You are currently being interviewed for your dream position. Everything is going great and you feel like you are connecting well with the interviewer! Too bad you have to be reminded about your previous supervisor when the interviewer asks you the following question. “How was your experience with your previous supervisor?” You tell the interviewer that you and your supervisor did not get along because that is the truth, right? This is why you left your previous position in the first place.

Wrong! You do not want to tell the interviewer that you and your supervisor did not get along. This will most likely lead the interviewer to think that you will talk that way about your new supervisor if offered the position. There is a good chance that the interviewer will have made up his or her mind not to hire you as soon as you answer the question that way. Unfortunately for poor Madeline, the young woman in this video, it is too late and she has already made that mistake. Can you think of another way Madeline could have better responded to the question? Maybe she could have focused on strategies she used to handle disagreements with her supervisor without saying they did not get along, for example, “My supervisor and I worked well together but when we had different ideas on how to handle situations, we worked together this way by doing this…” and then she could have given specific examples of how she worked with her supervisor.