By Bror David Johnson | Retention Search
Earlier this week, Anthony Fauci sat before a Senate committee for more than two hours and said one sentence. He invoked his Fifth Amendment right and declined to answer, more than a hundred times, to more than a hundred questions.
Set aside every political feeling you have about that, because I am not interested in relitigating any of it here. Focus on one narrow, uncomfortable, universal thing instead. He had a reason, and he said it out loud. He was worried about a perjury trap. His attorneys almost certainly gave him sound legal advice. And every single person watching drew their own conclusion anyway.
That is the part worth sitting with. Because a refusal to answer is not a blank. It is not neutral. The human being on the other side of the table does not experience silence as silence. They experience it as information, and they fill it in themselves, usually with something worse than whatever the truth was going to be. That is true even when the refusal is reasonable, which should tell you what happens when it is not.
That happens in hiring every single day.
Candidates do this constantly, and it costs them the job.
There are four or five questions that make almost every candidate tighten up. Why did you leave. Why is there a gap. Why have you had three roles in five years. What are you currently making. What would your last manager say about you.
And what I watch people do, over and over, is get vague. They give a long answer that never answers. They say it is complicated. They say they would rather discuss that later in the process. They talk around the thing for ninety seconds and then stop, hoping the moment passed.
The moment did not pass. The person across the table just wrote something down, and it is worse than what actually happened. Because here is the math a hiring manager runs without even meaning to: if this were a normal, defensible answer, you would have just said it. The fact that you did not means it must be bad. And the version they imagine is always worse than a layoff, a bad fit, a firm that got acquired, or a manager who was genuinely difficult.
I have seen candidates lose out over a gap that was a parent’s illness. Over a departure that was a restructuring. Over a short tenure that was a firm folding. All completely normal, completely survivable, completely explainable in eleven seconds. The answer was never the problem. The flinch was.
The fix is short, true, and forward.
Every hard question you are dreading has a version of the answer that is honest, brief, and does not invite a follow up. Say what happened in one or two sentences, do not editorialize, do not apologize for four minutes, and then move the conversation forward yourself.
The firm was acquired and my role was consolidated. Here is what I did with that year. That is the whole answer. Watch what happens after it. Nothing. The interviewer nods and moves on, because you gave them somewhere to put it.
The mistake people make is preparing these answers in their head. In your head it sounds fine. Out loud, on the spot, with adrenaline running, it comes out defensive and long. Say it out loud, to another person, before the interview. The difference is not subtle.
And hiring managers do exactly the same thing, in the other direction.
This is not a candidate problem. It is a human problem, and firms do it constantly.
A candidate asks what the compensation range is, and gets a deflection about how it depends on experience. They ask why the person who had this role left, and get a pause. They ask what the growth path looks like, and get something vague about opportunities for the right person. They ask when they will hear back, and get soon.
The candidate reads every one of those the same way you would. They do not think the interviewer is being appropriately discreet. They think the comp is bad, the last person quit angry, there is no growth path, and the process is a mess. And the version they imagine, again, is usually worse than the truth.
In a market this tight, that is not a small cost. Your best candidates have options and they are running the same instinctive analysis on you that you are running on them. Every question you dodge is a data point about how your organization actually operates.
You do not have to overshare. You have to answer.
None of this is about being an open book. Some things genuinely cannot be discussed, and pretending otherwise is naive. There is a real difference between declining to answer and dodging, and it comes down to one thing: name the reason.
I am not able to get into the details of that separation, but I can tell you it was not performance related and I left on good terms. That is a refusal, and it works, because you told them why you cannot answer instead of leaving them to guess.
We have not finalized the range yet, and I do not want to give you a number I cannot stand behind. Here is what I can tell you about how we structure it. Same thing. A boundary with a reason attached is not a wall. A boundary with nothing attached is.
And even then, understand what you are spending. A reasoned refusal costs you less than a dodge. It does not cost you nothing. Fauci gave a reason and the room still filled in the blank. Use the refusal when you have to, not when you would simply rather not answer.
This is most of what career coaching actually is.
I launched a coaching practice earlier this year alongside the search work, for professionals in transition and for new graduates trying to break in. A surprising amount of it is not strategy or resumes. It is this. Sitting with someone, finding the three questions they are afraid of, and building an answer they can say out loud without their voice changing.
That is unglamorous work and it moves the needle more than almost anything else, because most people do not lose opportunities on qualifications. They lose them in the eight seconds where they went quiet.
If you have a question you are dreading, whether you are twenty years into your career or three months out of school, that is a fixable problem and it usually takes one conversation. And if you are a firm leader who suspects your own process has a few of these dodges baked into it, that is fixable too, and cheaper to fix than to keep paying for.
The number is below.
Bror David Johnson
Founder & Executive Recruiter, Retention Search
773-573-5942 | bdjohnson@retentionsearch.com | www.retentionsearch.com