Glenford Smith | Rating your interviewer

QUESTION: Recently, I interviewed for a technical post and thought I had done enough to land the job. But I was terribly disappointed when I was informed that the company had picked someone else. There is just one nagging doubt at the back of my mind about a sort of throwaway question asked by a particularly hard interviewer. He asked: “How would you rate me as an interviewer on a scale of one to 10?” To be honest, I was caught off guard. I told him he was okay but that he should bear in mind how nervous the candidate is and try to allay the person’s fears. I think I said the wrong thing. What do you think?

– K. Thompson

CAREER: Thank you for your question and for sharing that experience. Right off, I think I agree with you. You made the cardinal error that you shouldn’t at an interview. You criticised the interviewer. You should never do that.

You are self-aware and self-critical, and that is good. The “nagging doubt at the back of your mind” is telling you what you want to know. Trust your intuition. Maybe you think you’re being honest by saying exactly what you think. No one is suggesting that you tell a lie – far from it. You can answer the question quite honestly without criticising the interviewer.

For instance, you can tell him how incisive and piercing his questions were. You appreciated how his questions caused you to think even some things you were not thinking of originally; how you want to commend him for the great job he does for the company. Nowhere do you detect a whiff of anything critical or condemnatory. And it is all true.

The advice would be: Don’t mention any number in the given range. Thing is, if you graded him less than 10, say a nine, which you might think is high, you open yourself to more serious questions. For instance, a follow-up question could be: What would you suggest I work on, I improve on in my next interview? And the interviewer then sits back and watches you hang yourself. Again, you never criticise the interviewer. Nothing good can come of it.

The thing about giving full marks, the perfect score of 10, is that you will come off as being disingenuous. You may pull off an Oscar-winning performance and sound sincere. At the end of the day, however, you will be taken as insincere, so stay away from grading the interviewer.

You mentioned that you were caught off guard. I know that you know it already and that we all can’t prepare for every single question. But as you’ve seen, perhaps it’s the lack of preparation that caused you to improvise the answer. If you were prepared and ready for the question – which is always best – you would have sailed through the interview.

I would advise, though, that you don’t beat up on yourself. Use the experience to be better prepared for the next interview. Interview candidates have attested to the fact that later, they were very thankful that they had failed that one interview because a better one was waiting.

- Glenford Smith is president of CareerBiz Coach and author of ‘From Problems to Power’ and ‘Profile of Excellence’.careerbizcoach@gmail.com