The Minimally Useful Industries Guide to Acing Your Interview in the Classical Stylings of Neil Strauss’ The Game
Yeah, you read the title right. Full disclosure time. We fucked up. Specifically, our intern fucked up, but as the saying goes “as fucks one, so fuck we all”. We sent our intern to the book store to pick us up some sweet books on human psychology — so that we could do some research before we told you how to mentally judo flip your interviewer into giving you a job in corporate purgatory. Well, long story short, we ended up with 65 copies of Neil Strauss’ seminal (heh) classic “The Game: Penetrating [(heh)] the Secret Society of Pickup Artists”. We’ve got deadlines to hit, and you better bet we worked with what we had and tried to come up with something to give you.
The interview is the last stage of the hiring process circle of life. You submit yourself to judgement by an individual or panel. Your entire working life is put before the tribunal, and your worth is evaluated. It puts you in a very vulnerable position. So, we’re here to help you find an edge in the process and feel a bit less vulnerable. Unfortunately, due to the *cough* unforeseeable error that we disclosed above, our resources are a bit limited (unrelated, but also limited: our intellect). But, when life gives you lemons, you open a window and make a silver lining. So, here’s how to ace your interview in 11 simple steps.
Let’s outline the steps towards getting an edge in your interview:
- Seeing and getting seen
- Opening Lines
- Positive conversations through negatives
- Disarming Traps / Overcoming Obstacles
- Isolation
- Creating an emotional connection
- Finding prime interviewing real estate
- Flirting
- Being touchy within the boundaries of work appropriate touching
- Cold shouldering
- Managing expectations
Oh. Before we start. Some of you who have read Neil’s book may notice that we don’t exactly hit the nail on the head with some of Neil’s strategies. This is due to several factors, but the predominant ones are 1) We are borderline illiterate. 2) This book kinda sucks. There’s like zero places to color, Neil talks about shit we don’t really care about (something about robots, right?). To summarize, we skimmed it. Actually, “skimmed” may even be an exaggeration. Pages were flipped. That’s all we can really say with certainty. Sorry Neil, it’s just not our bag of tea. But hey, you wrote a book! It’s not like any schmuck(s) can just publish a nonsensical guide, call it definitive, and put it out into the world. Anyway, back to our definitive guide on acing your interview.
Step 1. Selecting a Target
Hey! Would you look at that. You’re already knocking things off the list. Neil’s all like “you have to select a target” but the neat thing is, you already know who your target is — your interviewer. Sometimes, you can look your interviewer up on a social media website to get a good look at what they look like. In the event you don’t know what they look like, our “research” suggests that you should engage your mark within three seconds of seeing someone who even remotely matches any things you may know about your “mark”.
Statistically, if you say hi to everyone you see, eventually you’ll run into the person interviewing you. An added bonus to you saying hi to everyone — it’s possible that your interviewer will come to collect you while you’re saying hi and see what a social self-starting butterfly you are.
Step 2. Opening Lines.
As your interview starts, you want to ask a bunch of open ended questions to your interviewer. Ask questions that really get to the core of who they are as a person. Make them make the hard (hypothetical) decisions.
- If you could hunt any member of the Founding Fathers, who would it be and why?
- If you were about to be beaten to death, but your assailant let you choose the object with which they would assault you. What object would you pick and why?
- Which Die Hard villain is your spirit animal and why?
- If your workplace offered to pay you $300,000 a year for the rest of your life, and all you had to do was eat one human turd — would you take that deal? What’s your basement price to take the deal?
Questions like the ones above show that you’re, like, super introspective and is probably a sign of super-intelligence. You’ll check a lot of boxes here because:
- You initiated control by asking questions.
- You’ll get to know personal details about your interviewer that you can exploit later.
- The question and answer process will allow you to illustrate to the interviewer how well you listen to their answers.
Step 3. Positive conversations through negatives.
Mr. Strauss suggests that, in order to further attract the interviewer into your good graces, there’s some social jiu-jitsu that you can use to karate-chop your interviewer’s brain. It’s called “negging” and it basically boils down to casually complimenting someone with negatives about them. Since, it’s likely that you won’t find much dirt on your interviewer before the interview, we suggest starting with negging the company they work for — while simultaneously using the interviewer’s answers from Step 2.
Let’s say you’re interviewing at a bank, you could say something like:
“Wow, you guys have done really well for yourselves here. How much of that housing-bubble-bailout-money-provided-by-the-taxpayer-that-you-were-actively-fucking-over money did you need to use here to build such a nice place?”
You’ve succeeded in saying “nice place you have here” but also in keeping the interviewer getting a big head and thinking that they’re out of your league.
Step 4. Disarming Traps / Overcoming Obstacles.
Your interviewer might not be very into this new style of interviewing. Understandably so. We’re visionaries here at Minimally Useful Industries, so most of the shit we say is bleeding edge insight. If the interviewer is resistant to your charm and sweet-ass strategy, you’ll need to equip yourself to overcome various traps and obstacles.
If you get resistance, we suggest linking it to your passion. Employers love passion for shit. So, maybe say something like:
“I’m sorry if my immense passion for you and this business is upsetting, but I find it best to speak from the heart. It’s important that we really get to know each other.”
Other obstacles may include tests of your knowledge. We find it best to avoid exposing yourself and directly answering anything. Instead, we think it’s better to put yourself above it all. If someone asks you about your knowledge, simply suggest that it’s quaint that they still use such an out-of-date method. Then, suggest another method (doesn’t need to be real) that you prefer. This method is great for two reasons — One. You don’t need to know anything. Two. You’re combining negging and a sweet trap disarm. Look at you go playa.
Step 5. Isolation.
Not to be confused with Step 7, Dr. Neil suggests that you emotionally isolate your interviewer. Typically, this isn’t an issue — since you and your interviewer will be conducting a one on one interview. However, some of the more sadistic companies will attempt to subject you to a panel interview. If this happens, you’ll need to pick your target and emotionally turn them away from the other members of the panel. With most panels, you’ll have one person who is actually making the decision to hire you and the rest will just be noise and filler to try and trip you up. Our suggestion here is to complement the head interviewer (the one that you’ve identified as the alpha). You’ve still got to be nice to the beta interviewers — to show your benevolence or some shit. The key with the alpha is to suggest that you LOVE their questions and that you’d LOVE to answer them in further detail somewhere more private. Saying it another way, you don’t want to be mean to the beta interviewers — you merely want to encourage the alpha interviewer to pull themselves away from the panel to seek your answers sans those cockblocking betas.
Step 6. Creating an emotional connection.
Ideally, you’ll be creating an emotional connection throughout your interactions with your interviewer, but you should REALLY focus on this connection once you’ve isolated your interviewer emotionally. Make the interviewer feel like their world is limited just to them and you. After that, work on finding out what they want out of life. Discover their dreams and aspirations. Ask who they are. When they inevitably respond with work-related stuff, shush them and ask about who they really are. Understand them, discover them, and ultimately — love them (or at least make them think you love them — like that one time you went on that family trip down to Myrtle Beach with your family and you met that girl, Sabrina, who was also on vacation there from Tuscon. Your love burned bright — you held hands and did a lot of, what would best described as “heavy hugging,” at the pool when your parents weren’t looking. That last night in MB, you both decided that it would be best to take things to the next level. The french kiss. Due to some Puritan-esque hangups, she said she would only tongue kiss you if you told her that you really really liked her and believed that it would work. So, you told her that you would do everything to make it work and you traded your AOL Instant Messenger handles so that you could chat every night. You both committed to really really liking each other and went through that awkward “now what do we do?” when people in their early teens overcommit to something they’ve only heard the older kids talking about. Finally, she pushed into you and shoved her tongue into your mouth. It tasted like strawberry flavored bubblicious bubble gum, smelled like Banana Boat, and felt like love. The air was electric, the ocean sang of your love, and (unbeknownst to you) a homeless man watched you two while rubbing his genitals with a conch shell over-top of his poorly maintained trench coat. You sat on the pier, well into the night. In the following days, you ghosted her on AIM (even going as far to change your username) when you realized that you told her a lot of lies to impress her and hadn’t really included a single shred of truth — so you didn’t really have anything to talk about anyway. That may have been the closest thing to a pure untainted emotional connection that you shared with another human being. Distill that shit. That’s the product you’re selling — Bittersweet Myrtle Beach Teen Love — which is coincidentally what they called the AXE body spray smell prototype). Anyway, we’ve painted the moodscape, you just need to create that connection AT ALL COSTS.
