Our team is hiring for a new counterpart of mine, so yesterday was my first day interviewing potential candidates to fill this new role on our team on the East Coast. When interviewing, I try to be friendly but also fairly expressionless to ensure that the candidate doesn’t know which way I am leaning. But honestly on Friday, I was so confused by the experience that I had that it took me a few hours to realize that I did not like this person at all.

The worst thing you can possibly do during an interview is not answer the questions that are asked of you. If I ask you about A, you need to answer about A. Don’t give me scenario B and then ramble on and on about how that made you look good. That’s basically what happened today. But because this candidate’s delivery was so confident, if I really weren’t listening to anything he was saying, he could easily have won me over with his level of confidence and delivery. But, I was listening, and he didn’t.

Last week during our team week, we had a “speak easy” public speaking session, where the presenter basically said that the most important part of public speaking is how you portray yourself; the content is secondary. Well, in an interview, you need to be really good at both; if your content sucks, then you suck, and we don’t want to hire you. We don’t need some arrogant bullshitter who wants to try to own the place getting hired.