Some of the best people will say all of the wrong things during an interview – you should hire them anyway

Some people are shy. Some people are introverts. Some people are awkward. You should still hire them if they are talented.

Not everyone knows how to sell themselves. Job candidates are told to put their best foot forward, but some have no idea how to do that. In fact, some badmouth themselves, accidentally sabotaging their chances of getting a job. If you are wise, and you listen carefully, you can sometimes discover a gem that has failed most other job interviews. It is your job, as the interviewer, to discover the great talent that has been overlooked by other companies.

I’ll give you an example. The year was 2006, and I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. We needed to hire a Flash programmer. I put out a notice, got some responses, and did some interviews. I eventually found a woman, whom I’ll call Lisa, who was a little less experienced than some of the other candidates, but she seemed highly motivated. She was in her early 20s and just barely out of college. Her ambition was to become a great programmer, and that came across in the projects she had done. I decided I wanted to hire her, but I had to justify the hire to Timothy, my business partner. He had veto power. We all met at the office, out in Nelson County, 45 minutes outside of Charlottesville.

Not every talented person is talented at explaining their talent

When the three of us met, Timothy gave a bit of a speech about the difficulties we were facing — but also about how ambitious we were to reinvent ecommerce, especially as it related to digital goods such as songs and videos. I thought his speech was a reasonable attempt to lay out the problems we’d expect Lisa to solve.

Lisa then replied, “Yeah, I know, I’m so scared. When Lawrence offered me this job, I didn’t think I could do it. I mean, it’s all so complicated, and the connections to be made over the network are so uncertain, and then, everything, the timeouts, the servers, lost messages, sockets, everything I have to think about it, it’s just really overwhelming and I feel scared, you know? I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I guess, I don’t know, maybe I should give it a try, right?”

I was astounded by this, and not in a good way. I’d been assuming that she was smart enough to know that she should put her best foot forward. And I could see the doubt on the face of my business partner. I felt I had no option except to mimic her tone and make it sound normal.

“Yes, exactly, I am so scared about all of the connections we need to make.” Then I turned to Timothy. “The network can time out, the servers could jam up, the client might have a bad connection, their computer might have trouble running our frontend code — I’m definitely scared about how many obstacles we face. Lisa and I talked about this in some detail. But I’m sure we will find a solution for each of these problems.”

That seemed to get us through. I managed to switch our focus to the scary technology, which was essentially a “safer” kind of scary than hiring a woman who described herself as scared. Because talking about Lisa’s fears would have been a bad way to start the relationship between her and Timothy.

We worked with Lisa for two years and we produced our biggest successes with her. She gained a lot of skill, and for as long as we relied on Flash, she was absolutely pivotal to everything we did. She eventually was worth more than we were paying her, but we had decided to move away from Flash, so we knew our relationship with her would come to an end. She got a good-paying job with the University of Virginia. In the end, the whole experience was both good for us and good for her.

Work relationships are necessarily formal, at least at first, but not everyone understands this

Why did Lisa almost sabotage herself at the beginning?

In the 1990s, Deborah Tannen wrote a book titled, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. One of the points she makes is that women will often admit to a vulnerability so as to create closeness. Many female friendships start this way. Tannen makes the point that men often misread this as a lack of confidence.

My best guess is that Lisa was engaging in exactly this kind of behavior, admitting a vulnerability in an effort to start a friendship. This probably seemed natural to her. She was young enough that her social skills were still focused on the kinds of friendships she had made in college, rather than the kinds of formal relationships she would eventually make in the world of work.

But we were not her friends. We were her employers. I’m sure when she got older, she came to understand the difference. However, at that moment, she didn’t understand the difference, and it almost cost her the job. Sometimes employers and employees become friends, but this should never be taken for granted.

Discretion still matters — be careful when choosing to be informal

I sometimes envy my German friends, as the ambiguity and guesswork is taken out of most social settings. The German language — like a number of others — has a formal and informal form of address, and all business relationships start with the formal form. English used to have the formal “thee” which matched the formal German “Sie,” but now we only have “you” which matches the informal German “du.” My friend Kristin manages an office at a farm near Dusseldorf, and it was only after three years, returning from a long illness, that the wife of the boss said to her, “I think now we should use ‘du’.”

In Germany one can never stupidly stumble into assuming that one’s boss is a friend. It’s something that is always discussed. For American workers, I would suggest that one err on the side of caution and speak in a formal manner at work until it’s clear that a relationship is solid enough that one can speak more freely.

But that is the advice that I would give to workers. To someone who is doing the hiring, I would suggest you keep an open mind about the different ways that people express themselves. Not every talented person is talented at explaining their talent. Some people have remarkable skills but they do a terrible job of selling themselves during job interviews. There are some absolute gems out there, people who have failed their last ten job interviews — but if you are smart you will see how talented they are, and your company will be lucky to benefit from what they can bring to the job.