There is a misnomer floating around cyberspace that the job interview should be just as much about the hiring manager selling the job to the candidate as it is the candidate selling themselves to the hiring manager.

That’s not a good strategy. First off, a study into that exact issue showed that hiring managers who try to sell a job do a much worse job of finding great people than hiring managers that don’t.

And secondly, the bigger issue here is that one of the most important traits of a great candidate is that they really, really, really want to work for your company – and don’t need to be sold.

The Study

A study conducted by Jenifer Carson Marr of Georgia Institute of Technology and Dan Cable of the London Business School sought to discover if selling a candidate during a job interview was a good idea.

What they found was it wasn’t.

The study, which used both an experiment and an investigation into real-world scenarios, found that if a hiring manager tried to sell the job to a candidate during a job interview they became much worse predictors of if the applicant was right for the job. Instead, the study suggested having someone else try to sell the job to the candidate.

But that might not even be a good idea.

The Philosophy

One of the biggest issues facing American corporations today is that more than 70 percent of their employees aren’t engaged, i.e. they don’t really want to be at their jobs. Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost American companies $300 billion a year in lost productivity.

So there are already enough people who don’t want to be at their jobs. Why do you want to hire another one?

People who really want to work for a job don’t need to be sold. And, ultimately, those candidates are the ones that are going to become the rock star employees.

About VoiceGlance

VoiceGlance is a cloud-based hiring tool used by forward-thinking companies to hire smarter, instead of harder. Learn more here.