As a police officer, I had a process to shift personality gears from home to work and back. On the way to work, I would listen to something like Def Leppard or AC/DC to get pumped up. On the way home, it would be classical or opera music.
I took each of my two oldest children on ride-alongs with me, and they both enjoyed them. That led me to convince my first wife to come along, though she was a bit resistant. It was a relatively quiet evening, yet afterwards, my wife expressed dissatisfaction with the experience. She told me in advance she knew she didn’t want to know that person, and she’d been right.
We commonly talk about the various faces we present in our lives. I find picking which one to present during a job search is particularly challenging.
It’s complicated in today’s world of remote work. Even many who work in person have to spend time in virtual meetings and training. The virtual environment presents a range of challenges and opportunities.
Depending on the article you read or the school of thought you follow, employers should watch out for this generation or that generation. They should seek people of this gender, or skin color, or socio-political leanings. Certain positions should have this personality type, not another.
We also know from research that we prefer being around people like us (the Similarity-Attraction Hypothesis [SAH]; see https://rdcu.be/eSnEf).
However, we also know that teams benefit from diverse ways of seeing the world and thinking.
Additionally, what you see in a job interview is a bit like an early date—both sides are doing their utmost to show their very best while trying to figure out the downsides of the other party without revealing their own.
In reality, we are more complex and our contributions potentially richer.
In my own case, I have an early-to-mid-adult work history in the military and police at the lower level. In other words, I come from an employment background with a strong hierarchy, limited choice of work companions, frequent life-or-death dependency on coworkers, and regular idiocy from peers and supervisors, often including blunt behavior and a lack of tact. This prior experience is often evident in my resting face (helped or not, depending on your view) as a rather tall man with broad shoulders. Frankly, I’m often described as appearing intimidating.
However, if you get to know me, you will also know I’m quite goofy and caring of the well-being of my people. I often dress up in costume for work, I like to throw parties, I do silly gifts and jokes, and so on. I seek strong communication and promote a work-life balance, seeing the long-term viability of employees as a core goal.
I have many other facets to my personality—as does everyone. Yet if you read the guidance on how to get a job, you’ll find a narrow template promoted that varies slightly depending on the position you seek.
Additionally, we all pretend discrimination is not a thing and illegal, when, honestly, many forms of unlawful discrimination are pretty common. Some forms of discrimination are morally and ethically wrong but not illegal, and we often do those too, or are victims of it, whether intentional or not.
The point is, as employers, we should be more careful to get a holistic picture of a potential employee rather than a series of interviews that essentially ask the same questions to verify a candidate fits into a narrow mold. As job seekers, let us be more open to demonstrating valuable aspects of who we are that will contribute in the workplace.
In the end, none of us wants to find ourselves in a workplace where we are not a good fit for each other.