Should you just be yourself in a job interview?

Lots of graduate students and other people on the job market are advised to not be themselves in a job interview. Yourself? God, no. Please.  The idea you could be yourself is a symptom of grad student naiveté, so the idea goes, quickly shed once you become more job market savvy. Job consultant Karen Kelsky calls the be yourself advice one of the most persistent academic myths, and writes ""yourself"  is the very last person you want to be."

The problem is, while Kelsky is not wrong about the reasons for why "just be yourself" is terrible advice, the advice not properly contextualized is confusing. It is confusing because it leaves the candidate wondering, "If not myself, who should I be?" And it seems the answers to that, which I've encountered as a mentor fall along the following lines.

Many job candidates mistakenly believe that because fit is so important (it is, as I'll go into in a bit) they need to pretend that they will perfectly fit the requirements of the position. Can you teach advanced logic? Sure I can! (problem: what if you only ever took one logic course, and that was in your by now nebulous undergraduate?). Can you teach medieval philosophy? Not a problem! We need someone who will work on classic epistemology, are you at all interested in that? Of course, I'll just drop all my interests in social epistemology and I will work on Gettier problems and Cartesian skepticism.

The problem with this approach is twofold: first, pretending to be a different person - the one who will teach advanced logic, and medieval, and do classic epistemology, is hard even under ordinary circumstances. It would require extraordinary thespian qualities to pull off under the stress of an interview, be it on Skype or in person. Your temporary persona will feel fake. 

It is also dangerous as a bit of follow-up questioning by experienced search committee members (and people typically have served in several of these) will reveal that you are in fact not the perfect fit candidate who will fulfil their every need. For example, they could follow up by asking, "Great to hear you can teach advanced logic. How would you structure the course? What kinds of course books and materials would you use?" - you're toast.

Second, given that job market mobility is low in the philosophy job market, in the US particularly, your colleagues will have to put up with you for years, maybe the rest of your career. So while things like teaching and research excellence matter, the internal cohesion of the department and how you add to that also greatly matter. This is why, I think, the Princeton practice of hiring people without interview is not widespread. We need to get a sense of how interpersonal dynamics are, and the interview (which has low evidential value for job performance, as is well known) does give some sense of that, as well as how you will develop, what your interests are, etc.

If you pretend to be someone entirely different, the evidential value of the interview is very low, even lower than it already is under good conditions. You will have in effect not provided evidence that is useful to the search committee.  You'll just have done a performance, jumped through some hoops where the idea is that if only you behave in a way that is desirable to the search committee, you'll get to the on campus (or if this is the on campus, you get the job). 

Still, the advice "Just be yourself" is not good advice. It needs to be qualified. You need to be confident and present your best self, your professional confident self you will eventually grow into. As Kristen Irwin advises her students "let your flag fly, but just make sure it's clean and the edges are hemmed". 

The objection might be, how is this different from the perfect fit candidate who desperately tries to demonstrate 100% fit? While I think the perfect fit approach does not work, the best self approach does, and I'll end by highlighting what the best self approach involves and how it differs from the perfect fit approach.

1. The best self approach is one where you present your strengths while being honest about your limitations. You need to practice, through mock interviews and in the mirror, to give confident answers. But they'll be answers that reflect you as a scholar. For example, take the question: "Would you work on classic epistemology" Here's your best self answer "I'm doing social epistemology now, and I'm looking at issues X and Y, and I'm developing a new model of testimonial transmission along X and Y lines. I make connections with more classic epistemological themes such as scepticism about knowledge, and I'm applying it to the question of skepticism in a social epistemological context". See what you did there? You make an effort to speak to what they want, but you're also you, with your interests. And it might spark the interests of the committee too. Do they want a carbon copy of their own interests, or someone with fresh ideas they'll want to engage with and build an intellectual community with? My sense is the latter. 
2. The best self approach is honest about where you cannot meet them. "I am not able to teach advanced logic because XXX [be brief]. I could teach and advanced critical thinking class, though, and I'd structure it in this way [be brief]."  Search committees typically have experienced members who have seen lots of job candidates. They'll appreciate someone who is honest about what they can and cannot do. Note: don't set yourself too high a bar of what you can do. Perhaps the advanced logic is a stretch, but you could still teach, say Medieval, if you have some other affinity with history of philosophy. You don't need experience in giving a course to be able to realistically give that course. Your best self approach is to speak about, say, your teaching experience in Early Modern and then providing them with a preview of how you teach Medieval.
3. The main tricky thing with the best self is that you'll still need to be able to talk in a coherent, clear and crisp fashion, talking about what makes you distinctive in a way that is engaging to the faculty and not just purely focused on your own needs, connecting to them (think of what they want, what you can offer, how they connect). That takes practice. It takes practice to hem the edges of your flag. Hence, it's important to practice. But what you ultimately provide in that interview is not a fake persona, but really and truly you, the scholar you will be if hired as a faculty member. It is exciting and interesting to conceive of yourself in a way, which will not be soul-destroying in the way that the perfect-fit model is. 

