Boost Your Charisma: How to Attract Jobs and Inspire Others

A few weeks ago we read the book Captivate for our monthly book club and it was such a good book because I got some really actionable tips for how to immediately dial up charisma almost on cue so that you can really impress people from the moment you pop onto a zoom or the moment you walk into a networking event. Charisma really is something that you can learn to modulate. And I know that people think, oh, she's born with charisma or he's just so charismatic or they've really got something, but it is something you can learn. This book was great because the woman who wrote it actually researches this. She has a lab and she researches things like likability and how to immediately get people to warm up to you and to like you and to think that you are authoritative. So she has a number of books, but this particular book, the first half, was so applicable to our job searches and our interviews that I really wanted to share this as a podcast so that you can also get some takeaways. You don't need to have read the book to listen to this podcast. I'm going to go over the main themes, but I highly recommend picking up the book. I will link it in the show notes, of course, and if you get a chance to read it, I'd love to know your takeaways as well. This podcast episode is just the first half of our book club discussion as it really pertains to that job search piece. I might release the second half at some future time, but if you want it now, you can always pop into our free community. It is in our book clubs library and the second half of the conversation pertains to how to use these skills in your job to get promoted faster. So if that sounds like you definitely join our community and grab the full conversation. All right, we're going to jump into it a little bit midstream. I took out some of the chit chat at the beginning of the book club so we can get right to the meat of it. So enjoy and let me know what you think. Karina I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees so I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step by step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are Exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted. You're in the right place. The way we typically run these book clubs is I'm going to go through the themes of the book and relate them to what we talk about in here, which is mostly job searching and also a little bit how to excel in that job, get promoted quickly, all of those good things. I hadn't read this book before. Most of the books that I've chosen so far are books that are like oldies but goodies. I come back to the books over and over. And so this was new to me and I really liked it. And I want to read more of what she wrote. I was really impressed and she's very scientific about it. So I wanted to choose a book that had to do with body language and how you can make people like you instantly, because that's kind of the trick. And you get into these interview situations, you have such a short period of time to influence the person that you're talking to to hire you. That's your goal. Right? But that doesn't come naturally for a lot of people to sort of have natural inborn charisma or to have practiced that. And actually, it is just like anything. It's a muscle that you can develop and you can become really, really good at being charismatic and turning it on and off. And so something that some folks know about me and some don't is that I've actually had a lot of training in this area. I've invested in speech coaching. I've invested in learning how to give really good presentations. And I have spent money getting this right, and it does not come naturally to me. And I'm exhausted after I do pretty much anything. So today I had two podcast recordings. I recorded one for our Career Coach podcast. It's a great conversation. Absolutely loved it. I recorded another podcast for Building biotechs. Another great conversation. Absolutely loved it. I'm having this conversation with you. I have some client meetings in the afternoon and I am going to be dead at the end of the day. Absolutely completely wiped out. My poor husband will not get the charismatic version of me. I will just not be able to have a conversation. And that's fine with him. He's an extrovert. He can hold the conversation on his own, so it'll be fine. But all of this is to say that you do not need. I am a firm believer because I have trained myself. You don't need to be good at this to get good at it. And so that's why I chose this book. And I really liked the author's approach to it. She actually runs a lab where they test different things like charisma, like body language, like facial expressions, all of this. And I really like that because she pulls some of that in. And she also pulls a lot of really well documented research into this as well. So if you read the book from a scientific point of view, it's really sound. Her work, her research was very thorough in writing this book. So I'm going to go through a few main themes. But one thing that I really liked is that she gives us permission to not do the types of networking that we don't want to do. Now, that said, you have to interview for jobs if you want jobs. So if you're like, well, I don't like interviewing for jobs, so I'm just not going to do it. That's probably not what she means here. What she means by this first section is if you are on the job market, I'm relating this back to the job market. If you're on the job market or you're networking to further your career and you find that you really just don't like certain types of events, don't go to those types of events. That's okay. You don't have to go to every type of networking event. I personally really like networking events that have a panel discussion or some sort of a discussion. And it's not just purely like, walk into a room and start networking. I find those really uncomfortable for myself because for me, the tactics that I've always used to have a really good networking conversation have been to draw on a sort of further a conversation that maybe happened in that panel discussion or in the seminar we just watched. And I find that a much more natural way to enter conversation. I'm not really good at just saying something wacky, which is one thing that she talked about in the book is, you know, starting a conversation with an unexpected thing and being original. I'm not really good at that. That's where, you know, there's learned charisma and then there's natural charisma. And I think some people who have a little bit more of that natural ability to just walk up and say something weird that isn't weird enough to kind of put people off. It's like the right kind of weird. I don't. I don't have that skill set, and that's okay. And so I avoid networking situations where the only function is just to go Network, and then you're having to figure out and grasp at commonalities. Those are hard for me. Similarly, when I'm thinking about what I like doing in terms of my social life, I don't really. And I never have liked parties with no agenda. And so looking back at like college and things like that, I never joined a sorority. I wasn't that type. And I didn't like going to just big parties that were just. The whole purpose of the party was just to get together and party. I didn't really see the point in those. And now that I'm out in the real world, right, and I'm. I'm doing networking to further my career, I sort of equate those two things, and so I personally avoid them. However, my husband loves that sort of thing and he's an extrovert and he can strike up a conversation with anyone, and so he would not avoid those types of networking events. So give yourself permission to just say, I like this. I'm good at this. I don't like this. I'm not as good at this. I'm going to steer myself toward the types of events