Candidates for jobs are taught that behavioral interviewing should be approached by putting themselves in the employer’s shoes, and figuring out what it is that the employer is looking for in a potential new employee. The trick is to re-frame answers in language that would suggest that the candidate has knowledge and experience of the sought after behaviors.

The temptation might be for those on the employer side to try to put themselves in the candidate’s shoes but it seems that this is not a practical goal. Candidates for jobs are trying to figure out what employers want, but employers are trying to figure out what candidates are. A tall order indeed.

Know Thyself

How we see ourselves is not the same as how we see others. More specifically, it turns out that the evaluation technique that we use is different in each case.

When we  evaluate ourselves, we focus on specific details, like our messy hair, the size of our nose, or the lines on our faces. But when we evaluate other people we tend to take a more gestalt, abstract approach. The focus is on the whole, and not just the sum of the parts.

So a person will focus on one set of information to make an evaluation of another person but that person will use a different set of information to evaluate themselves. Not surprisingly the two evaluations don’t match each other.

The research that backs this idea up was done by Tal Eyal and Nicholas Epley, and published in the May, 2010 issue of Psychological Science. The methodology was to take pictures of people and tell them that others would be evaluating them for how attractive they were.

Then they were asked to rate how attractive they thought other people would find them. One group of people was told that the other raters would be making their ratings later that day. A second group of targets was told that the other raters would be making their ratings several months later.

The agreement between a target person’s rating of herself and other people’s ratings of her picture was higher when the target thought other people would be doing the rating some time in the future than when he/she thought the ratings would be made that afternoon. That is, by making people think of themselves more abstractly, they were better able to see themselves as others saw them.

Then they took it further and asked participants to put themselves ‘in the other’s shoes’. This didn’t make any change to the accuracy of the assessments, and to summarize the research, it appears that the details of a person’s life interfere with their ability to truly put themselves in other people’s shoes.

Lessons Learned

If we are to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes we have to accept the fact that this is incredibly difficult. To get any success at all you have to minimize the distance from that person, and get down to the fine-grained details of their lives, which is practically impossible in the interview situation

This takes a lot of time. There are no short-cuts to depth.