Six job interview tips from Google’s Laszlo Bock

Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015. Laszlo Bock’s role is as of 2015; he left Google in 2016.

Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of People Operations, who has already explained the only ways to keep the best employees in a company, is the author of the book Work Rules!. This time he offers some tips and tricks for landing a job at any company.

Bock starts from the premise that most interviewers are not very good at interviewing in a way that brings out a candidate’s best qualities.

Here is an abridged section of Work Rules! that Bock himself published on his LinkedIn account, explaining how to get through a job interview.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression” was the main slogan of a Head & Shoulders shampoo advertising campaign in the 1980s. Unfortunately, it captures how most interviews work.

Tricia Prickett and Neha Gada-Jain, two psychology students at the University of Toledo, worked with their professor Frank Bernieri on a study reporting that judgements made in the first 10 seconds of an interview could predict its outcome.

They recorded interviews and then showed shorter and shorter “slices” of the tape to university students. For 9 of the 11 variables they tested, such as intelligence, ambition and confidence, they found that the observers made the same assessments as the interviewers. Even without meeting the candidates. Even when shown a clip as short as 10 seconds. Even with the sound off.

In other words, most of what we think of as “interviewing” is really a search for confirmation bias. Most interviews are a waste of time, because 99.4 per cent of the time is spent trying to confirm the impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds. “Tell me about yourself.” “What is your greatest weakness?” “What is your greatest strength?” Worthless.

So if you are looking for a job, the fact that most interviewers do not know how to interview is a great opportunity, because that weakness lets you control the encounter. It lets you win. Here is how.

How to get through a job interview

1. Predict the future

You can anticipate 90% of the questions you will be asked in the interview: Why do you want this job? What is the hardest problem you have solved? Write down the main questions you think they will ask you and practise your answers.

(Read: 3 terrible interview questions interviewers should stop asking)

2. Plan your attack

Write down your answer to each question. That makes the answer stick in your brain. This matters, because your answers will come automatically and you will not have to work out each one during the interview.

3. Have a backup plan

In fact, write down three answers to each question. Why three? You need a good, different answer to each question, because one interviewer may not like your story. The next interviewer can hear a different story. That way they can become your advocate.

4. Sell yourself

Every question should be answered with a story that shows you can do what is being asked of you. Always tell a story or give facts that prove you are who you say you are. In the end, every interviewer knows deep down (as long as they care about the company) that it is not so much about what you have as about what you can do in the company, what you can contribute to its growth.

5. Read the room

Look around. Focus on the interviewer. In the first 10 seconds, see whether there is something in their office you can use to build a connection: a book on the shelf, a family photo, a painting, and so on. Read the interviewer: is their body language open or closed? Sometimes, just as when we buy something, we get a discount because the seller has a reason to give us one. In an interview, a reason to hire us can be a bond of affinity. If we manage to be liked, we will already have done a large part of the work.

6. Practise before every interview

It is no different from success in business or in a career and skill. Practise and practise. Rehearse the questions and answers out loud again and again until you answer without hesitating, so that when you get to the interview the answers come out automatically.

Remember that, in a way, and although it sounds somewhat sad from a professional point of view, it is not the best candidate who gets hired, but the one who manages to win over the interviewer during the minutes the interview lasts.

A job interview is not a place to be completely sincere, because hardly any interviewer is prepared to receive sincerity from a candidate. Ultimately, the job interview is a playing field where you have to use sales techniques. The truth is that an interview is a negotiation in which you are the product. If you sell yourself well, they buy, and if the customer is later unhappy with the product, they return it (they fire you).

And do not forget some of the factors outside your control that can affect whether you get hired.

Further reading

• 10 things not to do before and during a job interview
• 12 reasons you didn’t get the job that nobody will tell you

Featured image: Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.