GETTING TO KNOW YOU
(July/August 2005 Issue)

How do you get to know someone quickly? This is the problem of both the job interview and the dating interview. Since those interviews are notoriously inaccurate, it may help to look for better ways. In Malcolm Gladwell_s new book, Blink, he offers some interesting thoughts on these matters. Gladwell introduces the concept of "thin-slicing," defined as "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience". He gives an example of complete strangers (people who did not know the interviewees at all) doing a better job of rating them on conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences, after having had only 20 minutes to look around their dorm rooms. They did a better job than close friends of the candidates who presumably knew them very well.

"Looking around a dorm room" is thin-slicing because you see a wide range of behaviors and attitudes represented. By contrast, hours and hours of cafeteria or coffeehouse conversations do not reveal as much. Why not? People hide behind their everyday personas. But the dorm room reveals all.

You will quickly recognize this as the inherent problem of the job interview. It is an extended exercise in fakery. Well, we can’t walk through job candidates’ places of residence, but what can we do? Or, what can job seekers do to present a more accurate picture of who they are?

This example of strangers-with-clipboards versus friends makes a strong case for alternate, more predictive forms of contact between job aspirants and potential employers. And those alternatives are _- sound the trumpets _- internships, volunteer work, temporary work, co-op, and research projects (either school-based or not).

Fifty hours of work as an intern, volunteer, temp, or researcher is, in fact, a fifty-hour interview but even better than an interview because it is a more naturalistic setting. You are being yourself rather than some version of yourself that you might construct to please the interviewer.

Employers have, more and more, been using internship and temp work programs as ways of selecting future employees, because they recognize the inherent wisdom in seeing prospective employees "as they really are". You can hide a lot of yourself in a job interview, but your real self is much more visible when you’re at the workplace every day for many days.

Furthermore, if you are not yet a perfect example of traits the employer is looking for, the experience gives you a chance to work on them. What does your temporary office space look like? Is there a dorm room effect taking place?

Job hunters will not always get the jobs they seek through internships, but they stand a good chance of getting feedback about their weak points, especially if they ask supervisors (during internships) to tell them what they need to improve. And, working in one setting for many weeks or months gives them an opportunity to observe several other departments where they might be a better fit.

Thus what job seekers need are job search campaigns that depend less and less upon job interviews, and more chances to present themselves in "real" rather than artificial settings.

Now, let’s look at how thin-slicing can be applied to marital relationships, to further reinforce the idea that "real" data are good predictors of future outcomes.

Gladwell wrote about the work of Dr. John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, who learned that by observing one hour of a married couple’s interaction on videotape, he and his staff had a 95 per cent success rate in predicting whether the couple would still be together after 15 years. He gave each couple an innocent topic to discuss on video, in the book’s example, the family dog.

What he looked for were evidence of four negative factors, what he calls the Four Horsemen. The more evidence of these four in the couple’s interaction-- defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt -- the greater the chance they would split up. Gottman cited contempt as the most harmful of the four.

Gottman’s staff are highly trained in looking for facial cues to emotions that most of us would miss. So, if one partner shows a brief flicker of contempt, the other partner may see it, only on the unconscious level. That feeling is stored by both partners for future interactions.

The point is that you think you’re hiding your feelings in everyday interactions, but you’re not. You can’t see your face, but the other person can.

The connection between the job interview candidates and the married couple is that you can only hide for so long who you really are and how you are feeling. Hiding causes people to be manipulative and that ultimately breeds mistrust. And, often when you think you’re hiding, other people know more about you than you think they do. "You look troubled by what I said. What are you feeling?"

A positive lesson to be drawn from thin-slicing is that we should encourage people to get to know who we really are, so we can learn from our experience. We all have non-constructive traits that we need to work on. Take a look around my house. What do you notice? Tell me when you see a look on my face you don’t like or understand. Give me a job to do and watch how I go about doing it.

Howard Figler, Ph.D., is the author of seven books, including The Complete Job-Search Handbook [third edition, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1999], a best seller for many years. He is co-author [with Richard Bolles] of the Career Counselor's Handbook [Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999]. His most recent book is Keys to Liberal Arts Success [Prentice-Hall, 2002]. He can be reached at: Howard Figler, Ph.D., and Associates, 9542 Shumway Drive, Orangeville, CA 95662 USA.
Tel: 916-988-6464;
e-mail: hefigler@pacbell.net.