How to deal with large dinners and recruiting

chrisw
Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:10:07 +0000

Those situations are tricky. You feel pressure to speak as much as your peers, but the reality is that talking does not mean making a good impression. If I were to take out a group of four applicants and heard three people for 90% of the night, but the 10% of the night where the fourth person spoke made me stop and listen, I would think much more highly of the fourth person.

In the informal dinner situations, you have to try to forget that it is any kind of interview type thing. Feel free to engage your peers in addition to the people who are already employed. Let your personality show, and if that means listening most of the time and only speaking when you have something interesting to say, then that is perfectly fine. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”