that are going to lend to my strengths, and then we can polish those strengths even then within those events. So I liked that she started out just giving us permission to not be good in every situation. The next thing that really hit with me is how incredibly short the time period is that we make a snap decision on whether we like someone or not. It's shorter than I actually had thought. I knew it was short, but she pulls in a lot of really good research on this. And it's under three seconds. How does that show up in an interview, I ask you? That's. That's scary, right? To contemplate that the moment somebody sees you on a zoom call, and in zoom, we have fewer cues, right? The moment somebody sees you, they're basically deciding whether they're going to hire you or not. Now, it's not quite that black or white, but how can we set ourselves up to be really successful knowing that? Because knowing it is half the battle. How can we set ourselves up to be more successful? And so here are my little tactics that I'm pulling from the book and then also just my history of interviewing thousands of people. There's a few things we can do. The first is to make sure that you have set yourself up to be happy and smiling and high energy from moment number one. So people have all different tactics on this. But I can tell you that my speech coach would talk about a ritual for getting his energy up. And so I took that and I have a ritual as well for getting my energy up. And my ritual involves listening to certain types of music and things like that. But if I need to boost my energy, I know how. I have figured this out for myself and it's different for everybody. So my immediate advice is it would be well worth your while to establish your routine that allows you to get into the energy of being magnetic, of being high charisma. And so some people do jumping jacks. I mean, I've heard of all kinds of routines and rituals. So whatever that is for you, I encourage you to experiment and find that so that you can quickly bring your energy up even if you're a little bit low energy. If you're able to come onto a zoom call and immediately be smiling, projecting and energy even through the computer screen, like that's going to be. That's going to help you. If you're in person, it's a little bit easier because then you have your body language. She talks about a lot about hand gestures and things like that. And the hand gestures are just this ancient thing that, like, I'm not. I don't have a weapon. I'm not going to hurt you. Right? Right. I'm showing you that I'm unarmed. But on a zoom call, I talk with my hands a lot, but you all can't see. See it as much. Sometimes you'll see my hand kind of pop up. But that's harder to do on zoom because you're not going to come into an interview and be like, hi, right. It's. That's just weird. But you do need to project that you're a friendly, open person and you need to do it fairly quickly. So a practice here makes perfect. The other thing is to set up your environment so that it's tidy and it is inviting. I just heard from a hiring manager the other day that we let a candidate go and one of the reasons was that they showed up in a really cluttered room with like clothes strewn all over the place. That shouldn't matter, but it does matter. It just does. Just making sure that things are tidy and not distracting so that they're immediately focusing on you and not kind of what's going on around you in your environment. That's a really good tip. Lighting your face well, being in front of a natural light source if you can, a window or, or getting a ring light. That's a very inexpensive way to super up level your game on zoom. Just making sure that you're immediately visible. You're not like shrouded in a shadow or something like that. These are ways that you can actually have a pretty significant leg up in that first impression, that first three seconds, what are they seeing? It feels awkward. But, like, smile before you start the zoom call. Be happy, be smiling. It really, really makes an impact. All right, so that was a big takeaway for me. So in that sort of subcategories, we've got eye contact, we've got hand gestures and eye contact. And so this is really hard to translate into zoom. This is something you have to practice doing. You have to practice looking at that little green dot. If you're on your Mac, right on your computer, you have to practice looking at the camera. And it doesn't mean you need to look there all the time, but you do need to do it enough that it feels natural and you're making eye contact. If you're in person, making intentional eye contact feels unnatural at first, but it really does build rapport. So practice it with some friendly faces. Think about how much eye contact do you make with your friends when you're just out having a meal or chatting with friends? Try and start to mentally log that and then try and match that amount of time. When you're interacting with new people. It's surprising how much more eye contact you actually have with people that you have a good relationship with, and you like that than you think you do. It's more than you would think. Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company, Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals, and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech. I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show. All right. The next thing that I took away was to be interested. And she quotes the famous quote by Carnegie, which is to be interesting is to be interested. And I've heard that any number of times. But it's all about dopamine. People get a dopamine hit when they're Talking about themselves, you can give that to them by simply being curious about them. And in an interview, obviously there's a give and take. You need to get your information across, that's why they're interviewing you. But there's a lot of opportunity to get interested about the company, about the culture, about what's so exciting to this hiring manager, about their work and how, how would the person they're trying to hire, hopefully you be the one that really drives that forward. Those sorts of interested questions are going to give the hiring manager or the interviewer a chance to talk about themsel and their team and the work that they are very passionate about. And they're going to leave that conversation maybe knowing slightly less about you, but liking you more. And that's okay. So understanding that part of this, you know, if, if they leave and it's an actual conversation where it's not just you monologuing about your experience, they feel they've had a good conversation and a meeting of the minds with you, that's going to be much more impactful for them. So that's the goal. And then in a networking situation, my little game that I play with myself is how little can I talk? And I know I'm here monologuing at you and talking a lot, but this is actually my introvert secret to networking is when I go to a networking event I play a game. How little can I say? And not in an awkward way. I don't ever want it to be that I'm like not talking right. But I try and ask questions that are open ended that are going to get the person talking. I try and be very curious and there are really simple ways to do this. We talked about this in the last book club as well, but. Oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that. You can pull that out all the time, right? Somebody says something and you're not quite sure what to ask. Maybe it's a little out of your wheelhouse. Oh, I've never heard of that. Tell me a little bit more about that. And then you just close your mouth again. And then they come away from that interaction feeling like they were so smart and they really imparted all of their wisdom and they feel really good about it and, and they're going to remember you for that. So that's my big networking secret.