Step 7. Finding prime interviewing real estate
This is the physical location of Step 5. You need to find an area that really sets the mood for the remainder of the interview. Professor Neil goes on to suggest that it’s best to conduct this interview in a secluded location to make sure someone doesn’t do the equivalent of interview cockblocking. It’s likely that this won’t be an issue, but in the event the interview is feeling a little too crowded, just ask for a tour and try to scope good locations on the move. You’re looking for intimate and sensual. In the event that there isn’t anything available, you may need to improvise and just paint a word tapestry so engaging that it takes your enamored listener to an intimate and sensual mental place.
Step 8. Flirting.
Commandant Strauss provides us with a framework for flirting — or so we assume — at this point we were doing something that could probably be considered “negligent-scale skimming”. Anyway, we’re taking this at its base level. Flirting is basically tit(heh)illating someone with sexy future speak. Painting a picture about sexy things that could be underway in the near future. So, we asked, what’s the job version of that? Talking about the sexy job that you’re going to do after you get the job. Talk your shit up hard. Say things like “I’m going to maximize the shit out of your productivity, and minimize unnecessary expenditures on the business’ behalf.” Or “I’m going to spray my hot (work)load all over every part of you(r product backlog)”. Just go with your gut and say stuff that sounds both sexy and work-y.
Step 9. Being touchy within the boundaries of work appropriate touching.
This step is certainly worthy of its own number, but it also should be apparent that this piece is not sequential. Workplace touching can happen at anytime during your interview. Really the only expected physical touching is going to be a handshake — so make it count. We suggest showing your dedication to the most sacred of human bonds by holding the handshake out to the count of ten Mississippi all while maintaining the most sensual level of unbroken eye contact. Beyond that, it’s up to your words and actions to do the touching… of hearts and minds.
Step 10. Cold Shouldering.
Strauss’ “research” suggests that the next step in the interview process is beginning to seperate yourself. Now, we know it doesn’t exactly seem intuitive to break off the connection now, but Strauss suggests that this piece is necessary to reverse-psychology crank the desire knob on the interviewer. Apparently, the less interested you seem — after having gone through all these hoops to complement without complementing, creating an emotionless emotional connection, etc… the interviewer will want you MORE if you seem disinterested. As the interview begins to wind down, turn the heat of your emotional undertones to your conversation to a brisk 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Act disinterested in the position and the interviewer. This will drive the interviewer crazy with “desire to hire”.
Step 11. Setting expectations.
Jesus Christ, are there still more steps? Ughhhhh. Fine. But this is going to be the last one…
See what we did there?
Right at the end.
We set expectations. Look at us go! We said this was the last step we wanted to do, and wouldn’t you know it? It’s the last step we’re doing. It’s just that easy.
As far as this concept’s extension to interviewing, this is the negotiation piece. Salary, benefits, etc… For this, we suggest something we call “False Settling”. This is a concept where you think about what you want, but offer something incoherent. As an example, you might say “I’d like to be paid in a monthly delivery of 29,000 indvidually wrapped Halloween-size Kit-Kats.” Then, when you get the obvious decline, you say “OK, I’ll settle for [what you want] instead.” Worst case scenario, they give you what you asked for first — which would be pretty rad to have that much candy.
Anyway, setting expectations is all about you negotiating your self-worth, so ask high and let them whittle you down.
Conclusion
Well, here’s the end. But for you, and our visionary new method of interviewing, it’s just the beginning of your adventures in the corporate hellscape. See our other articles on Surviving the Corporate Hellscape to prepare yourself to survive the bullshit.
On another note, we’ve pretty much expended our available attention span on the workplace. If you want to be included in the most up-to-date visionary stylings of Minimally Useful Industries, check out our website minimallyuseful.com.
Goodnight and Godspeed.
XOXO
