Interviews Are Not Interrogations
By Dara Halloran · Under Pressure
Many people walk into an interview holding a frame: this is a test, they have the answers, I am being assessed, and I might fail.
That frame is not entirely wrong, and it produces specific, predictable, damaging behaviour.
What the frame does to you
You answer the question you were asked instead of the question underneath it. "Tell me about a difficult stakeholder" gets a literal account of a difficult stakeholder, rather than a demonstration of how you handle conflict, which is what was being asked for.
You over-explain. Uncertain whether the answer landed, you keep going. The good answer was ninety seconds; you gave four minutes and the last two undid the first two.
You avoid saying anything definite. Hedged answers cannot be marked wrong. They also cannot be remembered, and afterwards nobody can recall a single thing you said. There is more on how hedges undercut a speaker in powerless speech.
You do not ask anything real. Because in a test, the person being tested does not get to ask questions.
The better frame
Two people are working out whether a thing should happen. They have a problem. You may be the solution. Both of you are trying to find out.
This is a more accurate description, not positive thinking. The interviewer has a role to fill and would generally like the process to end with a good hire, which means they want you to do well. They are not looking for reasons to fail you so much as for reasons to be confident.
The behaviour that follows is different:
- You can say "I do not know" and then say what you would do
- You can say "before I answer, can I ask what is driving the question", which is what a colleague would do
- You can have a view, including one they might not share
- You can decide they are not right for you, and say so pleasantly
Four changes in the room
Answer the underlying question. Behind almost every interview question is a simpler one: can you do the job, will you handle it when things go wrong, will people want to work with you. Answer that, using the question you were given as the vehicle.
Land it and stop. Give the answer, give one example, stop. If more is wanted, more will be asked. The discipline of stopping is one of the biggest improvements available to most interviewees, and it is mostly about tolerating a two-second silence.
Bring specifics. Interviews are won on concrete detail, exactly as talks are. "I improved the release process" is nothing. "Releases took eleven days; we got to three by cutting the second sign-off and nobody has missed it" is an answer they will still remember on Friday.
Ask questions you want answered. Skip the performance questions and ask real ones: what does the first ninety days look like, what has gone wrong with this role before, what would make you regret hiring me.
That last change has research behind it, though not from interviews specifically. Karen Huang and colleagues asked strangers to chat online and told some of them to ask more questions.1 Those who asked more were liked more, and follow-up questions, the ones that build on what the other person just said, did most of the work. Participants did not predict this; they underestimated how much asking would help. An interview is a stranger conversation with stakes, and a real follow-up question shows you were listening rather than waiting for your turn.
A worked example
Question: "Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager."
The test-frame answer narrates the disagreement in detail, defends the candidate's position at length, and ends somewhere around "and in the end we sort of agreed to disagree."
The conversation-frame answer recognises the underlying question, will you push back usefully and then commit, and answers that. "My manager wanted to launch before the data migration was tested. I put the risk in writing with one number, the share of customers whose records would break if it failed, and proposed a one-week delay. She disagreed, we launched, and I spent the week on a rollback plan instead. We did not need it, but she asked for the same kind of risk note on the next release."
Under a minute. A position, a specific action, an honest outcome, and evidence that the working relationship survived. Then stop, and let them ask.
How you sound still counts
The frame changes your behaviour; it does not make delivery irrelevant. Timothy DeGroot and Stephan Motowidlo analysed recorded interviews with managers and measured features of their voices.2 A score built from those vocal features predicted how interviewers judged the candidates, and it also predicted the managers' actual job performance. The link ran largely through how much the listener liked and trusted the speaker. More on that study is in visual and vocal interview cues.
The practical reading is modest. Speak at a volume that does not ask the interviewer to lean in, vary your voice as you would in a real conversation, and let your answers end on a falling, finished note rather than trailing off.
The nerves are not the problem
You will still be nervous, and that is fine and normal. A certain amount of visible investment reads as caring about the outcome.
What reads badly is the behaviour the test-frame produces: over-explaining, hedging, agreeing with everything. Change the frame and much of that behaviour changes with it, whether or not the nerves do.
Before your next interview, write down the three underlying questions, can you do it, will you cope, will people want to work with you, and draft one specific story for each. Then write two questions you genuinely want answered. That is preparation for a conversation, which is what you are walking into.
References
- Huang, K., Yeomans, M., Brooks, A. W., Minson, J., & Gino, F. (2017). It doesn’t hurt to ask: question-asking increases liking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 430–452. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000097
- DeGroot, T., & Motowidlo, S. J. (1999). Why visual and vocal interview cues can affect interviewers’ judgments and predict job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(6), 986–993. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.84.6.986