The truth is a dangerous thing, especially in interviews

Education Secretary Justine Greening reckons she didn’t get a job in the City because she insisted on ordering her food in English in a swanky Italian restaurant

Being honest about weaknesses is key to landing top jobs, but not too honest (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A new psychiatric study reveals that being honest about your strengths and weaknesses goes down well at job interviews – although opening up about your failings only works for the top 10 per cent of candidates.

Honesty can backfire, if you’re not careful – I was interviewing someone for a job at the BBC once, and asked what programmes from my department (over 35 series) they watched, the candidate thought for a moment, and then answered “to be honest, none”.

Truthful, but career suicide – surely a bit of flattery would have played better? A common complaint about interviews is that class holds good candidates back – it’s not true in my experience, although one patronising BBC executive once told me I could only work there if I was “retrained” in their ways.

Education Secretary Justine Greening reckons she didn’t get a job in the City because she insisted on ordering her food in English in a swanky Italian restaurant. The first rule of getting a job is understanding the mindset of your future bosses – and if they want to order in faux-Italian, what’s wrong with following suit? She was going to be a worker, not a placard-waver for human rights.

Mind you, the paucity of women in senior city jobs is still scandalous – last week, two fund managers (Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management) announced a newly merged management board of 12 which includes just one woman. They claim to be “committed to promoting diversity at all levels…and ensuring the proportion of women in senior positions increases over time”.

Until that “time” comes, I don’t see why women should invest their money or their pensions with these funds. It’s well documented that more women on a board means increased profitability, but maybe that hasn’t filtered through to the men in suits at Standard Life and Co. Women control a huge rage of spending decisions now – and we should only trust our money and our pensions to companies that represent us fairly at board level.