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What Should You Do If You Disagree With Something They Said?

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

There are times in some interviews where you just disagree with their solution and just feel bollixed up with how they address it. Here’s how to respond.

How Do You Answer When You’re Asked to Rate Yourself on a Scale of 1-10?

I’m Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter. I coach people. I help with workplace issues which can involve job search hiring managing and leading just be more effective at work and the question for today is really about disagreeing with something that you’ve been asked about in the course of the interview and this happens with some regularity.

I know when I did recruiting back in The Stone Ages and people would get technical questions it was pretty common when I debrief the person after the interview for them to say something along the lines of they asked me a question. Their answer was dead wrong. I tried to explain to them but they just cut me off.

Like, what do you do? And the answer really comes down to is you’re polite with them and you explain why you think you’re right and you can do something along the lines of, you know, I have a different experience of how to answer this question. Can I just walk you through it? No, no, no, no. I’m right about this one.

Let me just kind of briefly walk you through the thinking I have about this and that’s for a staff level person being interviewed by a manager. Let’s look at it from the standpoint of two senior people and how you might address this because, again, this surfaces at all levels. So, there’s some question about how you handle leadership issues and how you might approach a specific management problem and they have an agenda in mind and you can point to your own success and they may say, “No, I wouldn’t quite do it that way.”

“Well, how would you do it?” And then you kind of dissect their thinking. Did you take this into consideration? Have you considered that? Yeah, I kind of dismissed it because when I had a situation along those lines, frankly, those were the pivot points for me in how we resolved it. Really? How’d you go about doing that? And notice what you’re doing is in a manner that’s . . . I don’t want to say flat but dispassionate, dealing with pure intellect.

What you’re able to do is express a difference of opinion with someone and give them something to think about. Being nice usually isn’t and when firms hire, it’s not like they want to hire a robot so we’re going to do exactly what they tell you to do. They want to hire people who can think and the more senior you are, the more your ability to think and professionally disagree is important.

As a matter of fact, for the more senior individuals, it is pivotal because that may . . . that question or scenario may have been a test for you that they know that their answer isn’t quite right but it’s close enough that if you’re not strong enough to resist and you go along, you rule yourself out. So, don’t hesitate to disagree. Just dive in and do it in a good manner.

They Don’t Want Me to Tell You This

ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER

People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers easier. Those things can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues.

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