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It’s important to have the right skills and relevant experience when you’re interviewing for a new job. If you have the perfect, purposeful background, attended Harvard, and have an MBA from Stanford and a law degree from Yale, but you’re incapable of connecting with people, you’re going to fail. To succeed in the interview, you need to immediately establish rapport and build a warm relationship with the interviewer, as well as with all the other annoying people you are forced to meet.
The goal is to feel comfortable with yourself. You want the interviewer to get to know the real you. Opening, the manager will start contacting you. The interview will begin to flow more naturally. For many, it is a herculean task to play well, to be pleasant, sociable, not too pushy, smart, charming and polite. If you don’t have any of these traits (and most of us don’t), pretend you do. If this is you, try to find someone who exudes charisma and emulate him or her.
Most people walk into the interview room and immediately completely change their personality. Their voice drops a few octaves to sound serious, strong and controlled. Their body language becomes stiff, cold and unnatural. We subscribe to the idea that you should be uptight, hide your personality, and act like a corporate robot. It’s difficult—and nearly impossible—for hiring managers to get to know and warm to a plastic corporate drone. To stand out from the crowd, you need to let your personality shine, but only if it’s a good one. If not, definitely be someone else. After all, no one wants to hire someone who is incapable of holding a conversation and is completely devoid of emotion.
The secret is this: people hire someone they feel comfortable with. The boss wants someone to go to lunch with, someone to cover for them when they’re hungover and just trying to hide in their office, and a willing supplicant to take the blame when things go wrong. The other 10 employees you meet with at the company will assume that the hiring manager has essentially singled you out and only cares if you’re nice and cool to hang out with.
Showing your personality might not be the easiest thing to do when you’re talking about boring work-related details. “What are your hobbies?” is one of the most frequently asked interview questions. It’s a valid question, but it also opens the door to trouble—namely, because by talking about yourself, you might end up revealing some tidbits of information that could end up costing you your job. Taxidermy, larping, sitting on the couch, drinking beer and watching basketball, time travel, playing games with your friends all weekend (especially if you’re 40), escapism, witchcraft, and taking care of your 14 cats may not appeal for a future new boss.
Be careful with other more socially acceptable hobbies. For example, I remember interviewing a guy for my company and he mentioned that he arrives at work at 09:30 in the morning as he does a morning jog and then, later in the day, has a long lunch to go to the gym . I was seething as I am in the office at 7:30am eating lunch at my desk. Yes, I’m a little manically obsessive, but I knew right away that his priorities were different than mine.
Talking about your personal life may seem like a natural thing to do in an interview, but there are some details you should aim to keep to yourself. Say your favorite hobby is volunteering for a political cause. You may believe that this is the best and most useful goal in the world. Meanwhile, the interviewer may have diametrically opposed political views to you and not be too happy with your fun outside the office. I see this all the time. Candidates will disclose on their resumes which congressman, governor or presidential candidate they spent time campaigning and ringing bells for to help them win. I cringe when I read that, thinking that the hiring manager would be hurt about it if he supported opposition politicians. It’s just not worth the risk.
If you are asked about your current or previous managers, it is forbidden to say anything bad about them. Even if you want to scream that your boss is a horrible, pathetic, no-good person, don’t. Maybe you worked for a psychopath, but keep it to yourself. If you brainstorm past managers, the manager you’re currently interviewing with will wonder who’s really to blame. Since they won’t be sure who is at fault, it’s easier for them to just move on and move on to a new candidate.
As a general rule, you should always try to keep certain taboo topics out of the interview – religion, politics, gossip, your love life (or lack thereof), conspiracy theories and partying. As for the family, be careful. If you brag about leaving the office early at your current job to get out of the office in time to be in the suburbs to coach your kid’s baseball game, the interviewer might not have kids, live in the city, and angry at your sense of entitlement to just run out of the office on a sunny, spring day while they’re stuck there slogging away.
There are times when you do not need to provide personal information. Learn what companies are legally allowed to ask and what they are not. For example, interviewers cannot ask about your religion, marital status, sexual orientation, marital status, or whether you have children. If any of these topics come up, you are perfectly within your rights to respond that you prefer not to discuss this aspect of your personal life. In the real world, you might want to discuss some of these things if it allows you to connect with the interviewer.
Talking about your personal life during a job interview really comes down to getting the balance right. You want to be honest but not over-sharing, and with any luck the people you talk to will get a realistic understanding of your winning personality.
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