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Helen: I think this is a great post. Interestingly, I think it also illustrates why interviews are so problematic, and why Princeton has it right.

Consider the following points you make: “This is why, I think, the Princeton practice of hiring people without interview is not widespread. We need to get a sense of how interpersonal dynamics are, and the interview (which has low evidential value for job performance, as is well known) does give some sense of that, as well as how you will develop, what your interests are, etc. If you pretend to be someone entirely different, the evidential value of the interview is very low, even lower than it already is under good conditions.”

This is exactly the problem with interviews. They don't merely poorly predict job-performance. They poorly predict job-performance in large part because they are unreliable measures of personal qualities and dynamics. Committees want to know the interpersonal dynamics, but interviews are a *terrible* way to measure those dynamics because they are (A) a performance, (B) under highly artificial conditons, where (C) candidates are incentivized to *not* be themselves, thus (D) giving committees poor information about the candidate’s actual interpersonal skills. I’m a good example: I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I come off very differently in interviews than I do in person—say, on a campus visit.

This is just one of many reasons why interviews are worse than having little evidential value: they actually have negative evidential value. The science confirms this. It shows that no matter how much hiring committees might *think* interviews give them valuable insight into candidates' personal qualities, interviews don't in fact do this with any reliability. Princeton is doing what the science clearly shows works best. It is shame that just about everyone else uses practices (screening interviews) that the science shows we shouldn’t use.

That being said, given that hiring committees do hold interviews, your advice is right on the mark! ;)

[Helen De Cruz]

Hi Marcus - I am curious what you think about on campus interviews. Given the length of these interviews, would you say they provide some evidence? (there is still a performative aspect to them but my sense is also plenty of engagements where people might get a better assessment of what the person would be like as a colleague). Would going straight on campus after making a shortlist be an option?

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Helen: yes! There are many things that are problematic about short screening interviews—but two primary things known to contribute to how poorly they predict things is how short they are and how they don’t simulate actual job performance. The science shows that observations over much longer periods of tIme that involve job-like performance *are* good predictors of job performance. And that is exactly what on campus visits do. They give observers a full day or two to observe the candidate doing things that actually approximate the job: research talks and teaching demos, as well as lunches and dinners that enable the candidate to settle in and convey more of what they are actually like. So again, Priceton has the science exactly right: the best thing to do is to go straight to on-campus interviews.

[JDF]

Princeton does not 'go straight to on-campus interviews'. They just do not interview. They hire simply on the basis of the application file and written work.

[Marcus Arvan]

JDF: thanks for the correction. The science says that’s a good method too. Generally speaking, the science holds that past performance is the best predictor of future performance—and that it is best to hire people on the basis of their work rather than performance in interviews (see https://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2016/01/on-academic-hiring-practices-and-the-science-of-selection.html ). The science just indicates that if interviews are done at all, the best kind are long ones that closely simulate on the job performance. So Princeton is still doing something the science says woelse. But thanks for the correction!

[Paul]

"in the US particularly, your colleagues will have to put up with you for years, maybe the rest of your career. So while things like teaching and research excellence matter, the internal cohesion of the department and how you add to that also greatly matter."

Interesting post and conversation, thanks Helen. I am also inclined to get rid of first round interviews, but do think that we still need campus interviews. But I agree that if I am going to potentially work with you for 30 years, I want to have at least some indication that we can work together. And I want to know that you can teach our students and that your research is hopefully something that we find interesting, but more importantly that you can convey that research clearly and compellingly to a broader audience. If you can't do that, you will have a hard time getting tenure since it has to go through the university tenure committee, which is drawn from across the university.