The Innocense of the Interview
As an anecdotal piece, I wanted to offer a perspective on the general process of interviewing. Interviewing is often associated with job interviews, but it also takes place in other areas of projects, business, and most aspects of everyday life. The question is - do your tactics suit the need? And when should you play dumb?
Much has been written about interviewing skills, tactics, how to negotiate, how persuade, and other techniques that appear within a thousand other well-written tomes on how to influence people. I wouldn’t presume to recount nor analyze that mountain of thought here.
Rather, what I wanted to highlight here was an approach I find is useful in many discourses; the tactic of playing dumb.
Playing dumb (or being “dumb like a fox” or whatever your favorite colloquialism may be) isn’t ideal for every circumstance, but it can certainly pay off when you are trying to get the other person/team to divulge information rather than recount facts, details, or history. And clearly the context of the discussion/interview needs to play into the approach.
I’ll take the concept of playing dumb as something that the reader can already conceptualize and that the reader is interested in why it would be used as a tactical tool.
I’ll note a couple of contexts for the reader’s consideration:
If you are running a project and you are trying to understand risks or to get a set scope details clarified as requirements, which approach is better? Validating what you know or discovering what you don’t know? More likely you can play dumb and get the other party to spend time elaborating on open-ended questions. The art here is to be very careful in acknowledging that they’ve met your understanding of the item. See if you can coerce them into continuing the detailed discusion of why, how, why not, etc so that you continue to hear new material. When you’ve gone around the issue twice or more and they haven’t said “Oh yeah, one more thing”, then you’ve probably solicited the fullness of what you need.
A great story that brings this tactic into focus is from an Executive Recruiter whom I know. He tells a story of interviewing a candidate for a very prestegious position. The candidate had compelling qualifications, excellent references and seemed the perfect fit. However, the Recruiter - being wise and experienced - still felt something wasn’t quite right.
So the Recruiter - being somewhat older than the candidate - started a more casual conversation about the candidate’s days at his Undergraduate college and hit upon the topic of a particularly notable football quarterback who had played for that school at the time the candidate was there. The Recruiter played it out by playing dumb - saying “Gosh what was that quarterback’s name?”.
The candidate couldn’t describe the player, give the player’s number, nor speculate on the name, but the candidate played along with the conversation making statements like “Yeah, that guy was great!”. (Yes, it’s possible that the candidate was not familiar with football, but the Recruiter reasoned that the magnitude of the quarterback’s achievements at the time would have left some imprint on everyone at the school in that era!)
By playing dumb, the Recruiter was able to identify an area of concern about the candidate. After some additional background checking, the candidate was found to have fraudulently mis-represented his attendance at the school in question. In fact, he’d never been to that school at all!
So, had the conversation been “So you went to XXX University and you studied XXX?”, the Recruiter would have received a (fraudulent) reiteration of the “facts” from the candidate’s resume’ already in hand and as known by the Recruiter.
Instead, the Recruiter used open-ended questions and played dumb. This to solicit a broad answer from the other party that lead the Recruiter to a major win by preventing a fraudulent candidate from possibly tainting the image of the hiring firm.
And the only effort it took to start the alarms was in asking:
“Oh, what was that quarterback’s name?”