Chris Dragan's Corner

I doubt that everybody realizes, that job interviews are for both the company trying to fill in an open position as well as the potential employee trying to find a job. A usually small, but important part of an interview is when the person being interviewed asks the questions.

This idea is for those who have the chance to speak to their potential future manager. How do you know if a particular manager will be right for you?

The question to ask your future manager is: Do you prefer cats or dogs?

The explanation follows.

Dogs are followers, they need their master to tell them want to do, to give them direction. Cats on the other hand are soloists. They do what they want, whenever they want. If they want to be tapped, they come to you.

Of course, this is an approximation, a generalization.

Similarly, there are two groups of employees. Ones which need to be told what to do, and the others, who don’t need and don’t like encouragement, but rather pursue tasks on their own. This is universal regardless of the job type. Obviously, the first kind can be compared to dogs, while the other to cats.

Before going to a job interview, you need to ask yourself honestly, whether you are a follower and need to be told exactly what to do, or whether you like taking complete control over what you are doing. This has nothing to do with whether to like cats or dogs, it is completely orthogonal.

If you are more like a dog, probably a manager who prefers dogs would be better for you. Similarly, if you are more like a cat, a cat-person would manage you better.

It’s just a theory. As silly as it sounds, I wonder if there exists any statistical data which would help test it.