In this presentation, Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ and author of Never Say These Words in a Job Interview, shares findings from a linguistic analysis of over 20,000 real interview responses. He explains that answers flagged as strong consistently use past‑tense verbs, first‑person pronouns, and positive‑emotion words, and are longer than weak answers. Murphy illustrates the concept with a concrete example of a candidate who correctly answered a “disagree with your boss” question, highlighting how the response directly addresses the prompt, avoids fluff, and follows the identified linguistic patterns. He warns against overly polished, scripted answers that sound canned, noting that seasoned recruiters can spot them instantly. The talk concludes with a call to read his book for more examples and actionable takeaways.
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This might sound kind of weird, but there are very specific ways that people talk that get them flagged as really good interview answers. There's a certain kind of verb tense they use, pronouns that they use, emotions they use, how long they talk that really do signal to an HR person, a hiring manager, or recruiter that this is a good interview answer. Hi, I'm Mark Murphy. I'm the CEO of Leadership IQ. I'm a New York Times bestselling author, and my most recent book is called Never Say These Words in a Job Interview: The Words and Phrases That Win or Lose You the Job. And in this book, we reveal some science about what makes a good interview answer. So we took a look at over 20,000 real-life interview answers, and we did some linguistic analysis on them. And what we discovered was that good interview answers, contrasted with ones that got flagged as bad interview answers, like, "Don't hire this person," the good interview answers had a lot more past tense verbs and a lot more first-person pronouns. So in In these good interview answers, people tended to say things like, "I did," "I experienced," "I faced," et cetera. They also had more positive emotion words. So rather than veering on the negative, "Oh, everybody on my team was kind of an idiot," they didn't say that. They were, "I was thrilled about this. I was excited. This was a great opportunity." And their answers tended to be longer than low-performer answers. So let me give you a real-life example of this. So in response to the question, "Could you tell me about a time when you're boss gave you directions that you disagreed with. One person said, and this was flagged as a good answer, once I had to convince my boss that the pacing of a project and the work we were doing with our client was sufficient. He wanted to see it move along at a faster pace, a pace he knew we were capable of. However, I explained to him that the current pace was appropriate based on what the client had the mental energy to handle. The client had about a dozen other things going on in their life at the moment and was kind of mentally maxed out. And even though we could move along things faster on our end, I was giving the client what they were capable of handling. Now, okay, not an earth-shattering answer, right? But one of the things that really stands out about this answer is that this person truly answered the question. The question was, tell me about a time, a specific time in the past, when your boss gave you directions you disagreed with. They don't shy away from answering the question. And I know this sounds kind of weird, but it is shocking how many people, instead of just answering the question, I had a time 2 months ago when I faced the following. Instead, they will add in some fluffiness. They will avoid answering the question. Well, what you should do when you disagree with your boss and disagree with your boss's directions is what you should do is you should sit down and talk to the boss, which is not an answer to the question. So one of the major hallmarks of really good interview answers is don't try and sound overly smart because that turns answers into just kind of fluffy nonsense. And that stuff sounds canned, it sounds scripted and rehearsed, and HR people, recruiters, especially the better ones, they see through it a mile away. But if your answers focus on past tense verbs, first person pronouns— I had a time in the past when I did this— you are already 90% of the way there because you are giving them a direct answer to their question, which again is sadly really, really rare. I hope you check out the book, Never Say These Words in a Job Interview. Lots of examples of real-life answers, why they're good, why they're bad, and specific takeaways that you can use to ace your next interview.
