Despite repeated suggestions that we should “just be ourselves” during job interviews, it is clear that a moderate amount of deception, and skilled impression management are generally preferable to revealing our authentic self.
Although typical job interviews are modest predictors of future job performance (around 9% overlap/explanatory power), it is virtually impossible to get any job without first going through an interview.
In fact, employers and hiring manager will often just rely on a job interview to make hiring decisions, undermining other indicators of job fit and potential, such as science-based assessments, past experience, and credentials.
This makes the interview a high-stakes situation, where the difference between saying the right things or not can mean a job offer or not. Indeed, AI and machine-learning scoring of job interview responses, especially via natural language processing, highlight significant associations between the words candidates use and their major psychological qualities, including the Big Five personality traits. Not just what you say but also how you say it impacts assessors’ perceptions of your hirability, as meta-analytic studies show reliable correlations between a person’s accent and how they are evaluated on job interviews.
Interesting, the last few years have seen a great deal of consensus among self-proclaimed interview and career coaches about the notion that we should approach the interview with full sincerity, so as to showcase our “real” or “authentic” self to others. In other words, the best answer is the one that comes straight from our heart and reflects our honest, intuitive, and instinctive views on their questions. After all, if a potential employers doesn’t appreciate us for “who we really are, deep down”, then what’s the point of working with them?
Despite the popular appeal of this idea, nothing could be more detached from reality. In fact, decades of scientific research highlight the main advantages of “faking good” or engaging in skillful impression management, overconfident self-promotion, and exaggeration during an interview, especially compared to radical candor.
Consider the following facts:
(1) Impression management is an essential ingredient to career success: There is a logical reason for “faking good” during job interviews. That is, the ability to manage impressions and put on a desirable behavioral repertoire in interviews reliably predicts your ability to do so once you are in the job. And, while there is a big difference between being good at your job and pretending to be good at it, most people are rewarded, compensated, and promoted for the latter rather than the former. The reason is equality obvious: in most jobs, particularly knowledge economy jobs, performance evaluations are contaminated by subjectivity, politics, and impressions. Indeed, once you remove the performative aspect to ratings of job performance, there is very little left. Concerningly, this is particularly true in highly-skilled, highly-paid, complex jobs: paradoxically, the more senior you are, the more power you have, and the more you get paid to do what you do, the harder it is to know whether you are any good at your job – or at least to prove it with data. To be sure, power confers the ability to dictate what indicators of “esteem” should be equated to performance metrics. When senior leaders claim that their company increased profitability or revenues by 20-30% during their tenure, the obvious question is “because of them or in spite of them?”. In short, corporate cultures reward the politics of impression management, so if you cannot fake it during an interview, you will probably fail in your career.
(2) Impression management signals emotional intelligence (EQ): The self-help industry perennially celebrates both EQ and authenticity, but people with high EQ excel at concealing their true emotions, managing impressions, and convincingly displaying fake or posed emotions in order to influence others. There is nothing unethical or machiavellian here; there are many benevolent and prosocial ways to leverage these skills, but an important benefit is to better navigate interpersonal relations and politics at work. In other words, people who are truly authentic at work, in the sense of showcasing their uninhibited, unfiltered, and uncensored emotions and thoughts to others, without any concern of how these may impact them, are the archetype of low EQ individuals. In contrast, the ability to fake interest, warmth, and empathy with others even when you cannot stand them (something that can inevitably happen when you are interviewed by someone who shows little interest in you and quite a few biases against you) is indicative of high EQ. And, since a higher EQ is linked to all sorts of positive subjective and objective career benefits, including superior management and leadership skills, a positive appreciation of candidates’ impression management during the interview is in effect an accurate validation of their EQ.
(3) We are not good at detecting deception, either in ourselves or others: Although making inaccurate claims about objectively provable facts is a poor strategy (except, it seems, in politics, where voters are rather indifferent about this), there is no definitive way for someone to tell if you are lying about, say, your self-reported leadership, team work, or competence capabilities. In fact, the human ability to detect or spot detection is more or less at chance level (you may as well flip a coin). Furthermore, decades of research show that we are particularly bad at spotting deception in those who have deceived themselves, which explains why deluded narcissists are frequently perceived as competent instead of accurately identified as overconfident, and why fearless individuals, including those with psychopathic levels of greed and ambition, so frequently engage in effective self-promotion during interviews, to the point of being seen as charming and charismatic. Contrast this with the common tendency to punish people who are smart but quiet, competent but humble, and truly interested in having their achievements speak for themselves. Although these qualities are precisely what we should be looking for, especially if we want to improve organizational cultures and upgrade the quality of our future leaders, most interviewers would prefer self-promoting charlatans to unassuming, unselfish, low key candidates, irrespective of their actual level of competence.
(4) The expectation is that you will fake: If for some reason you decide to approach the interview with the idea to be completely factual, honest, and self-critical, as opposed to adorning, inflating, or exaggerating your reports of your past experience, current skills, and future capabilities, people may still assume that you are exaggerating, so they will still “discount” 30-40% from what you say. For example, telling someone that you have basic knowledge of a second language may result in them concluding that you don’t speak that language at all, since the typical self-assessment for someone who has basic knowledge is to say they are fluent or at least conversational. To be sure, some claims could be tested there and then, but the majority of claims will only be tested once you are on the job, or perhaps not even then – especially if your boss ended up getting their job for the same reasons.
To be sure, I am not advocating for a world in which con artists advance at the expense of competent, hard-working, and moral people. In fact, this is our current world, and that is largely enabled by the job interview, especially in its unstructured, poorly designed, common form. But, in order to fix the interview, we first need to fix how we measure the value people contribute to their teams and organizations. This would reduce the problematic gap between people’s career success, and their actual job performance. So long as interviews are validated against future ratings of job performance, which are corrupted by bias, politics, and favoritism, not to mention workers tendency to devote more time to self-promotion and managing up, than to actual work, they will remain a useful predictor of career success, rather than a tool that can be used to increase organizational effectiveness, meritocracy, and talent-centricity in companies.
The simplest opportunity to de-bias recruitment is to remove job interviews, at least until you can improve them. But the pre-condition for this requires a very bold decision, namely to completely sanitize or sterilize performance evaluations, so that successful politicians (including parasitic free-riders) are no longer allowed to extract value from an organization without adding much, and hurting fairness and organizational effectiveness.