In her video Ex-Google Recruiter Explains Why “Lying” Gets You Hired, former Google recruiter Farah Sharghi offers nine pieces of advice about answering interview questions. Her position is clear: interviews reward strategic answers. Candidates need to understand what hiring managers expect to hear, even when their more candid answers would be different.
I disagree with the direction this advice takes. A recruiter who teaches candidates to conceal relevant information may make them easier to hire and harder to assess. That is a serious problem for a profession whose purpose is to improve hiring decisions.
Some of Sharghi’s recommendations are entirely sensible. Candidates should describe their achievements accurately, explain what they can contribute and prepare thoughtful questions. But several of her other recommendations encourage people to withhold information that could determine whether they and their prospective employer are suited to each other. The advice may improve interview performance while making the eventual hiring decision less informed.
Interviews are compressed, asymmetric and high-stakes. Some people dispute that last description. Yet for anyone who depends on a salary to make a living, employment directly affects financial security. Work can also provide belonging, status and recognition, needs that Maslow placed higher in his hierarchy. When a hiring decision can affect someone’s livelihood, sense of belonging and self-esteem, what exactly would qualify as high-stakes?
Candidates are judged against comparison groups they cannot see, by people working with limited context and limited patience. Frustration may be interpreted as instability, ambivalence as weak motivation, and an inconvenient detail as poor judgement. Candidates know that a single answer can influence the outcome, and many cannot afford the luxury of treating an interview as an experiment in absolute candour. Sharghi understands these pressures and teaches people how to navigate them. Her advice can work. That makes its consequences worth examining.
Consider her first example, the apparently harmless question, “How are you?” Sharghi explains that candidates who mention a difficult week, recovering from an illness or problems getting to the interview may already create a negative impression. She describes making a mental note and wondering whether the person would behave the same way on a difficult working day. Her instruction is unequivocal: candidates should always say they are doing great.
I find the reasoning behind that assessment far more troubling than the answer itself. Someone mentioning a difficult week has revealed very little about their emotional regulation, resilience or likely performance at work. Yet the interviewer has already begun to assess those qualities. A candidate who follows the advice may avoid the negative impression, while the interviewer continues using an ordinary social response as evidence of professional competence. The coaching protects the candidate from a questionable assessment practice and leaves that practice untouched.
The advice becomes more consequential when Sharghi addresses the question of where candidates see themselves in five years. She explains that employers want to know whether someone intends to leave quickly and whether their ambitions fit the role. Candidates should therefore avoid mentioning plans for graduate study, starting a business or pursuing a leadership position elsewhere, even when those plans are genuine. Instead, she recommends expressing a future with the prospective employer.
Plans change, of course. Nobody can reasonably guarantee where they will be in five years. But a person who already intends to pursue a substantially different path may possess information that matters to the employer’s decision. An organisation investing in recruitment, onboarding and development has legitimate reasons to understand a candidate’s intentions. Coaching someone to describe a future they do not currently envisage may improve their chances of receiving an offer. It also deprives the employer of information it was specifically trying to obtain.
A particularly instructive example from the video concerns a candidate who described her current manager as a micromanager and explained that she wanted greater autonomy. According to Sharghi, the hiring manager interviewing her was herself known for being heavily involved in her team’s work. Some employees appreciated that approach; others did not. The candidate received no offer, and Sharghi presents her disclosure as a costly interview mistake.
But consider what the candidate actually revealed. She identified a management condition that affected her experience of work. The prospective manager apparently operated in a way that might reproduce precisely the conditions the candidate wanted to leave. That information was relevant to both parties.
The account does not establish that the difference in management style was the decisive reason for rejection. If it influenced the decision, however, the interview may have done exactly what a selection process should do: identify a potential incompatibility before employment begins. The candidate may have been disappointed, but both parties could have avoided entering a working relationship with conflicting expectations.
An unsuccessful interview can be a successful selection outcome.
Sharghi’s recommendation is to avoid negative descriptions of previous managers. She even provides an alternative answer in which the candidate acknowledges the structure and guidance provided by the manager and presents herself as increasingly proactive. Such language may be appropriate when it accurately describes the experience. But if the candidate’s central concern was excessive control, the suggested answer makes that concern disappear.
