How To Be A Positive Interviewer - Part 1

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Manager Tools

Episode: How To Be A Positive Interviewer – Part 1

Release Date: February 2, 2026

Hosts: Sarah (A) and Mark (B)

---

Overview: The Case for Positive Interviewing

In this episode, Sarah and Mark tackle a widespread misconception in manager hiring: that toughness or a cold, adversarial approach makes for better interviews. They argue instead for a data-driven, positive interviewing style—one that not only improves the accuracy of hire but also increases the likelihood that candidates will accept job offers. Drawing on an extensive study of real interviews, the hosts break down both why and how to make interviews more welcoming, and detail the tangible business benefits of doing so.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Misconceptions About Tough Interviewing

• Many managers believe that tough, high-pressure interviews reveal how candidates handle stress or “weed out” the unfit.
• The hosts attribute this to a lack of formal management training—most managers simply mimic interviews they’ve experienced or common cultural tropes.

Notable Quote
"If you want to make managing easier, make hiring better, just say no [to being a tough interviewer]."
—Mark, [01:13]

2. The Psychology of Power in Interviewing

• Mark references the Stanford Prison Experiment and the French Revolution to illustrate how people given power (like interviewers) can act more harshly than intended.
• Interviews are inherently stressful—both because the candidate is the weaker party and because the outcome is often binary (pass/fail).

Memorable Moment
"...people given power, when they've felt in the past powerless, tend to take advantage of that."
—Sarah, [03:24]

3. Problems with Common Interview Behaviors

• Most interviewers have little to no training, don’t know how to ask the right questions, and struggle to evaluate responses.
• The proliferation of poor advice on the Internet (e.g., superficial “Tell me about yourself” tips) aggravates the problem.

Notable Quote
"If anybody is talking to you, if you're watching a video from someone who's an HR generalist or a specialist in interviewing and they're 25 years old, they don't have enough interviewing alone underneath their belt to be telling you what works..."
—Mark, [09:58]

4. Benefits of Positive Interviewing – The Data

• Mark shares findings from his previous firm, Horseman and Company:
  • Over 50,000 interviews involving 500 managers at major Fortune 500 companies were analyzed.
  • Interviewer behaviors tracked included smiling/laughing, having prepared questions, eye contact, expressing thanks, and making encouraging statements.
  • Interviews were assessed for positive versus negative behaviors (not rudeness, but lack of warmth and engagement).
  • Positive interviewer behaviors correlated strongly with better candidate acceptance rates and higher subsequent job performance.
• Notably, even in high-stress environments (e.g., the U.S. Navy's submarine program), the traditional assumption that high-pressure interviews select the “best” does not hold up in data.

Notable Quote
"You can be a nice, friendly, personable, caring...even charming interviewer while having high standards for your company."
—Mark, [11:03]

5. Three Practical Rules for Positive Interviewing

Sarah outlines the three core behaviors they recommend for interviewers:

• Smile
• Express thanks
• Compliment candidate behaviors

These are meant to be simple yet high-impact and do not mean lowering your standards or being insincere.

Notable Quote
"The way people evaluate nice people is by their behaviors and typically in the first few minutes of an interaction with them."
—Mark, [11:48]

6. Study Design & Implications

• The study was manually conducted with video review (pre-Internet, on VHS tapes).
• Only in-person interviews were analyzed, but Mark and Sarah believe results extrapolate to today’s virtual interviews—perhaps even more so, due to the “coldness” of virtual interactions.
• Data limitations and scientific rigor were important; when studies produced no significant findings, they were discarded.

Memorable Moment
"There are people listening to this podcast right now that have never actually seen a real VHS."
—Mark, [15:46]

---

Memorable Quotes & Segments

• On why positive behaviors matter:
  “A preponderance of positives is likely to generate a positive response from the interviewee about the culture of the company.”
  —Mark, [18:00]

• On reluctance to be positive:
  “If you tell me, 'Well, Mark, my authentic self is to be very dour and straight,'… You're not a nice person. Or, let me put it differently, you may think of yourself as a nice person, but other people won't think that about you."
  —Mark, [11:19]

• On Internet advice for candidates:
  “...these people were not trying to help interviewees, they were trying to make money off of people watching them.”
  —Mark, [08:50]

