What a job interview taught me about the difference between honesty and truth (and the power of Imposter Syndrome).

“Ultimately truth is binary whereas honesty is a spectrum…”

In the past week I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of honesty.

Being honest.

I’ve always considered honesty to be a synonym for truthfulness.

That if one is honest, one is always truthful.

But in the past week I’ve discovered there is a clear distinction between the two.

Whilst I’ve had good intentions, believed myself to almost always have been honest, when it comes to what I’ve told myself (the intellectual alibis I’ve given myself for some of my choices) I haven’t always been telling the truth.

I came head to head with an intellectual alibi having becoming ‘truth’ this week when I was sharing one of my early work experiences with a mentee.

It was 2001 and I was the Head of Marketing for what is now the UK’s leading homefinder site, one of the success stories from the first dotcom boom.

I loved my job, it was everything I wanted. I was empowered to explore any opportunities I spotted, and given the freedom to be as creative as I liked provided I got results.

I had an amazing boss and a team I both adored and respected. We worked our asses off together, and when the working days ended, we played hard together too.

Work didn’t feel like work, it felt like us against the world, building something new and exciting together. Each day I walked through the office door into our warehouse office I was grateful for the opportunity I’d been given to be a part of that team.

But, getting the job hadn’t been easy.

Right from the start I knew I was on the back foot, I knew I didn’t tick many of the boxes HR required in terms of qualifications and relevant experience.

In the interview I was more salesperson than candidate; trying my damnedest to sell a version of me more applicable to what they needed. As thoughts and ideas flew out of my mouth at a rate of knots, I saw HR exchange a look with my interviewer and felt the sinking sensation of having failed.

Shortly after the looks were exchanged, HR and my interviewer excused themselves and left the room. I remember sitting there, staring at my hands, knowing I’d blown it.

There was no way they were going to take a chance on me. Hell, I wouldn’t have taken a chance on me if I’d been in their shoes.

And then something amazing happened.

The door opened and my interviewer walked in alone. In one hand he held a printed copy of my cv, and in the other a red felt tip pen. He smiled as he sat back down opposite me, and then he spoke. I can still hear his voice in my head now, 23 years later.

Softly spoken, gentle and empathetic;

“Liz, I am willing to offer you this role right now, but on one condition; I want you to take your cv and this pen, and I want you to redline anything that isn’t true, anything you’ve exaggerated or appropriated. I want to know exactly what you do know, what your real experience is. I am willing to teach and coach you based on the raw potential I see in you, but you have to be truthful with me now.”

As I listened to him and met his gaze, I knew that to honour the chance he was willing to take on me, I would have to expose myself, make myself completely vulnerable.

Admit to a stranger, someone I had been desperate to impress, all the exaggerations, the hyperbole, the lies I’d only just finished telling.

It was terrifying.

But I did it. And over the course of the next 2 years, he honoured his promise and his commitment to me. He taught me how to think. How to reason. How to problem solve, strategise, ask the hard questions and look for the things most people can’t see.

He taught me how to harness my creativity, to apply discipline and rigour to my innovation and ideas. He had faith in me, he believed in me, and he pushed me. Every. Single. Day.

It was without a doubt one of the happiest and most meaningful periods of my life.

And then change came. Our investors decided to offset some of their exposure and sold 70% of the business to a PE firm, one that already owned a significant stake in a rival company. Within weeks we were informed that the two companies were to be merged, with an attendant 50% reduction in headcount.

When the news came my boss, my wonderful mentor and teacher, sat me down and told me I would need to re-interview for my job. He was highly optimistic, pointing out my achievements both within the department and also in building our company culture. I was hopeful and willing to do anything not to lose the work I loved and the team who had come to be my work family.

And then as our offices were merged, and the sister company were moved into our warehouse, I met my opponent, Charlie. He was older and more experienced than I was, had a pedigree CV and had the respect and support of his whole leadership team. He was also a genuinely nice guy. Down to earth, kind and humble.

The first day we met he talked about how much he loved his work. He showed me pictures of his wife and their one year old daughter. He talked about how they had just taken out a mortgage and though he was terrified of losing his job, it was worth the sleepless nights watching his daughter play with her new rabbit outside in the garden.

He also talked about his journey with the sister company and all the ideas he had post-merger. He knew the tech inside out as well as the commercial aspects of the business and had already drawn out a user recruitment strategy, mapped out additional income stream opportunities and started to develop new commercial partnerships.

As I listened to him I felt like I was shrinking. My experience paled into insignificance next to his, my ideas black and white next to what seemed like his shining technicolour. I remember walking back to my desk and feeling like the world’s biggest imposter. A fraud.

24 hours later and it was “the day”. The day of we were both to be interviewed for the Head of Marketing position by both our individual bosses and the new CEO brought in by the VC firm.

I was in early, pacing the kitchen, practising and rehearsing my pitch when a noise in the corridor distracted me. Charlie was on his phone, talking to his wife, trying to calm her. He was telling her it would all be ok, that no matter what happened he wouldn’t let them lose their house. That he was willing to work all night in Sainsbury’s stacking shelves if it came to it.

As I stood there staring at my notes, I came to a decision. I knew what I had to do. I left the kitchen, walked over to HR, and removed myself from the interview process, stating clearly I wanted the job to go to Charlie.

It was easy to explain to HR that at 26 with no dependants, no mortgage, no real financial obligations, it was better for me to be out of work than Charlie. That not only was he the best person for the job, he needed it more than I did.

In the years that passed after leaving the Company, I was often asked why I didn’t go through with the interview. Why I voluntarily removed myself from a job and team that (at the time) meant everything to me.

And in all those years I told the story of how I did the right thing; ensuring Charlie had the job, could protect his family. That I was doing the gracious thing; quietly removing myself from the equation.

And this story isn’t just what I told other people, it’s also what I told myself.

But that’s where the distinction between honesty and truthfulness comes into play, because honesty and truthfulness are not the same thing. 

Being honest means not telling a lie. Being truthful means telling the whole story.

I saw this clearly this week when I was sharing this story for the first time in a long time, and as the words started to tumble out my mouth I had to stop. I knew that I wasn’t telling the whole story, knew I hadn’t been telling myself the whole story for years.

And the whole story, the whole truth, is that whilst I did want to protect and help Charlie, that I did feel I would find it easier to get another job and could live with a pay cut more than he could, I was mainly terrified I would be exposed and rejected.

I was terrified that during the course of the interview with the new CEO and Charlie’s own boss, I would be shown up to be the fraud/imposter I felt I was.

Compared to someone who really did know their stuff, who had years and years of experience, I would look like a kid playing at the job. I was scared I would see in their eyes that I wasn’t anywhere near good enough for them, that I was the last person they would want to keep in the business.

And as the years passed, I continued to tell myself the half of the story that meant I could avoid facing the fact that when I should have stood up and been counted, when I should have had faith in myself and honoured the belief and investment my boss had made in me, I did the opposite. I let fear win.

It was a sobering realisation this week that the lies we are most willing to believe are not the ones told to us by others, but the ones we tell ourselves.