A candidate who knows they perform poorly under micromanagement and better in an environment with greater autonomy is not disclosing a character flaw. They are identifying a condition that matters to performance and retention. The employer may have legitimate reasons for maintaining close supervision. The candidate may have equally legitimate reasons for seeking independence. An interview should make it possible to examine whether those expectations can coexist.
Near the end of the video, Sharghi also advises candidates to postpone questions about holidays and remote working flexibility until the negotiation stage. The timing of contractual discussions is a reasonable consideration. Yet if remote working is a necessary condition for someone to accept a role, postponing the question may leave both parties investing time in a process that cannot produce an acceptable agreement. A condition essential to one party’s decision deserves to be identified while that decision is still being made.
There is an interesting contradiction in the video. Sharghi encourages candidates to regard an interview as a meeting between two parties who each have something to offer. I agree. That principle requires both sides to have enough information to evaluate the proposed relationship. Several of her recommendations, however, concentrate on making the candidate acceptable to the employer, even when that means withholding information relevant to the relationship they are considering.
Research on applicant behaviour distinguishes honest impression management from deceptive self-presentation. Melchers, Roulin and Buehl (2020), reviewing the evidence on interview faking, found mixed results regarding its effects on interview ratings and predictive validity. Strategic preparation can be useful. But when candidates are coached to suppress information relevant to their future working conditions, the selection process loses an opportunity to recognise incompatibility before hiring.
I understand why candidates follow such advice. Someone who has been unemployed for months, faces financial pressure or has experienced repeated rejection may have little freedom to risk another opportunity. Employers also contribute to the problem. If describing a difficult manager makes a candidate appear troublesome, the safest response becomes the one that creates no discomfort. People learn which answers are rewarded, and interview coaching teaches them how to produce those answers consistently.
Recruiters know these pressures. They should also understand the consequences of designing or supporting a process in which relevant information becomes a liability.
An interviewer who treats criticism of a previous manager as evidence of poor character may overlook a legitimate concern about working conditions. Someone who interprets a casual admission of fatigue as weak resilience may confuse social polish with professional capability. These errors become harder to identify when every candidate has been taught to anticipate them and provide the expected answer.
Recruiters frequently argue, with some justification, that their profession requires expertise and deserves greater recognition than transaction management. Yet parts of the profession actively participate in turning candidates into more acceptable presentations of themselves. There is a contradiction between claiming professional expertise in evaluating people and teaching those same people to conceal information that could improve the evaluation.
Sharghi is speaking as a career adviser drawing on her recruiting experience. Her immediate objective is to help candidates secure offers. That is understandable. But a profession concerned with selection quality must also examine what happens after the offer has been accepted.
When a recruiter’s contribution consists of teaching candidates to suppress inconvenient but relevant information, recruitment begins to resemble presentation management. The candidate becomes more acceptable while the employer may become less informed. The interview looks successful because the difficult issues have been kept out of sight.
If a recruiter’s value lies in teaching candidates how to conceal information that matters to selection, they are helping both sides postpone judgement.
The consequences may emerge after entry. A manager expects close supervision while the employee expects autonomy. A new hire has career plans that conflict with the organisation’s expectations. A position requires regular office attendance while the employee needs flexibility the employer cannot provide. These differences do not inevitably produce failure, but leaving them unresolved increases the possibility of frustration, declining trust, disengagement or early departure. The information needed to identify the problem may have been available before the hiring decision.
A well-designed interview should be able to examine difficult experiences without automatically penalising the person who describes them. If a candidate reports problems with micromanagement, the interviewer can ask what happened, which forms of supervision were helpful or obstructive, and how the person responded. The employer’s own management practices should be open to examination as well. Both parties need to understand the conditions under which the working relationship would operate.
Candidates can learn to describe difficult experiences professionally and accurately. They can explain their contribution to a conflict, distinguish isolated incidents from recurring problems and identify the conditions under which they perform best. Recruiters can help them communicate those facts clearly, even when the result is that a particular employer becomes less interested.
That is valuable recruitment work. It helps people make decisions they can live with after the interview has ended.
Teaching candidates to make incompatibility invisible does not resolve it. It transfers the discovery, and potentially the cost, to after the contract is signed.
Reference
Melchers, K. G., Roulin, N., & Buehl, A.-K. (2020). A review of applicant faking in selection interviews. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 28(2), 123–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12280