When you can’t tell the whole truth in a job interview

Succeeding at a job interview can feel like having to pretend to be someone you’re not: someone more professional, more dedicated to work, more personable. But the Ask a Manager blog recently shared a story that suggested someone had taken that feeling too literally. A man called John had just started his first day of a new job, having been hired after a series of remote interviews. However, his team leader was suspicious. John didn’t look or act quite the same as he remembered, and also didn’t seem to remember conversations that took place during the interview. Was this John in fact a different person?

Lying during a job interview is generally a bad idea, even if you’re not going to the extreme of getting someone else to pretend to be you. But it can sometimes be difficult – or even inadvisable – to tell the whole truth about yourself. The UK is one of many countries that has laws preventing interviewers asking questions about disability, pregnancy, religion and other protected characteristics. Of course there’s nothing to stop you offering up this information to your interviewers, but you might hesitate to do so knowing that those characteristics have been used to discriminate against jobseekers. If that characteristic is something that’s an integral part of your identity, concealing it can be highly uncomfortable, and the effort to avoid mentioning it may affect your performance even on unrelated questions.