---

Important Timestamps

• 00:09 – Guiding questions: Why positive interviewing? What's wrong with "tough" interviews?
• 02:25 – The power dynamic and the tendency for interviewers to become adversarial
• 04:00 – The Rickover/US Navy “stress interview” myth and why it didn’t work
• 07:35 – Internet advice and how it fails both candidates and interviewers
• 11:03 – The three simple rules for positive interviewing (smile, express thanks, compliment behaviors)
• 12:33 – Data study: How 50,000 interviews revealed positive behaviors outperform negative
• 15:42 – Old-school logistics: VHS tapes, in-person reviews, and behavioral coding
• 17:46 – How data was mapped to actual post-hire employee performance

---

Tone & Style

• Friendly, direct, and pragmatic—geared toward busy professionals and managers.
• Mark and Sarah mix dry humor with sharp, actionable guidance.
• The tone is accessible, adamant about evidence, and dismissive of unsound “gut feeling” advice.

---

Conclusion & Next Steps

Sarah closes by promising a continuation in the next episode. The key takeaway here is that positive, people-centered interviewing not only makes the hiring process better for candidates, but empirically produces better hires and higher offer acceptance rates. Mark and Sarah urge listeners to adopt the three core positive behaviors in interviews and to dispel the myth of the “tough interviewer” as a best practice.

---

Stay tuned for Part 2, where they’ll continue the discussion and presumably get even more tactical.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[B]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[A]

Today's podcast, how to be a positive interviewer, part 1 of 2.

[B]

This guidance answers these questions. How can I be a positive interviewer? And that doesn't mean just saying yes all the time. Why should I avoid being a tough interviewer? What's better about being a positive rather than a tough or negative interviewer?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Most managers are never actually trained on how to manage. They're promoted, given a team, and told to figure it out. If you have managers missing the training they deserve, we can help bring manager tools to your organization. The Manager tools, Effective manager training teaches you the core skills every manager needs. How to run one on ones, build trust and, and drive results through people. Don't make your managers guess, give them the tools. Get your questions answered by sending us A note to customerservicer-tools.com all right, Mark, so today we're talking about interviewing, one of your favorite topics.

[B]

Yes, absolutely. If you want to make managing easier, make hiring better, just say no.

[A]

Just say no. Exactly. Exactly. And folks, today we're talking about interviewing in part because too many managers make the mistake of thinking that they have to deliver a tough interview. Right. They think of interviews as being adversarial. Sometimes they foolishly think that they need to apply pressure because that will help them see how the candidate reacts. And today we're going to talk essentially about why all of that is entirely wrong and that positive interviewing is much more effective, both in terms of outcomes as well as in terms of offer acceptance rates, which ought to shock no one.

[B]

Yeah. And that's part of the data we'll share that shocked us as well when we got it many years ago. I'll tell you something. One of the things about being a tough interviewer is that I think being a good interviewer is like being a driver, a new driver. And saying I can be a good driver because I was a good passenger. Okay, that's just silly.

[A]

I've been interviewed before. So I can drive. Or, Sorry, I've been, I've driven before.

[B]

So I can drive.

[A]

So I can drive. Exactly right.

[B]

And therefore I've been interviewed so I can interview. And the combination of the lack of training and also the experience they had and the predominance of interview behavior is on the tough side. Okay? There's just no question about that. It's straight faced. It's. I'm neutral. And to me, Sarah, one of the things that that says is people like Being in charge and they take advantage of it. If you want a really, really dark example of that, look up the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is running on late night TV all the time. It tells a story about humans in an experiment where some were made jailers and some were made inmates. And even though they were all basically equal and they were playing a role, the jailers became increasingly brutal. Even though, again, it was just an experiment, you could do anything you wanted. You could have let them all free if you wanted to.

[A]

We were literally just talking about this the other day when we were talking about the French Revolution.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[A]

And folks, if you don't know a lot about the French Revolution, which I did not look it up. But yeah, same concept. People given power, when they've been felt in the past powerless, tend to take advantage of that.

