What We Can Learn From How TikTok Creators Are Helping Candidates Prep for Our Interviews
Spend any amount of time on TikTok, Instagram, or other social media platforms and you’ll likely find them: knowledgeable lawyers, consultants, and other professionals (many with strong HR backgrounds) dishing out interview prep to job seekers everywhere. Their advice, their reach, and the demand they are meeting for candidates may shed light on the state of hiring these days.
If you don’t have time to fall down more rabbit holes, here are just few examples:
- How to answer the “most annoying interview question ever”: Tell me about yourself.
- 5 Questions to Ask Your Interviewer
- How to Negotiate a Job Offer
- Salary Negotiation is Like Dating
- Can you spot a toxic boss in the recruitment stage?
While it may be easy to tune this content out if you aren’t actively on the job search, the trends and topics are noteworthy. As hiring managers, we can glean quite a bit about ourselves and how we are faring in all this:
After all, we are the ones designing and structuring the interview process that our candidates are turning to TikTok to prepare for.
While not an exhaustive list, here may be a few lessons for recruiters and hiring managers:
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Interview performance is not work performance. Via short videos from strangers and peers, candidates are trying to learn and rehearse for questions or standards they think will impress us, but may have no bearing on their actual job performance.
- It’s our job to not let either of us fall into that trap. (Even the most experienced managers can be dazzled by interview tricks!)
- As managers, we are leading and hosting the job interview – which means we establish the dynamic and tenor.
- We can proactively reduce the emotional environment for both ourselves and our candidates. When we do so, we encourage more authentic conversation.
- We can design questions which align with our *actual* role and have efficacy, versus just winging it and believing that we’ll “know it when we see it.”
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Candidates are looking for a good fit, not just a job. A lot of “Interview-Tok” content is coaching candidates not just on how to find a job, but how to discern a job that is going to be the right fit for them.
- In a world where nearly 60% of new hires say the job they are doing 6 months in is not the job they thought they were hired to do, it makes sense candidates are looking to avoid misalignment and bad fits the next time they shift roles and employers.
- Again, this one is on us: we hiring managers can take the time to clarify the role and what success looks like ahead of meeting any candidates.
- Yes, things may shift and evolve down the road – but most of the time, this misalignment a new hire experiences in just a few short months stems from managers not taking the time to articulate the role for themselves and then for candidates in the job description and the hiring process itself.
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Candidates are doing the job we should be doing. “What questions to ask your interviewer” is a major category of interview advice. If you watch enough of these, you’ll notice a trend: most potential candidates are looking for deeper information or clarity on what the role and environment is actually like.
- They want to know about the team dynamic, the hybrid work environment, the company culture, your communication style, what disappoints you, or what support you do or don’t get from senior leadership.
- One candidate said she was “gobsmacked” when a hiring manager offered references from team members who had worked for him in the past. That should not be so rare.
Perhaps that is a good final takeaway: As hiring managers, we should aim to ‘gobsmack’ our candidates with insights and clarity about ourselves, the role, and the world they would be joining. It will take time, preparation and intention – but it is well worth the investment for both you and your future hire. Together, you will be far more successful as a team when you do.
And job candidates? They will have to rely far less on TikTok and their social network for what we can easily provide them.
