What’s The Best Way For A Manager To Interview For A Job

The best way to get the job that you are interviewing for
The best way to get the job that you are interviewing for
Image Credit: Alan Cleaver

When a manager goes interviewing for a job, they may find it odd to be on the other side of the interviewing table. We use our manager skills to do a lot of interviewing as a part of our job; however, when we go looking for our next job we need to know how to use our manager training to do so successfully. What’s the best way for a manager to get the job that they are interviewing for?

The Right Way For A Manager To Interview For A Job

Managers may have their own thoughts on the best way to interview for their next job. I think that most of us believe that all we have to do is to figure out what the interviewers want and give it to them. However, this might be the wrong approach. Studies show that catering to an interviewer’s expectations may be less effective than being authentic. Authentic means being willing and courageous enough to express your own views, opinions, and preferences, no matter how unpopular they may be.

So what’s going on here? It turns out that catering hurts our chances for two reasons. When we cater, we are intentionally choosing to minimize our own interests and preferences in favor of those of the person doing the interview. This is an effort to hide who we really are—a cognitively and emotionally draining process. What’s more, we really can’t be certain about the other person’s preferences and expectations, no matter how much research we’ve done on them. This can further raise our anxiety and hurt our performance.

Further studies have confirmed this. In a study participants who catered felt more anxious and strategic than participants who were simply being themselves. The emotional state of those who catered, in turn, hindered their performance during the job interview. Those who behaved authentically were 26% more likely to get hired than those who catered, and those in the control group were 15% more likely to be hired than those who catered (and 9% less likely to be hired as compared with those who acted authentically).

How To Get The Job

Mangers who want to get the job that they are interviewing for need to pay attention to these studies. The researchers found the same results in another study where they asked people to take the role of a person interviewing for a job that was described to them in detail, or of the person conducting the interview and evaluating candidates. Those who played the role of the interviewee were asked to either be authentic or cater to the expectation of the interviewer, without the interviewer knowing they had been asked to follow one of these two approaches. Authenticity helped participants land the job more frequently than catering did.

What managers need to realize is that when they are interviewing for a job, there is a very good chance that they may appear and act like everyone else who is applying for the job. If we are not careful, we may get passed over simply because we don’t stand out. What we need to do during the interview is communicate to the person that we are talking with who we really are. If we let them know that we are both smart and hardworking then we can stand out and we boost our chances of getting the job.

It can be a challenge to get comfortable sharing our true self during a job interview. This is not something that most of us are comfortable doing. However, if we want to be successful in our quest to get a new job, we need to understand that only by being authentic to our true nature can we come across as the person that they want to hire. If we try to cloak or shield who we are by conforming to what we think the interviewer is interested in, then we’ll end up getting passed over for the position.


What All Of This Means For You

When a manger interviews for a job, it can feel a bit strange being on the other side of the table for once. However, we need to understand that we are competing with other job candidates for this position and so we need to find a way to stand out from everyone else. The good news is that if we know how, this can be done.

It turns out that although we may think that trying meet an interviewers expectations is the way to go, it may not be. The problem with doing this is that it minimize our interests and it raises our anxiety because we don’t know what the other person really wants. If we compensate then we’ll end up feeling more anxious than if we don’t. Authenticity will help us to do a better job of landing the job that we are interviewing for. During a job interview we need to act like our true selves. This can be difficult to do. However, this is the best way to land the job.

Managers need to understand that allowing themselves to come across as the person that they really are during a job interview is the best way to land the job. If we try to compensate to meet what we think that the interviewer is looking for, then we’ll end up becoming more anxious and we’ll probably not get the job. If we can be true to ourselves then we’ll have a better chance of getting the job that we want.


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™


Question For You: If you start to feel anxious during a job interview, what can you do to calm down?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Sure you are enjoying your manager position, but wouldn’t you like to receive a raise? There is a problem with getting a raise: when it comes to using your manager skills to ask for a promotion or raise, most of us focus the conversation around the same thing: ourselves. All too often this does not get us the outcome that we want. What we really need to do is to listen to what social science research has found out about how we can make it one more rung up our career ladder.