserve brain calories?
Preserving brain calories can possibly be traced all the way back to hunter-gatherers when groups of men and women would bond together for safety and security. Groups would conserve calories because they had to be ready for threats from animals or other groups. If you spent all your calories in one day, you could be dead the next when the nearby clan storms the hill and raids your group.
This may sound silly in today’s modern society, but these forms of barbarians still exist. They simply take different forms. For example, if a hiring manager spends too many brain calories in interviews, what happens when Pam from HR walks in with the latest firestorm one of your employees created? This is what modern-day barbarians look like. Or what about that key account that threatens to pull their $5M book of business later? If we spend all of our brain calories, we’re dead.
How do we ensure a hiring manager doesn’t tune us out during an interview?
By communicating about topics that help the interviewer survive and doing it as simply and clearly as possible ensures they won’t burn too many brain calories. This is how we make sure they understand us and are able to metabolize the message we are delivering. The clearest communicator will win the interview and win the job, not the most qualified candidate. People don’t hire the best person for the job and they never will. They hire the ones they can understand and connect with the fastest. We are in a race to communicate clearly.
Every piece of information we choose to share in an interview is like handing someone an apple. If you hand them one apple, they can hold it without dropping it. If you share another piece of information and hand them two apples, they’re probably still holding both with relative ease. But what happens after you hand them the third, fourth, or fifth apple? Or you share some kind of term or technical piece of information that they’re not familiar with? Now you’ve made them spend even more brain calories. This would be like dipping the apple in melted butter before handing it to them. And what happens when you hand them that fifth apple all covered in butter? They drop all the apples. Not one or two, but all of them. And this is what is happening to many of us in our interviews.
We tell the hiring manager about all our accomplishments at our last employer and how we solved all these problems, step by step, detail by detail, and by the fifth apple, the hiring manager’s brain is fighting to stay awake. You’re also in severe competition because they have another interview they are thinking about after yours. And then the phone rings and someone on the product team has an emergency. And what happens is they begin to prioritize the next interview and that phone call as more important to their survival than the nonsense we are spewing out.
We have to communicate:
simply by avoiding language that the hiring manager may not understand
clearly by having a controlling idea for our interview and bringing everything back to that idea
5 Step Answer Guide and Examples