[B]

Exactly. Now look, if you combine all those things with the fact that most people hate being interviewed, right, you're the weaker party. You're not in control, you don't have the power. So it's stressful because there are only two outcomes, one of which you definitely don't want. A. No, it's basically pass fail. You can't get a B. And then they say, oh, you know, we're going to take you even though you're not very good. And pass fail situations are actually relatively rare in our lives. But in addition, going back to the points we made earlier, people hate interviews for another good reason. Most interviewers don't know what they're doing. They don't know how to ask the right questions. They never have read the Effective Hiring Manager or used our interviewing creation template, which is available to licensees. They don't know how to evaluate answers, which is really what matters. They don't know how to elicit behavioral answers through asking behavioral questions or probing to get to the actual behaviors, because people don't talk in terms of behaviors. I just conducted a practice interview with someone and it was very clear to me. It was over zoom, but it was very clear to me they were reading an AI generated script off to the side and it said, wonderful. Lovely buzzwords, but it wasn't a good answer at all. And too many managers think that making things tough, being negative, not positive, will reveal more about the candidate. In fact, there's history here during the creation of the American nuclear submarine program. There's a famous admiral, Admiral Hyman Rickover, who is deified in the Navy. And don't get me wrong, that Navy nuclear submarine force is absolutely incredible. It's incredible. Part of the American Defense System nuclear submarine sailors and officers are exceptional. But Admiral Rickover was famous for putting people through stress interviews. For instance, he would give him a chair and the chair was nailed to the floor, and then he'd say, hey, move the chair closer to me. Or he'd give him a chair and one of the legs was three inches shorter, so it was very, very tippy. Or they give him a chair and it was intentionally uncomfortable. Too small or too short or too tall. And he thought because they're going to be in situations underwater for six months at a time, that stress would be good. And in fact, Rickover's results did not indicate that there were people who were creative and did well in the interview but didn't do well as submariners. Then there were others who did poorly, and then they ended up being told no and in fact then went on to great naval careers. So, and I'm spoiling it a little bit here because we're going to talk about the data. Basically, what we know is from the data, which we'll share, positive interviewers get better results, not just in the accuracy of their interviews, but also in likelihood of offer acceptance, which should make sense to most people. Right? I'm interviewing with a guy, I get a yes, but I don't like the guy. I'm not going to go to work there. If I like the person, I have a higher acceptance rate.

[A]

Yeah. And folks, if you're one of those individuals who, prior to listening to this podcast today, thought that giving a stress interview was the best approach, we don't blame you. I mean, over at Manager Tools, we say all the time interviews are nothing more than a fictitious reality designed to resemble reality so that an employer, a hiring manager, can determine whether or not, if placed into the position, you could do it. So if you think to yourself, oh, it's really, really stressful to work here, I want to measure whether or not someone's good at stress. I guess interviews should be stressful. I mean, it's a logical place for your brain to go. And with all of the terrible Internet advice that you're getting, why wouldn't you think that was the right approach?

[B]

I forgot about that. We've actually talked about this. I think we did a cast on it in Manager Tools or Career Tools. But Wendy and I. Wendy's now left the firm, but Wendy, when she was running Career Tools, she and I would send as jokes back and forth various YouTube videos on how to answer the tell me about yourself question. And what was interesting about it was there are a couple of Things that I found and we both were aghast at the guidance. And if you're wondering how to answer the tell me about yourself question, we have a podcast for that. It's very straightforward. You, you'll be able to practice. We can help if you want. But one of the things I noticed was all of the people doing the video that were the, the person delivering the information were attractive and well groomed. Okay, so they were actors, they were reading a script. So strike one, strike two. All the videos were at least 10 minutes and one second long. And the reason for that I found out Wendy told me she being very knowledgeable about the Internet, is that at 10 minutes and 1 second, YouTube allows you to put a third advertisement into a video. These people were not trying to help the interviewees, they were trying to make money off of people watching them. They knew that tell me about yourself is a standard question and they knew that people didn't necessarily know how to answer it, although our podcasts are free and so they'd listen to a 15, 10, 15 minute video. The third thing was the guidance was horrible. The classic example is your answer to tell me about yourself should be one minute long. Don't worry though, the interviewer will of course be probing and then it will become longer. The only reason interviewers probe during a one minute tell me about yourself answer is it's so short. They've already downgraded the candidate by them being so short. As if you could describe your life in one minute and then begging them to interject to probe for more details is that candidates don't know. It's supposed to be three to five minutes long and you're supposed to show the, the interviewer that you've done some preparation, you've thought through your life, you thought through the various stages of your life, and there are some themes with your professional and personal life. So yeah, you mentioned the Internet and it's just full of really bad advice. In fact, if anybody is talking to you, if you're watching a video from someone who's an HR generalist or a specialist in interviewing and they're 25 years old, they don't have enough interviewing alone underneath their belt to be telling you what works and what doesn't work for interviewers, you'd need to have data experience.

