Job interviews typically begin with a pre-job interview small talk of seemingly innocuous questions unrelated to the job:
- How is your day going?
- Got any plans for the weekend?
- How was traffic on your way in?
By the way, these are not tricky interview questions.
However, can these questions influence the interviewer’s impression of you? Does pre-job interview small talk matter more than we think?
Research on pre-job interview small talk
Brian Swider, Brad Harris, and Murray Barrick set to find out through research. They recorded and reviewed 163 interviews with ambitious job seekers. In the research, interviewers were trained to note initial impressions of candidates following a quick rapport-building phase, before formal interview.
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Here’s what they found, as revealed in HBR blog:
First, and consistent with mounds of other research, our comparisons revealed that there were differences between the two data sets, suggesting that the initial impressions did have an effect on interviewers.
In this sense, rapport-building questions, even when purposefully crafted to be as innocuous and unrelated to the job as possible (as was the case in our test), do seem to provide interviewers with abbreviated, albeit meaningful, insights into a candidate’s job prospects.
Interview starts with pre-job interview small talk
As I have stressed before, interview begins from the minute you pull up in the car park and finishes when you leave the car park.
Everything matters on interview day. Be polite to the secretary. Nothing stops the interviewer from asking the secretary or receptionist on her views on you.
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If there is anything you can learn in the pre-job interview small talk from the receptionist, take it in. She knows more than you do and you have to respect that.
Anyhow, the takeaway from the research is,
Candidates need to be “on” during all interactions with prospective employers, even the initial chit-chat. Interviewers can, and likely will, use this information to make inferences about candidates’ suitability for the job, especially early on in the interview. Candidates need to come off as professionally sociable and competent during the opening small talk with interviewers.
