Preparing for an interview? Reframe your shortcomings using probability

A few years ago, I was talking to an entrepreneur working on an easy way to share STD test results and he said something that stuck with me: HSV is a dumb reason to break up with someone, because about 50% of the adult population in the US has it, and so it is 50/50 that even if you dump this person, you’ll have to dump the next person too.

To me, this is a very clever reframe. It doesn’t try to debate anything about the morality of breaking up with someone or minimize HSV itself. Instead, it just focuses on the probability of an event occurring in the next instance.

This is on my mind this week because of a conversation with a mentee about her immigration status. She’s looking to change jobs, so she’s been applying and getting interviews, but doesn’t get selected to continue because she only has 3 years left on her OPT visa.

So I invited her to do one of my favorite activities: a reverse roleplay. She got to be the interviewer, I got to be her. And when she asked me the question about my immigration status, I used a similar reframe: 

“The average tenure of someone at my level in a tech company is less than three years, so if you pass me over because of my OPT, it is just as likely that the person you choose to hire will actually leave in the same amount of time. So why not consider whether I’m the best person for the job instead of focusing on how long I’ll do it?”

Her job dropped.

Note that I’m not arguing the fairness of immigration status being a form of legal discrimination. And I’m not trying to convince the interviewer that I’m so much better than the next candidate that they should overlook the deficiency. Instead, I’m arguing it isn’t a deficiency in the first place because it is true for the majority of the population. 

This works for all sorts of perceived shortcomings in an interview. For example, take a job description I read once that had both “Ten years of applied behavioral science experience” and “Ten years of insurance experience” as requirements – a combination that literally no one had at the time. 

Rather than arguing that whichever you don’t have isn’t important or that you can make up for it in other ways, you can just rely on probability. By pointing out the non-overlap of those experience sets, you can level the playing field by arguing that everyone is going to have to learn something in order to do the job and so it might as well be you.

As the joke says, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than the other person they’re chasing. By pointing out equivalencies, you can reset the frame on yourself as a candidate to minimize shortcomings. You’ll still have to highlight your strengths, but it can sometimes eliminate at least some forms of bias.