The Best and Worst Options When Applying for a New Job

First published on October 23, 2019

I was speaking to a client once about preparing for a job interview and, as we spoke about her tactics for that interview, we happened upon an insight: that the worst possible outcome for her interview was for her to pretend to be something different to what she is and get the job.

The reasoning goes something like this.

Option 1: If, throughout a recruitment process, you are yourself with honesty and integrity and you get offered the job, wahoo! The people assessing you have seen you as you are and they have assessed that you are a good fit for the job. And so there's a good chance you will be (a far better chance than if you haven't been yourself with honesty and integrity). If it turns out you aren't a good fit for the job, then everyone is still in integrity: you can all say 'Well, we thought this would work. It doesn't. What shall we do now?'

Option 2: If you are yourself throughout the process with honesty and integrity and you don't get the job, then at least you can counsel yourself with 'I wasn't the right fit for that role at this time.' You can say, 'I showed them what I have, what I can give, with integrity, and they judged I wasn't a great fit for that job. Well, maybe I just wasn't right for it now.' There's a story you can hold on to: it may not be comfortable - we all want to get the job - but it enables you to move on with your life, it opens space for possibility and it gives you something to work on.

If, instead, you really play a part during a recruitment process, things are different. I'm not talking about acting a little bit more confident than you feel; that's normal, we all have to act before we feel perfectly confident sometimes. I'm not talking about being ourselves, more, with skill, either: that's taking the unique mix of skills and experience we have and then communicating it skilfully to people who don't know us. That's vital.

I'm talking about twisting ourselves into precisely what we think someone else wants to see and hear at the cost of honesty and integrity. If we do that, all kinds of things get tangled.

Option 3: First of all, imagine if you do that and don't get the job. Imagine that: trying to be exactly what someone else wants and still not being successful. This costs you energy, it costs you pride, it costs you resilience, it costs you integrity. Trying to be perfect, to be exactly what they want at all times in all ways, at cost to what makes you you. In the second possibility, above, at least you still have your pride and your integrity at the end. Not here. And that sounds like the worst of all worlds... but I don't think it is. I think option 4 is worse.

Option 4: Imagine twisting yourself into someone else's expectations and then getting the job. You don't have your integrity; you sacrificed that to get in the door. You don't have the story that you have been chosen for what makes you you; you were chosen, after all, when playing a part. And, you are in a job which someone else judged would be right for you when you were pretending to be someone else: you have got yourself a job which is right for someone who isn't you. You may be in it for years. We may think when we apply for a job that we can predict how it will turn out, but we can't. We don't know what will happen in the future. If we pretend to be something we are not then everything from our integrity to our energy gets tangled: imagine, after all, having to pretend to be someone you are not every day at work until you leave that job. That sounds exhausting.

And that, I think, is the worst of the four options.

Of course this isn't just true for recruitment processes. It's true for clients for any freelancer (including coaches) and it's clearly true in our intimate relationships. It's one thing for a relationship to not work out - that happens - but imagine twisting yourself to be something you aren't because that's what you think someone else wants to see, only to be rejected then. That's bad. But what about doing that and 'succeeding' in staying in the relationship: being in a relationship where each and every day you are being stretched to be something that isn't you, having the love in your life built on falsehoods and dishonesty. That's way worse.

The answer, then, is what my friend Nicole and I discovered when delivering this workshop on Mastering Your Personal Brand. It's be yourself. That's the only place, in the complexity of the modern world, where we don't know what will happen in the future, where we can be confident that we are making things better for ourselves and not making them worse. Build your life, especially times when you are forming new partnerships with employers or lovers, on what makes you unique.

Be yourself.