Job Interview
Job Interview is a scene game in which one or more performers audition for a position while endowed with secret traits, habits, or identities that the interviewer must guess. The interview setting provides built-in status dynamics, clear stakes, and a familiar social ritual that audiences instantly recognize. The game rewards clear character physicalization, the ability to embed clues through behavior rather than exposition, and the comedy that emerges when inappropriate qualities collide with a formal setting.
Structure
One performer plays the interviewer, seated behind a desk or in a position of authority. One or more candidates enter for the interview. Before the scene begins, the audience assigns each candidate a secret trait, quirk, or identity that the interviewer does not know.
The interview begins with standard questions: qualifications, experience, strengths, and weaknesses. The candidates answer the questions while incorporating their secret endowment into their behavior, speech patterns, and physical choices. A candidate endowed with "obsessed with cats" steers every answer toward feline references. A candidate endowed with "secretly a robot" moves with mechanical precision and speaks in overly literal terms.
The interviewer responds to the candidates' behavior in character, trying to make sense of the unusual responses while maintaining the formality of the interview. The interviewer may ask probing follow-up questions that push the candidates to reveal more of their endowment.
The game runs until the interviewer guesses each candidate's secret, the candidates' behavior becomes so extreme that the endowment is obvious, or the scene reaches a natural comedic conclusion. The interviewer then announces a hiring decision, which provides a satisfying button.
Variations include group interview (multiple candidates compete simultaneously), reverse interview (the candidate interviews the company, and the interviewers have the secret traits), and panel interview (multiple interviewers each endow the candidate with a different quality).
How to Teach It
How to Explain It
"Two or three players are being interviewed for a job. The catch: each interviewer knows something about the applicant that the applicant doesn't know themselves. The interviewers can only hint at what they know through their questions and reactions. The applicant figures out their own character through the interview."
Job Interview is an effective game for teaching endowment skills because the interview format provides a clear structure that supports the performers. Students know how interviews work, which frees their creative attention for the endowment challenge.
Coach candidates to think in terms of behavior, not exposition. The endowment should emerge through what the candidate does and how the candidate speaks, not through what the candidate says about themselves. This distinction between showing and telling is central to effective scene work.
The game teaches status play. The interview format creates a clear high-status/low-status dynamic that performers can reinforce, subvert, or complicate. A candidate who gradually takes over the interview through the force of their endowed personality creates a status reversal that is both funny and instructive.
Use the game to practice audience interaction. Taking endowment suggestions from the audience gives performers experience incorporating external input and builds the audience relationship that live improv depends on.
How to Perform It
The candidates must embed their endowment in their behavior rather than stating it. A candidate who says "because, as a pirate, that is how things are done" has handed the answer over too easily. A candidate who says "arr, that brings to mind the time at the previous company when the treasure was buried in the quarterly reports" delivers the clue through behavior while maintaining the interview's premise.
The interviewer's reactions drive the comedy. An interviewer who plays the straight person, remaining professionally composed while candidates exhibit increasingly bizarre behavior, creates the frame within which the candidates' absurdity lands. An interviewer who breaks character to laugh or comment undermines the game.
Pacing matters. Candidates who reveal their endowment too quickly leave the game with nowhere to go. Candidates who are too subtle frustrate the audience and the interviewer. The ideal approach starts with mild hints and escalates to unmistakable clues over the course of the scene.
The game benefits from clear, simple endowments. "Secretly a vampire" provides more physical and behavioral material than "has complicated feelings about the economy." The best endowments suggest specific physical choices and speech patterns.
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Backwards Interview
Backwards Interview is a short-form game in which a talk show interview is performed in reverse chronological order, beginning with the farewell and ending with the introduction. Players must construct logical narrative links that work backward while maintaining the illusion of a natural conversation. The game rewards sharp memory and structural thinking.
Press Conference
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Alter Ego
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Job Interview. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/games/job-interview
The Improv Archive. "Job Interview." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/games/job-interview.
The Improv Archive. "Job Interview." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/games/job-interview. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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