Can Casino Games Teach Skills for Job Interviews?

Preparing for a job interview is never easy. Well-meaning advice from one person can completely contradict advice from someone else. Do we stay quiet and reserved and let our confidence shine through or do we show them what we can do, pulling out all the stops? Ultimately to ace a job interview, we need to be able to teach ourselves the skills and let them naturally show. One way we can do this – thinking outside the box – is through learning skills based on casino games. But how can casino games teach us to be stronger candidates in job interviews?

Read Your Opponent

Poker can teach you a lot of skills that can be applied to other situations. One of the essential facets of poker is the need to be able to read your opponent. You need to analyze them to see if they are lying, to see what they might do next, and to incorporate your assumptions about them into your own moves. Poker relies on interpersonal analysis to create such an exciting game.

Being able to read your opponent is key in a job interview. While the person interviewing you might not be an ‘opponent’, you do need to be able to read them to see what they may be wanting from you and to see how it’s going. While they often try to remain impassive, certain responses do elicit reactions from them – such as experience in a previous role or in something extracurricular you do. Being able to pick up on these cues and lean into them could help you succeed in the interview.

Make Good Decisions

As the range of table games online shows – from Live Blackjack to Power Blackjack – there are many formats of the same simple game. Essentially, the key with blackjack is to analyze your hand, the table, and then make a quick decision based on this information without getting knocked out of the game. As the game progresses, these decisions need to be fast yet well-reasoned. This ability to make confident and correct decisions can be applied to a job interview.

Job interviews require you to respond to a variety of questions. Sometimes the key is to expand on something you have done or previously said, other times you should pare back the answer. We tend to diminish our successes in interview settings and could accidentally talk ourselves out of a job. The key is to make quick, yet well-reasoned decisions based on what we feel the interviewer wants to hear from each question they ask.

Go All In

Roulette can be played as safely or as riskily as you want. You could opt to portion out your bankroll on some sensible 50/50 options such as red or black or evens or odds. Or you could go all-in on one number. The approach to going all-in or making counterintuitive decisions based on a gut feeling is normal for those playing roulette. But could it also help a job interview? After all, sometimes the employer will be taking a risk on you.

Sometimes we know that the interviewer isn’t pleased with our responses. No matter how much we have to our credit, we might not be showing them what they’re looking for. It’s at this moment that our riskier sides should come out and decide if we want to ‘go all in’ in the interview. This means throwing everything we have at the interview, let them know our passion and zeal for the company, our abilities to do the job. By going off-piste with a declaration of ourselves and our caliber for the role, we may end up turning the interview around.

Playing casino games might not seem the most obvious place to find inspiration for a job interview, but they can teach us some transferable skills that could be useful in a job interview. These include the ability to read the person sitting across from us, the ability to make good decisions under pressure, and the knowledge of when it might be appropriate to give it our all for one final push.