It's an Audition, Not an Interview

We should call them "job auditions", not "job interviews". That's because they have a lot in common with demonstrating your ability to play a musical instrument or perform a dramatic role. They have so much in common that the old model of a job interview - a review of your resume, plus the obligatory question about your greatest strengths and weaknesses - pales in comparison.

So what makes it an audition?

By the time you're talking to an actual human being, various bots, search engines, and recruiters have already confirmed that your resume contains the right keywords for the job that's being filled. The objective criteria have already been satisfied, like a violinist knowing which end of the instrument goes under their chin. What's left is to show how you would perform the job, and that's an audition.

Once you're in an interview - I mean, audition - the interviewer is really looking at two things:

1.          Ability to articulate your knowledge

2.          How you would play the role

For articulating your knowledge, there is a further breakdown.

First, it's a test of your resume. If you claimed certain expertise, but you can't speak about it with clarity and detail, then perhaps your resume overstates your qualifications.

Once that's checked off, the real audition begins. When you explain the activities and theories underlying your professional work, can you educate someone about them? Be persuasive? Justify a possibly inefficient process? You'll likely have to do that at some time or another in your new role, and the interviewer wants to see how well you'll do it.

That leads to the second goal of the audition, playing the role.

The traditional interview paradigm stresses meritocratic skills: can you perform a particular task? Can you perform the task independently? Do you know when to perform task A instead of task B? What do you do when you can't do either?

The audition presumes that you know the back-of-the-book answers to all of those questions. The true test is performing those tasks in the role you're auditioning for. How well do you communicate and collaborate with a team? With your stakeholders? With executives?

The interviewer is looking for your ability to adjust your communication to your audience. First, you have to recognize the needs of your audience, then you have to communicate based on that recognition. At the team level, for example, you need to speak tactically, step by step; jargon and tech speak are probably the language of your team. For the executives, it's broader brush strokes: business risks and impacts, summaries of proposed options.

That part of the audition is pretty much the same everywhere. The really critical part of your performance is showing that you can do all of these things within the particular environment of your role. Sure, maybe you can do musical comedy, but can you do Shakespeare?

This is where research and preparation can pay off. What is the current state of the organization you'd be working with? What are its challenges and issues? What works, and what doesn't work? If you have knowledge about this, you can audition better by projecting yourself into that environment.

This can apply to a department, or even to a company as a whole. At the department level, for example, it may be that the department has had considerable turnover recently, has new leadership, and is trying to get itself reoriented. Can you work with a fair amount of ambiguity, with constant course corrections and shifting roles?

At a company level, there may be standard behaviors needed for success. Before I interviewed with one company, I was briefed on the primary demographic of the company's employees, and how this shaped how they operated. In this company, I was told, you could never have a meeting to resolve a problem. Instead, you needed to speak one-on-one with the key players, come to a solution, and then have a meeting where you presented the solution for approval - which you, of course, had already obtained by speaking to everyone individually.

For these cases, the auditioner is looking for you to imagine yourself in their environment and reacting with confidence. How will you play the role if they offer it to you?

So, it sure sounds like an audition. But what do you differently, thinking of this as an audition and not an interview?

The strategy for old-style interviewing is conformity and predictability. Questions have a right answer, or at least a safe one. A good candidate is solid, stable, and bland.

There's a lot to be said to demonstrating a responsible, stable personality, so audition behavior isn't about looking at the old model and doing the opposite. Instead, it's about revealing more of yourself and working to make a connection to the auditioner. Think of how to do things like:

·      Show your human side (answer a question with a connection to a non-work interest you have)

·      Have an opinion and back it up (show how you evaluate an issue, demonstrate independence of thought)

·      Make a connection with your auditioner (have you crossed paths before, do you have a shared background such as college or a prior employer, have you read something they've written)

·      Show some vulnerability (tell a story about how you made a mistake but learned from it)

And finally...

The final part of the audition is simply showing that you're Easy to Do Business With. Your auditioners want to know that they can talk to you. They want to know that you can be part of the give and take of business discussions, and have the right levels of analysis, reflectiveness, humility, confidence, and so on. Being friendly and articulate won't fix a big gap in your resume, but it can certainly get you the benefit of the doubt. People are more likely to look at those interpersonal qualities and see that you have the potential to grow.

So - look at these discussions not as interviews, but auditions. Research the roles, rehearse your performance, and go out ready to perform!