Egotistical bragging is pretty easy to spot. Good team players are easy to spot, too - they're the ones giving credit to leadership and co-workers even for work

Egotistical bragging is pretty easy to spot. Good team players are easy to spot, too - they're the ones giving credit to leadership and co-workers even for work they take personal pride in. When I see a candidate's eyes light up talking about the manager who led them through a challenge into success, I know they respect others, and that matters. It's hard for a lot of people to speak well of themselves, which makes the whole interviewing process difficult much of the time. We're trained to a beat-down that gets called humility, but it's not. Asking about successes is a way past that - it's giving them permission to say something good about themselves. But to be fair, a lot of what I'm after is inflated claims on a resume, which are common as dirt, because people are much more comfortable deceptively bragging on paper than they are in person.