[A]

Or lack thereof, I suppose.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

No time for a live conference. Don't worry about that. Our asynchronous video classes teach the core management behaviors of one on ones feedback, coaching and delegation. Whenever it fits your calendar, build better Management habits by visiting us@manager tools.com EMC all right, so our outline for today's cast. We're going to start by talking about the data on positive versus negative interviewing. And then we're going to go over three rules for interviewers that we would recommend you put into practice. The first, the first is smile, then express thanks followed by compliment behaviors.

[B]

Yeah, and these are, these are just simple things you can do while still keeping a, a sharp mind about you, about whether or not you're going to say yes. You can be a nice, friendly, personable, caring, concerned, even charming interviewer while having high standards for your company. And it's totally okay you can do those things. And folks, I'm just going to tell you now, this is not in the show notes. If you think you can't do that, you're not good enough to be an interviewer. Okay. If you tell me, well, Mark, my authentic self is to be very dower and straight. It's my natural self. Yeah, exactly. When I meet new people, I don't smile. I don't say thank you or please or you're welcome or anything like that. Then you're not a nice person. Or let me put it differently, you may think of yourself as a nice person, but other people won't think that about you. The way people evaluate nice people is by their behaviors and typically in the first few minutes of an interaction with them. And there is no excuse for a company letting a person who would insist on their authentic behaviors. I'm doing Joy air quotes right now. There is no company that would allow a person who insists on being authentically dour, sour, straight faced, not warm, not personable. If they knew it, they wouldn't let you interview. Or at least if they're smart, they shouldn't let you interview. So I want to start on the data because I was there during the data. So I'll get it started on the day.

[A]

I already told them that this was your favorite. So they expect you to.

[B]

Yeah, go for it. So over the course number of years, 10 years, maybe 12 years. My previous firm, Horseman and Company, where virtually all the data for manager tools comes from, we gathered data on over 50,000 interviews conducted by roughly 500 interviewers over that roughly 10 year period. These interviews were conducted by hiring managers, not recruiters. Full disclosure, some recruiters are warm and friendly, some are not. And they were for either entry level positions or frontline manager roles. And these were all at Fortune 500 companies. Okay. Which is generally a pretty good standard for how companies Interview. I know there are smaller companies and I wouldn't say they're bad interviewers. I would just say sooner or later, when you start getting bigger, you start getting more refined and you'll find better interviewers at larger companies.

[A]

Say less mature processes, generally less, Less opportunity. Right. Smaller companies hire less often because of the decrease in reps. You're just not going to be as good.

[B]

Yeah. And you know the old saying of people like, what's your favorite color? If you were an animal, what animal would you be? You should just politely get up and say, I'm sorry, I forgot, I have to go home and water my plants. If people start asking you questions like that, it's so bad. So the data was gathered at about 15 companies with whom we had long term consulting and training engagements around hiring processes. The entire hiring process, from sourcing to screening to screening interviews, resume screening, then screening interviews, and then face to face interviews and background checks and reference checks and onboarding the entire process. Okay. Each interview was recorded and me and three or four of my staff split them up and then reviewed all 50,000 of those interviews. Okay. They recorded it. We reviewed it for behaviors such as smiling. And by the way, for the record, we made a decision. Laughing counted as smiling. Okay. Having prepared questions, by the way, there were some more, but I'm just highlighting some of these. We were essentially marking a tick box whether or not we saw or heard that behavior. Look, in gathering data like this, in a large scale data gathering thing like this, you. You don't want the reviewers opinions, you don't want them saying how they felt about a particular interviewer, Right? We did. We paid very little attention to the interviewee. We were focusing on what can we learn from interviewers?

[A]

You know what I bet you wish you had back then? AI.

[B]

Oh, oh. Dude.

[A]

Can you imagine how much easier that would have made this irrelevant? Doesn't matter. Just an idea that occurred to me. I can imagine how much easier this would have been.

[B]

You should know, since we're talking about timing, we also didn't have the Internet. These were manually recorded onto VHS tapes. So you had to physically be in the office to review the tapes.

[A]

There are people listening to this podcast right now that have never actually seen a real vhs.

