The more you interview for jobs, the more you’ll get to experience the personalities of various interviewers.
We often assume or expect that interviews will be formal, professional affairs but often they end up being something different. Sometimes you need to quickly roll with the punches as they say, during a job interview. Specifically, you have to quickly figure out the personality of the interviewer(s) and determine how the interview is going to progress.
Some people are casual by nature and will treat an interview with you in the same way. Others will keep their distance and remain formal throughout.
Personally, I’ve experienced both ends of the interview spectrum and chances are you will too over time. The key is to remember that when we get too comfortable, we often let our guard down and can start saying things that we might regret and that can hurt us during the interview.
I recall earlier in my career before I got into recruitment during a job interview where I was actually first interviewing for a recruitment job. I was interviewing with the co-owner of the company who was a bit of a hard guy to figure out. He then brought in one of the managers to interview me and by now, I was feeling fairly confident and comfortable and must have gotten a case of verbal diarrhea because after the interview with this manager, the co-owner came back in and told me that the manager had said that she thought I was a good candidate but that I “talked a lot.”
He didn’t mean this in a good way, either.
The point was that I’d let my guard down and had probably been a bit too casual with some of my answers.
I can think of numerous instances while working as a recruiter where I’ve had a hiring manager tell me that one of my candidates wasn’t the right person for their job based on how they came across during the interview and in many cases, it seems that the person treated the interview perhaps a bit too casually.
In some instances, this might actually help your cause if the hiring manager gets a connection with you and starts believing that you’re the ideal person for the job. In other cases, it can hurt you especially if you let your guard down and perhaps say things you shouldn’t have.
