For a candidate, interviews can be an intense and nerve-wracking experience, especially when the job in question is an attractive one. The stakes are enormously high. Each interaction feels make-or-break.
Imagine you’re in the candidate’s shoes. You’re finally in the room (or on the Zoom) with your would-be boss and you’re asked a thoughtful question about some element of your prior experience. You want desperately to pick a story from your memory bank that best fits the bill.
You pause for a few moments to think and . . . the interviewer jumps in to rephrase the question.
Were you too slow to respond? Are they frustrated that you didn’t have a great story perfectly lined up? Now the pressure is on, so you throw out a second-rate, multipurpose story that you’ve already told three other interviewers. And you’re mildly annoyed at your would-be boss.
Effective interviewers are ones who allow silence when it really matters. Yes, it’s important to avoid wasting time in an interview, but time management is more about avoiding long backstories and low-value tangents. It’s not an invitation to rob candidates of those precious few seconds of silence when they are searching their memory banks for a compelling story from their past.
It’s critical to understand the “time warp” that’s at play in these situations. If you’re a candidate, a five-second gap feels like nothing. Time appears to pass very quickly, because your cognitive load is high when you’re in data-retrieval mode.
If you’re the interviewer, there is very little cognitive load. You’re just waiting for a response, so time seems to be crawling by. Three seconds might even feel a bit awkward.
We have observed many mock interviews and timed the question-response gaps. Interviewers consistently overestimate how much time passed relative to candidates. Overall, it takes a lot longer for the gap to feel awkward to the candidate than it does to the interviewer.
Silence is occasionally golden, so embrace the “10-second rule”
We recommend a “10-second rule.” When you ask a candidate a question, be comfortable allowing a full 10-second gap before you attempt to “rescue” them and step in to rephrase the question. You will rarely need the full 10 seconds, but when you do, the candidate will thank you.
One last thing to note: If candidates routinely hit the 10-second mark when responding, your questions may be too complex. Perhaps there are too many qualifiers or filters in your phrasing or some tricky spin that may be throwing them off.
Keep it simple. Candidates will certainly thank you for that as well.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.
Jordan Burton has 15 years of experience as an executive assessor and interviewing trainer, working with top VC/PE investors and high-growth startups to help them hire the best of the best. He has trained over 3,000 executives and investors on hiring and interviewing skills. He leads Talgo's business development initiatives, managing relationships with Sequoia Capital, TH Lee, Palantir, Chainlink Labs, and over 50 venture-backed startups.
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