[B]

Exactly. Well, let me tell you, it's a physical thing. It is not a digital file that you can mail around and have anyone look at anytime you want. So we were looking at again, smiling and laughing, prepared questions, knowing the candidate's resume in advance. It's really obvious if you're Looking for that, whether they do or don't, probing for details, shaking hands, eye contact, voicing appreciation, making encouraging statements, expressing thanks, answering questions directly, and again, several others that were other parts of the study designed to inform our training on these managers at these different companies. And by the way, we had to disclose when we were using joint company data that in fact we were using other companies interviewer behavior in interviews to inform us on some of this. And a couple of the companies actually said, you can't use our data. We, we said at the time, they won't know it's coming from you. Right? They won't. It's all anonymized. Nobody knows anything. I was very surprised by that. Sometimes the non disclosure agreements and the work product agreements we had were fairly restrictive I think for the wrong reasons, but whatever. Okay. We then made a map of all those behaviors and compared those behaviors with interview outcomes, offer or not offer, and then process outcomes, which is higher or not. Okay, so obviously if you don't offer, they can't, can't be hired. But then if you do offer, you find out whether or not people accept or decline.

[A]

And then the second part of this is now that there's this data set, we've got data set with interviewer behaviors. Simultaneously we track the performance of those individuals that were hired. Now in this particular study, we did not track the performance of those that weren't hired. Now that was also studied to a degree, but a different study, not, not.

[B]

A successful study, much, much harder as you can imagine.

[A]

And in order to study these, these hires that were made, we looked at things like interim and annual performance reviews, compared candidates who were hired by positively behaved interviewers versus what we would deemed as negatively behaved interviewers.

[B]

To be clear, when I say negatively, you didn't have to be rude or loud or mean. You just happened to be in the bottom third. Roughly, I think it was more like 30% of the positive behaviors we were looking for. And we admit that you might say, oh, this was biased because you were looking for a particular thing. You weren't looking for both things. You weren't looking for negatives. We made the assumption that would have, by the way, that would have made this an even more complex process and taken even longer. But we made the assumption, as all studies do, that a preponderance of positives is likely to generate a positive response from the interviewee about the culture of the company. And we'll talk more about that later. But we also assume that if you didn't have a lot of positives that even if we might not, someone might not say you were negative, we would certainly say you were a lot less positive. These are professional managers. We didn't see any inappropriate or untoward behaviors, but there were some that were straight faced, I would call sour, dour, glum, sullen, those kinds of things. I would use those descriptive, qualitative terms. But you know, if somebody doesn't smile for a whole hour, that's a surprise. And if you think, well, that's me, you might not be a good interviewer unless you understand that to be a good interviewer you must be willing to engage in behaviors that interviewing science shows as being effective. That's the whole point of this podcast.

[A]

Okay, now in addition, before we get here to the the results for the record, none of these interviews were virtual to Mark's point earlier in this podcast. That's funny, it was pre Internet, right? So at the time there was no reliable, affordable software system that could be used on individual contributors and frontline manager interviewers as well. Nevertheless, because we don't have specific data suggesting that these concepts would hold true in a virtual interview, we do believe that these same outcomes would be similar if it were done today using virtual interviewing technologies. And the reason for that, folks, is interviewees are as nervous today for an interview as they've ever been. I mean, folks doing a virtual interview today are just as nervous as an in person interview because of the predominance of it. I would suggest, and I mean the argument could be made that positive behaviors make even more of a difference virtually because there's a complete lack of personal connectivity in a virtual interview. Now we don't again have data to support this. That wasn't part of the part.

[B]

We didn't study that. So that's not the data.

[A]

It wasn't part of the study. But again, I would suggest that day to day conversation done virtually is colder generally than in person conversations. So I would think it's logical that.

[B]

The results would hold because we're the only people with this kind of behavioral data. We want to be fair to those people who are inclined to think scientifically about these studies. And there were studies that we did that were expensive that we had to throw out because they didn't show anything. Now we had to tell the client about them because they were work for hire. But again, there's no data specifically around virtual interviewing other than my gut instinct, which I think after 65 years on this earth, I can justifiably say, having been listened to by millions, hundreds of millions of people or around the world that in person interviews beat virtual interviews every day of the week. We understand that virtual is cheaper and higher volume and we respect that accessibility.

[A]

All that. I get it. Thanks so much for joining us folks. We hope you join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only. Please.