Tools and techniques to try out:

I often get asked the question "can NLP help me in job interviews to communicate more clearly?"

I would suggest that two simple steps to effective communication are rapport and outcomes.

There's a page on rapport on the website which you may have seen - you can practise on the people around you - try matching head angle, shoulder angle, voice tone and rhythm and see what happens. Most powerful of all is to match breathing rate although this perhaps isn't the easiest to start with.

For outcomes, the NLP approach is simple - you tend to get what you want if you express your desires:

Positively (as something you want)
Congruently (with no nasty side effects)
Personally (about you and under your control)

So, one step at a time:

Express what you want as something you DO want rather than something you DON'T want. Saying you don't want to be a network designer gives me no useful information about your needs.

Make sure you do want the thing and that there aren't any side effects. For example. if you want to give up smoking (I know that's a negative) would you lose anything that you weren't expecting? e.g. confidence, social life, hunger control etc. Your unconscious mind will sabotage your attempts to change if there are any side effects to what you want.

Make sure that the thing you want is under your control to change and that it has positive effects on you and the people around you

How would this apply to interviews? Well, if your interviewer told you what he/she didn't want in a candidate then you need to explore the positive intention i.e. what he/she does want. Then you can ask "why is that important" in order to start to understand the motives and values. When you understand someone's values you can communicate much more effectively with them. Here's an example of a conversation I had with a customer this week:

etc.

Did you notice that this gets different results to just saying "OK, we'll get you a new one...."?

If we only listened to what this guy didn't want then we could wheel one account manager after another in front of him and he'd never be happy. This would actually annoy him even more, even though we'd be trying our best to make him happy. Instead, we now know what is important to him and we can satisfy him much better. Finding a word to describe the value is good, as it gives you instant feedback - when the person you're talking to says "yes! that's it" then you've 'hit the nail on the head' - by describing his value accurately you've proven that you understand it.

He went on to tell me what he does want, so now we can give it to him, making everyone happy.

You can apply the same process in interviews. When you're asked a question, you needn't always answer straightaway. Remember that the person asking the question may not actually understand it himself, so it's always worth a bit of clarification. For example,

What experience do you have in management?

Is experience important to you

Yes, you need experience

What would experience give me?

You'd have learned from your mistakes in the past

Is learning from mistakes important?

Yes

So does that mean you're expecting me not to make any more mistakes?

No, you'll always make mistakes, it's learning from them that counts

So is the ability to learn more important than experience?

Yes it is

etc.

So you've achieved two things - you've dealt with the issue of experience AND you've helped the interviewer clarify his own thinking.

Next time someone asks you a difficult question, try asking "what's important about that?" I guarantee that the other person can always find a little more clarity in their thoughts, with your help.