How to Gauge the Success of Your Interview

Knowing how to gauge the success of your interview can make all the difference. If you know how your interview is going, you can ask better questions and redirect your answers to get it back on track or close the deal. Most people make interviewing way more complicated than it needs to be. Checking your progress throughout the interview is a good way to know how well you’re doing and to improve your interviewing skills over time. So, how do you know if your interview is going well?

False Signs the Interview is Going Well or Not

There’s a lot of information out there about the “signs” that your interview went or is going well. You can find things such as:

• Body language. If they smile and made eye contact then the interview is going well.

• Length of the interview. If the interview was shorter than expected, that could be a sign the interview didn’t go so well.

• The manager didn’t sell you on the company or the role could be an indicator that the interview is going poorly.

• The manager tells you they have concerns could be an indicator that you gave a poor performance.

There are countless blogs about these indicators and more. They are all wrong. We often use these types of cues to determine if someone likes us or is friendly toward us, but this is what Malcolm Gladwell calls the Friends Fallacy in his book Talking to Strangers. Relying on criteria such as this is the same reason that nearly half of all judges get it wrong according to Gladwell and if you rely on these types of signs to determine the success of your interview, you will get it wrong as well.

Here is the truth. Some managers are quick interviewers. Most managers have no training on how to conduct interviews. Many managers are also nervous and don’t make eye contact. Some managers don’t know that they should sell you on the role. Some managers have an old-school style of interviewing where they ask the majority of the questions and you answer. Many managers will tell you they have concerns because they want you to put them to rest. They want you to resolve them and so they bring them up for that reason not because they aren’t interested, but rather because they are interested.

Can an Interview Go Poorly?

In a modern job search, it’s time to expel the notion that an interview can go poorly. You are not there to hard sell someone. This isn’t a used car sale happening. Rather, we should look at an interview as a discovery call to find out more about one another. When we start viewing interviews in this way, there is no such thing as a bad interview. If it is not a fit, that doesn’t mean you necessarily performed poorly. Many times interviews go very well, but one of the parties didn’t find the other to be the right fit for them right now. Not receiving an offer letter or another interview is not always a reflection of your performance.

With that being said, we all can improve our communication abilities and thus improve the quality of our interviews and the quality of conversations we have with recruiters and hiring managers. So how do we gauge how engaged the other person is during our interview?

The Timeline

Pay attention to the timeline. Most interviews will start with questions about your past - your education, your job progression. But as the interview goes favorably, the hiring manager’s questions should move through a few stages, moving from past to future. Here is an example of how this might play out.

First, the manager may ask questions about your distant past such as where you attended school.

Second, they may ask questions about your most recent job, about your immediate past.

Then they may ask you questions such as “what are you looking for in your next job?” Now we’re in the present time.

From there they may ask future questions about where you see yourself in 5 years or make statements such as “when you come to work here, you can expect…"

Notice that as the conversation leads more and more into the present time and future, the more success you are having. If your interview starts becoming dominated by future questions and statements, you can bank on the fact that you are doing well. As you move through this process and you’ve determined that this is a place you want to work, you can use the “future tense” to help you progress your interview. If you begin speaking in the future tense, meaning you speak of yourself and the hiring manager/team working together, it will typically help the other person start to think and respond in kind. You want them to visualize you working with them.

You too can start asking questions like the following:

“If I step into this role, can you tell me more about what a typical day will look like?

“What goals will be focused on over the next 6 months?”

“Who would be the key stakeholders I would work with to get me up to speed as quickly as possible?”

Pay attention to the time frame. The more time the interviewer spends in the future vs. the past, the more favorable you can assume the interview is going. If the interviewer stays in the past, this is often not a good sign.

If the Interview is Going Well

If you judge that your interview is going well, you need to uncover the answers to these questions if you haven’t already:

1. What does a typical day look like in this role and what is expected of you?

2. Who will you be reporting to and what peer relationships will you need to maintain for success?

3. Will you be working on a team or solo?

4. What goals will your new boss want you to achieve and in what timeframe?

5. How is success measured?

6. What key responsibilities can you take off your supervisor’s plate?

7. Who will you need to build key relationships with to get up to speed and ensure your success?

8. What were the strengths and weaknesses of others in this role prior to you?

9. Can you meet other team members during the interview process?

What if You’re Not Sure?

If you’re unsure how well your interview is going, there are some questions that are always appropriate to ask. You can still ask and should ask about:

1. What characterizes successful employees in this role?

2. What significant changes the company has gone through?

3. What future changes are coming or foreseen?

4. Who are the company’s competitors?

5. What values does the company hold sacred?

Use the answers to these questions to help guide your responses and pivot accordingly to discussing your experiences that are in alignment or can help them through their challenges. And try to move the conversation into the present and future tense.

Before You Leave the Interview

Before you leave, regardless of how well the interview is going, be sure you do these three things.

1. Tell them what you like about their organization and be specific.

2. Tell them what challenges you find interesting and be specific.

3. Tell them what skills you believe are necessary to meet those challenges and remind them that you possess them. And yes, be specific. Use your past and show examples of your skills in action, quantifying your results whenever possible.

In Summary:

• Relying on archaic signs such as body language should not be used to determine how well your interview is going.

• Interviews are conversations between two people trying to figure out if they can help one another. Viewing them this way will remove pressure on your performance.

• Using past, present, and future tenses as indicators will ensure you can gauge the success of your interview in real time.

• If the interview goes well, ask key questions to qualify yourself and the employer.

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