Active listening

What the behaviour actually is

Paraphrase what the candidate just said back to them, in your own words. Ask a follow-up that’s actually about what they said, not the next item on your list. Let a pause sit instead of filling it. None of this is new: Carl Rogers and Richard Farson wrote it up for supervisors at the University of Chicago’s Industrial Relations Center in 1957, arguing that a technique built for therapy would work just as well on a factory floor. It’s been repackaged for sales, mediation, and hiring ever since.

The case for using it in an interview specifically: a 2022 review of the workplace-listening research by Kluger and Itzchakov found that when someone experiences being listened to well, they convey more information and the listener understands their intent more accurately (Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior). For an interviewer, that’s the whole job. A candidate who feels rushed gives the rehearsed version of an answer. A candidate who’s actually being heard gives the version with the caveat, the exception, the detail that tells you something real.

Where the textbook version breaks

Here’s the part most interview training skips. Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman’s 2016 study of 3,492 managers rated on their listening found that the classic version — stay quiet, nod, repeat the answer back almost word-for-word — isn’t what the best-rated listeners actually did. The best listeners asked real questions and occasionally pushed back; the worst ones “listen only to identify errors in reasoning or logic… using their silence as a chance to prepare their next response” (Harvard Business Review). Read that twice: silence, in that study, wasn’t proof of listening. It was frequently proof of the opposite.

That’s the interviewer mistake this term is supposed to fix, and a scripted “so what I’m hearing is…” doesn’t fix it. It’s the same passive posture the study found doesn’t work, just with a phrase attached to make it look active.

What actually earns the signal

Not a better script, then. A follow-up that could only come from having processed the last answer, not a generic “tell me more” that works on any answer, but something specific to what the candidate just said that either confirms it or exposes the gap. That’s also where behavioral interviews and structured interviews meet this term instead of replacing it. A structured format fixes which questions get asked and in what order. A behavioral prompt fixes the shape of the question itself (“tell me about a time…”). Neither one tells the interviewer what to do once the answer arrives, and that’s this term’s entire job, running inside either format or neither one.