Shared Responsibilities

Both interviewer and interviewee share in the responsibility to adapt to each other and the interview situation appropriately—in both their verbal and nonverbal communication. If a professor in your department is interviewing you to see if you would be a good fit for your college’s honors program, you would typically treat the interview quite formally. For example, you would use professional, formal address when speaking to the professor (“Professor Arisetty” or “Dr. Edmunds”). But if you have known this professor for three years, you baby-sit her children, and she insists that you call her Emilia, you can adapt, feeling free to use her first name and a less strict, more personal style of conversation.

If the interview takes place in a conference room with multiple interviewers, the interviewee can adapt by making appropriate eye contact with each of the interviewers and behaving more formally. But this also depends on the situation. If you are applying to become a barista, for example, and are interviewing on a bench outside the coffee shop, you can consider the situation less formal. In this case, you would also need to avoid distractions from the people and noise around you.

Culture also plays a profound role in job interview situations (Gardner, Reithel, Foley, Cogliser, & Walumbwa, 2009), affecting both judgments and evaluations (Manroop, Boekhorst, & Harrison, 2013). For example, many people from various ethnic and religious backgrounds find it difficult to brag about their accomplishments at a job interview because their culture frowns on such boastful behavior. Research shows that rather than clearly state a strength (“I have extremely strong organizational skills”), African American interviewees often tell stories about themselves to illustrate their strengths (Hecht, Jackson, & Ribeau, 2003). Researchers also note that European American interviewers often judge story-telling candidates to be “unfocused.” Thus African Americans who adapt by directly listing their strengths for a job are perceived more positively in interviews (Hecht, Jackson, & Ribeau, 2003); conversely, a European American interviewer who looks for the message behind the story an interviewee tells has competently adapted as well.