One takeaway I've actually gotten from retail that kind of like adds into this point is people don't care what you know until they know you care.

Oh, I like that a lot. I like That a lot. Where did you, where is that a quote from something?

I used to help out at a feed store back in Texas. And so he had been in retail all his life. And so for us in the feed store it was ask them about their animals, about their horse, about their dogs. And that was your gateway to selling them products to help them solve their problems, to improve their animals health. But you know, just trying to approach them and sell them a product. They don't care about what you know about the products they're looking at until they know you care and in this case about their animals. But you know, it can be about anything. As you know, they tell me more that lets them know you care and so then they, they're more receptive to what you know.

Love that. And I'm going to, I'm going to guess and you here, what about in interviews? What do I always say? I say lead with your passion and your why did you apply for this job? Then you get to tell them what you know. But this is the why do you care? Right?

Exactly.

Oh, I love that. I love that. I'm stealing that from you all day long. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Okay. There was a lot in this book that, that follows on to the actual workplace. So they talked about the five love languages and all kinds of things. But the parts that I really wanted to talk about today were really those initial pieces which I think are most applicable in our interviewing and our networking situations. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I did edit it down so that it was as concise and impactful as possible. If you want to hear the whole conversation, including the second half where we talk about how to use these techniques to get promoted, go ahead and jump into our free biotech career development community. I will link that in the show notes or you can find it at library.collaboratorycareerhub.com and you'll find this conversation in our Career Chats Recording Library. As always, I hope this was useful to you. Let me know what you think about this book. I do highly recommend reading the whole book if you are interested in learning how to dial up your charisma on demand. Thanks for spending some time with me and bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub to join our free Slack group and to get access to other great free resources and materials. Head over to CollaboratoryCareerHub.com and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn Pro Tip. When you connect with me on LinkedIn you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. And if you leave us an honest review, screenshot that review and send it to helloollaboratorycareerhub.com we'll give you totally free access to our popular LinkedIn course so that you can learn all of the same secrets behind creating a magnetic LinkedIn profile that drives your career forward. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.