🌷 How To Be Impressive in a Job Interview Without Sounding Like a Braggart

Five science-based recommendations to talk about your qualifications in a meaningful and effective way.

Job interviews are the fortune cookies of hiring—vague and often misleading. But companies keep using them, despite research suggesting that typical job interviews are mostly unreliable predictors of future job performance, because they give hiring managers the illusion of insight, and a convenient way to validate gut instinct with zero data.

It’s not that all interviews are useless; some formats, like structured behavioral interviews with scoring rubrics, including AI-based scoring algorithms that match responses to actual outcomes and future performance, can be moderately predictive. But the typical unstructured interview? Oftentimes, it conveys the illusion of predictability by allowing hiring managers and interviewers to unleash their biases and subjective preferences during the interview, and then reactivate those same biases during their job performance ratings and evaluations of those candidates, once they become employees. It’s mostly a personality contest masquerading as a talent evaluation.

So if you want to distinguish yourself, be the person who not only speaks well—but listens even better. For example, after you answer a question, try asking, “Did that answer what you were hoping to learn?” or “Would you like more detail on that?” It’s called being a kind and socially skilled human, and it’s rarer than you think.

The candidates who perform best in interviews are often the ones with the most confidence, charisma, and charm. Unfortunately, these traits are also the calling cards of narcissists, Machiavellians, and the occasional smooth-talking psychopath. What passes for “leadership gravitas” can often be ego dressed in a blazer.

Read the complete Fast company article BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic: https://www.fastcompany.com/91317119/how-to-not-sound-like-a-narcissist-in-an-interview