You wouldn’t show up at a dinner party you were invited to with a serving of fish in a cooler and ask your host to cook it for you, would you? The host may remember you, but not very fondly. Similarly, savvy candidates will often try to make their mark during the interview. We instruct them to do so. And yet there is a tendency for some to take it too far. Typically we find out from the client interviewing the candidate just how far from center they strayed. There can be a fine line between outstanding and weird. 2 recent examples: A Market Risk Analyst was interviewing for a position with a large corporate client. Things were going well and he was getting comfortable, too comfortable. As a sideline he wrote jokes for standup comics. Somehow that came up and he went into a 5 minute standup routine of his best material. The client was not amused. An IT Security Analyst went a little (or a lot) too far in trying to impress a Security Manager with the fact that he hacked back at an intruder’s system and wreaked havoc. Next.