Should You “Be Yourself” At a Job Interview?

This write-up is inspired to a great extent by an excellent guest post over at The Unemploymentality (a great blog for anyone looking for a cheerful, tongue-in-cheek outlook on unemployment). One of the central themes of the original post was whether you should “be yourself” at a job interview, or if you should adopt and morph to the expectations of the interviewer.

And that, I think, is a question we’ve all been confronted with. After all, how many times has one of your well-meaning friends told you to “relax and be yourself” when they spotted  you being all jittery before an interview? How many times have you heard the notion that interviewers appreciate honesty in a candidate (or, worse still, that honesty is the best policy at a job interview?)

On the surface, it seems that an interview would appreciate a candidate who doesn’t exaggerate or bloat their achievements and instead tells things how they are. In fact, some believe that it would even help them distinguish themselves from all the other candidates who came to the interview solely to explain why they’re the best candidate since Bill Gates decided to have a go at running Microsoft.

And here’s the simple truth.

The interviewer will thank you for your honesty - right before they decide that you’re not qualified for the job.

You see, at a job interview, your goal is to present yourself in the best possible light - and that meanings glossing over unsuccessful efforts at previous jobs, bad experiences or uncomfortably long periods of unemployment. Whichever way you slice it, if you were to sit down and explain honestly that you got fired from  your last job for sexually harassing the secretary, you’re not going to get the position you’re applying for, no matter how good you are.

In many ways, job interviews are like public performances. Performers come to entertain - and candidates come to sell themselves to the prospective employer. In both cases, the audience doesn’t want to see a poorly-dressed guy who hasn’t shaved for a few days and stinks like they just took a swim in the sewage filtration system. They want a dazzling young bloke who can convince them that he is the right guy for the job, and has an impressive list of accomplishments to back it all up.

Needless to say, you can’t put your best foot forward and still be yourself - and, since the two terms are mutually exclusive, it makes sense to drop one in favor of the other.

Now don’t get me wrong here - I am not encouraging you to lie or mislead your prospective employer! But there’s a world of difference between glossing over some of your more uncomfortable experiences and blurting them out in a fit of honesty and being yourself.

Sure, it might make you feel better - but it won’t get you the job. Because even as you decide to be honest about everything, there’ll be ten other candidates out there who won’t - and they’re the ones who’ll get hired.