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With All Due Respect, Shut Up

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By Dennis M. Barden

I just got off the phone with a candidate for a leadership position at a major research university. I had called to discuss the candidate's background relative to the requirements of the job in anticipation of a formal interview. I began with the usual opening pleasantries -- my name and background, the agenda for the call, an acknowledgment of the common ground between us, and so on. After a minute or two, I asked my customary opening question inviting the candidate to share some of his professional story with me.

Fifty-six minutes later I uttered my next complete sentence.

While extreme, that is not an unusual occurrence. Candidates frequently don't seem to be able to control their instinct to talk, whether they are in a preliminary interview with a search consultant, a formal session with a search committee, or even a final conversation with the ultimate decision maker. The urge to keep talking overwhelms their interview strategy, their common sense, perhaps even their voluntary reflexes. It never helps their cause.

Why do they do it? And why don't search consultants do something about it? Sometimes we do, but sometimes we shouldn't.

Nerve Gas

Talking may simply be a manifestation of nerves. Especially when someone has little experience in an interview setting, the attendant anxiety can turn itself into an uncontrollable torrent of words.

It is interesting that while people frequently lapse into chronic verbosity when nervous, I cannot remember a single case in which a candidate was struck dumb in the same circumstance. Maybe that is because by the time people reach the point in their careers when they are looking at ascending to leadership positions, the way has been smoothed time and again by their speaking skills. When stress overwhelms them, they fall back on the attribute that has never failed them -- the ability to talk their way out of trouble.

Nerves are particularly prevalent when candidates have some incident or issue in their past that could compromise their candidacy. People with something to explain in their résumés generally come prepared -- sometimes even preprogrammed -- with their version of the events in question. That is highly advisable.

It is also advisable to wait until someone asks before offering up that narrative. Too frequently, however, candidates cannot control themselves. They launch into the story with little or no provocation, so anxious are they to unloose this well-rehearsed, pent-up account of events.

That happened not too long ago in front of a search committee I was working with. The candidate was nervous walking in the door. A job he had held a decade before had been difficult and public, and he was concerned that the members would be put off by what they might have learned simply by searching the Web. He walked into the room with his fuse already lit. When the head of the committee welcomed him and asked him to say a few words of introduction, he ignited. Thirty-seven minutes later, he came to the end of his story. The committee members had 10 questions left to ask and 23 minutes left in which to ask them. They had long since lost interest not only in the candidate's narrative but in anything he might have to say. They ended the session 15 minutes early.

The irony? The committee was not even concerned about that old controversy.

Somebody, Help Me

So why don't search consultants warn candidates not to talk so much? Sometimes we do. In the case above, however, the candidate was highly qualified, and his performance before the search committee was inconsistent with his demeanor in my private conversation with him. It seemed to me a clear manifestation of nerves.

Our job is to put the candidate and the institution in an environment in which they can each see what they would be getting. If anxiety is not chronic but is rather temporal and related to the artificial environment of the interview, we try to help both candidate and institution factor that out of the process.

On the other hand, some people are just talkers. The candidate with whom I just got off the phone is an example. He wasn't nervous. He was anxious to impress, of course, but that didn't make him talkative. He is simply talkative by nature. In fact, the trusted source who had referred us to this candidate had told us in advance that the gentleman tends toward the loquacious.

In cases like that, we don't coach people to change their intrinsic nature. We simply tell the search committee what to expect. After all, the person is highly qualified and occupies an important position at a peer institution. His garrulous nature seems not to have negatively affected his performance to date. Why ask him to portray himself as something he is not?

If his talkative nature is inappropriate to the institutional milieu, it is no different from any number of other factors that relate to fit. Therefore it is fair game for the search committee in its decision-making process.

Twice during the phone call, this fellow stopped and said to me, "I am talking too much." In both cases, he then took a deep breath and launched back into his story, heedless of the simple truth that he had just uttered. Why didn't I stop him? Why don't search committees put such candidates out of their misery by interrupting?

For one thing, it is impolite.

I realize that may sound childish, but I believe it is true. We are all taught that interrupting is rude, and most of us try to treat our guests with courtesy. We will therefore go to enormous lengths to accommodate the speaker, even when she is suffering job-search death by a thousand wags of her tongue. The idea that courtesy is actually not in the speaker's best interest is not lost on search committees or on me personally, but there we are, listening to people prattle on endlessly, all the while drawing X's -- and sometimes daggers -- through their résumés on the table before us.

Save Yourself

What, then, is a talker to do? I refer, as I have before, to the Oracle at Delphi as the source of the first and best advice for any circumstance: Know thyself. If you start to babble when you're nervous -- or just when you get up in the morning -- build that into your plan for the interview. In my case, I have a permanent bruise in my ribs where my wife has been elbowing me for 20 years to get me to shut up. It is perfectly placed to remind me to take a breath occasionally.

Some of this is simple math. Committee interviews usually involve a prepared set of questions that every candidate will be asked. Search consultants or committee liaisons will usually tell the candidate how many questions there are and how long that portion of the interview will take. (If that information is not offered, the candidate should ask. This is not a quiz; it is a chance to show what you can do.) Divide the amount of time by the number of questions, and you have a sense of how long an answer should be.

I also believe in the old vaudeville maxim: Perfect your act and then cut two minutes. Leave room for follow-up questions, to give examples, and to tell stories. Allow the interview to come to you. Answer the questions you are asked. If the committee members want to know more, it is their job to ask. Don't assume.

And what of the wordy fellow with whom I just concluded a conversation? He is good at his job, has delivered consistently excellent results, has been given increasingly responsible positions of authority, and, perhaps most important, kept his monologue focused on the issues about which I would have asked him -- if I had been able to get a word in edgewise. I will tell my client exactly what happened, including the candidate's verbosity, and let the client make the decision.

They may just give him a chance to talk himself into, or right out of, the job.