Why you shouldn’t give everything away at the job interview

I can understand completely why you’d want to tell your best stories, give your best advice and generally put your best foot forward on a job interview.

There’s only one problem. When you’re on a job interview, it’s not in your best interest to lay out exactly what you think your hiring manager should do to solve his or her problems.

We tend to think that we have to “wow” the job interviewer with our observations and the quality of our thinking on a job interview.

But stop and think for a second. When you have a problem, and it’s been bothering you for ages and you’ve been thinking about it and worrying, do you want a complete stranger to say “Oh! That’s all you’re dealing with? Oh heck, that’s easy. You just do X, Y and Z.”

You might feel bad if somebody told you that the problem that’s been vexing you for months is simple to solve. It is easy to hear that message as “That’s an easy problem! You couldn’t solve that on your own? What are you, stupid?”

When you ask a person for help and they rattle off an answer to your problem, you might not believe them. And maybe you’d be right! There is always more complexity and context in a real-life business situation than a theoretical one.

When you get one of those “What would you in this situation?” questions at a job interview, you have to show how your brain works. What I don’t want you to do is give the person interviewing you the step-by-step instructions for solving his or her problem.

For one thing, if you do that many managers are going to think they’ve got the best you have to offer. And in their confused minds, they might! They will take your idea and forget where they got it. You don’t think so? It happens every day.

I went to a networking event where a local CEO was speaking. The CEO told 200 people in the room, “You should always interview people, even when you’re not hiring. Job candidates will give you great ideas for your business!”

You already know that it’s unethical to interview people on the pretext that you’re hiring when you’re not. That guy was a slime bag, but even decent and ethical people will grab a good idea and completely forget where the idea came from.

When your hiring manager is driving home after your interview, s/he’s going to be thinking about the great idea you gave him or her — not about you.

If you put the manager through a lie detector test a week after the interview, he or she will swear it was their idea all along and they’ll pass the lie detector test. In their brain, the idea came from the air. The human brain is funny that way.

Every consultant knows this! You don’t give away your best advice for free.

So what do you do? They’re going to ask you “How would you solve this problem?” and you have to say something. You have to show them your brain working. I want you to do that. I just don’t want you to say “Here’s the answer you want.”

That course of action has no good outcome for you. If they’ve already tried the idea and it didn’t work, they’ll say it’s a bad idea. If they haven’t tried the idea even though you think they should, they’ll say “We don’t like that idea. It stinks.”

Here’s what you can do when the question “How would you solve this problem?” comes up on a job interview:

MANAGER: So, Jason, you’ve seen your share of channel conflict, I’ll bet.

YOU: Indeed I have! Comes with the territory when you’re a Channel Marketing Manager. What are you dealing with in that vein right now?

MANAGER: Well, we’ve got some distributors who are complaining that our Corporate Sales team is eating into their business. These are direct accounts we’ve had forever, but a couple of our distributors are doing projects for some of the same companies and they feel that they should take over these corporate accounts from us. They say we’re undermining them. How would you solve that problem?

YOU: That’s a great question! I would treat that as internal consulting project. I’d talk to your Corporate Sales folks first, and get the history on the accounts in dispute.

I’d get on the phone with the distributors and hear all about their concerns. I’d talk to the Purchasing folks at those corporate accounts and make sure that I heard anything they want to tell me.

Then, I’d sit down with you and give you my recommendation for keeping everyone happy and keeping the orders flowing.

MANAGER: I guess I was hoping for a silver bullet.

YOU: You’re a smart guy and everybody working here is smart. If there were a silver bullet, you would have found it long ago.

MANAGER: You’re a smart guy yourself, Jason.

YOU: Thank you. Do you know if anyone on your team has talked to the corporate accounts that your distributors feel should be theirs? I ask because I’d be shocked if the distributor’s sales team hasn’t started that conversation with the corporate buyers directly.

MANAGER: That’s a really good point. Obviously we don’t want to compete with our distributors, but I don’t think they have the bandwidth to service these large accounts the way we do.

YOU: Your problems are good problems to have!

MANAGER: You’re right. If we were to make you a job offer, what would it need to look like in order for you to sign it?

It is a new day. The Human Workplace is already here. When you step into your power and treat a job interview like a meeting of two professionals on an equal footing, other people will respond the same way. If you stay locked in the idea that you’re nothing and the employer is mighty, you’ll be treated exactly that way.

Are you ready to find your voice and bring yourself to a job interview all the way? I hope so. The whole world is cheering you on!

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: Liz Ryan is the CEO and Founder of Human Workplace.

Image: Unemployed Belgian Mohamed Sammar (R) answers questions during a simulated job interview. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir.