Interviews - performance

Being present, alive and active

One of the most important things to manage in an interview is your own posture and role in it.

Far too many candidates expect it to be something like an examination at school: they ask you the questions and you will do well to the extent that you come up with the right answers.

Some of it is similar. You will be asked questions. If you prepare well, you’ll do better. There are definitely many right and wrong answers. If you are asked a question to test some required knowledge or insight, you either have it or you don’t.

But in most interviews, most of it is about discovering who you are, or rather, who you will be if you get the job. Doing well in the interview means showing that you are a person who will do well in the role.

A job interview is a business meeting. Prepare for one. You are not being inspected or examined, as if you were some merchandise. You are coming to the table as a potential partner, a colleague, a team-mate, because they have needs and you have skills and abilities that could meet those needs.

Applicant vs supplicant

Indeed there is an imbalance of power.

They are bigger than you, they have more money, there are more of them, and of course, you applied to work with them, not the other way round. It’s too easy for candidates to adopt a passive posture.

Remember, you are an applicant, not a supplicant. They may have set the agenda, but they don’t totally own it. You have an active role to play. You need to be fully present in the encounter. You will be amazed how much an interviewee who takes an active role in an interview can influence its course.

Needs, value, demonstration

In an interview, you must demonstrate how you can bring value that meets their needs.

So, three questions for you.

What do you think they need? The nice thing about their needs is that mostly, they’ll tell you what they are! They’ll do that right in the job advertisement, for example.

Sometimes, it can also help to do a bit of reading between the lines to get at what they need - but always start with what they say.

You might judge that one of the problems they have is poor testing discipline in their engineering team - they need someone to improve the team’s testing practices, not just someone who writes good tests themselves. Write that down, so that it’s staring you in the face.

What value do you have that can meet their needs? Now think about yourself, and what you have that connects to those needs.

You might have many good qualities, but you need to identify the ones that will matter to them; write those down too. Perhaps you think: I am pretty good at getting people to do new things.

How can you demonstrate that you’ll be able to bring that value? The key word here is demonstrate. For example, perhaps in a previous role, you got the whole office to embrace recycling, despite initial skepticism from management and resistance from some colleagues - that shows your ability to bring people along with you.

It’s useless to tell them “I’ll be very successful at changing a team’s attitude towards testing”. You have to show them something.

This uses two essential interview techniques you need to get used to using:

• using stories

• demonstrating value

Here’s another example:

• One of the things you read is that they want to establish more rigorous platform operating procedures (need).

• You can help meet that need, because you enjoy creating documentation, and you are good at it (value).

• What could show that? Your story of how you wrote up the post-mortem following a security incident, and used it to create the standard security incident operating procedure (demonstration).

And that way you can end up with something like the table below, a tool to have at your fingertips when you need it - especially valuable to have as an aide-memoire in an interview situation.

their needs	value I can bring	demonstration
someone to improve the team’s testing practices	I am pretty good at getting people to do new things	how I got the whole office to embrace recycling
more rigorous platform operating procedures	I enjoy creating documentation, and I am good at it	how I wrote up the post-mortem following a security incident, and used it to create what is now our standard operating procedure for responding to security incidents

Templates and resources

Needs, values, demonstration sheet

You will soon discover which particular examples resonate with other people. Be prepared to be be surprised – the ones that seem most impressive to you won’t always be the ones that others get excited about.

It takes a while to get good at thinking like this. Do it early and do it often. If the first time you do it is in an actual interview situation, that’s much too late.

Bad interview advice

Let’s get some bad advice out of the way. Bad advice is not given in order to cause harm. It’s well-intentioned, and it represents natural anxieties, inclinations and even values, which is what makes it so problematic - we often see bad advice and think: yes, that makes sense.

Being yourself

You will read, over and over again, that you should “just be yourself in the interview”.

Don’t fall for this. This advice encourages you to take a passive approach, trusting that things will work out because you are the right kind of person.

Performance

The preparation you do is for your performance in your interview. That’s performance as in “performance in an examination” or “performance on the sports field”.

Would you go into an examination or a tough competition “just being yourself?” Presumably not. The people who do that don’t do very well. The ones who do well are the ones who have prepared for that moment, so that when it comes, they are ready to be the version of themselves that can succeed in the exam or the competition.

It’s the same in a job interview. The ones who do well are the ones who have prepared, so that in the hour of the interview they can step out of where they are now, to where they are going to be.

To perform well in an interview is not to deliver a well-rehearsed speech. It’s to have thought about and thought through the challenge, imagining its possibilities and the responses you would offer in return, and to think about what that will demonstrate to your interviewer.

Performance is not who we are, but what we do. It’s separate from us, and can be measured, or at least assessed and judged.

Don’t settle for “just” doing or being anything anything. Think about your performance, and what the interviewer will have to see and measure.

Selling yourself

“How do I sell myself in a job interview?” is a common question. And you will find hundreds of articles on how to sell yourself:

Like a marketer or salesperson, your focus is on promoting yourself as the product the hiring manager should buy.

or:

To better sell yourself, in a job interview, become a salesperson. What you are selling is yourself - you are the product.

This is actually atrocious advice. It’s a terrible way to think about approaching an interview. You are not a thing. Do not try to sell yourself. Put this idea right out of your mind.

It is a very peculiar experience when a candidate starts to do this. They will judge a certain moment in the conversation to be the right one for their sales pitch, take a breath, and dive into it.

You can find advice literally to say things like:

My drive to succeed succeed and my ability to learn quickly, combined with my proactive attitude, make me confident I’ll be able to tackle the challenges of this role.

This is a completely weird thing for a human being to say. It’s irritating, even embarrassing for the interviewer. Nobody wants to hear you selling yourself. Your interviewers will not welcome your “elevator pitch”, nor you “impactful closing statement”.

What’s in common?

What’s wrong with both these examples of bad advice is that they imagine the candidate as some kind of thing.

You are not a sample of goods being measured, weighed or inspected, or sold. You are a person, and in the interview you need to be the person you are going to be, in the future, in that particular job, and that is how you need to think about yourself, during the interview and during your preparation for it.

And this is probably the single most significant thing that a candidate can do to ensure success: not to go in with the hope that what you put on the table will be be attractive, and to be concerned with that, but to go in as a participant, with a shared responsibility for making this a successful encounter.