I interviewed someone recently fresh out of college. I love interviewing people like that because they’re so full of boundless optimism and think they can do anything and that attitude is kind of infectious. A colleague of mine from the UK told me a story last year of a trip he took to the US many years ago. He’d spent many months just traveling around the US and said it was a life-changing experience having so much American optimism rub off on him (quite in contrast to the mood in the UK at the time). It made me feel so proud and ashamed at the time. Proud, obviously, of my own country. Ashamed of the general pessimism (or maybe more accurately, cynicism) I was personally feeling at the time.
So anyway, I was happy to have this candidate’s optimism rub off on me and was generally impressed with his maturity and drive and apparent intelligence. I’d even written in my notes early in the interview “polished interviewee”. But over time I started to feel concerned. He had clearly taken many seminars and/or read many books on how to interview well and speak well and had clearly been an eager student of them. And he was trying his damnedest to apply those lessons. Every single question I asked him eventually came back to a summary of why my company was so great and he thought he’d be a good fit and this job fit with his goals. Every one, even me asking him why he wanted to be an astronaut at some point in his past.
That was good in a way. It demonstrated pretty clearly to me that he was interested in self-improvement and was a good student and could take advice well and apply it. But the interview told me nothing overall about who he was. It left me having to decipher for each answer how much was bullshit (or, more kindly, positive spin) and how much was the real person I’d end up having to manage if I gave him the job. So even though I found no red flags in the interview and in fact was a little excited by the candidate, I still left feeling a little uneasy.
Nobody is that perfect, and no job is a perfect fit and it’s a farce to pretend otherwise. I’d rather know up front where our challenges will be and decide to hire someone anyway than find out as a surprise when they’re already in the door.
A more experienced candidate I’d pass on right away as a result because they should know better by now. But this one I might chalk up to inexperience and well-intentioned eagerness and hire anyway. I don’t know; I guess I’ll just have to see what the other interviewers say.
