I don't understand. Isn't the point that your example good candidate will prepare for interviews by reviewing those occurrences such that they are vivid, but a bad candidate will be unable to do so regardless of how much they prepare?
No, the idea is that people who find it easy to praise themselves may actually do fewer praise-worthy things. Like when I sit on my butt for weeks, then wash the dishes one time and consistently remind my wife of that one time I washed the dishes. Whereas she might wash the dishes every night and never asks for praise.
In that situation, if someone asked "tell me what special activities you've done in the past month", I might point to that one time where I washed the dishes, whereas my wife, not seeing dish washing as anything impressive, might say she's done nothing special. Even though I only washed the dishes once, I come off looking better there since I have an example I can point out.
Simply saying "I did my job every day" isn't good enough. However, not doing your job except on one occasion makes that one occasion seem special.
In your example, "I washed the dishes once or twice" is not going to impress the interviewer and is quite revealing. (This is true for the more general version of your anecdote as well.)
No, but you'd come up with a story to go along with it. You didn't just do your job building a website for a client, but rather you had a client with a pressing need for a custom site and they were on a tight deadline. Normally your team wouldn't work contracts like this, but you thought it would be a good challenge and a way to test your skills. You had to work late nights for a few days, but you managed to get the site done in time and on budget. Sounds pretty nice, it's good that you were selfless and spent some of your personal time to help the client on such a tricky project.
What actually happened was you just sat there browsing reddit until the deadline had almost arrived, then worked like crazy trying to get the site finished. Normally your team wouldn't work contracts like that (which means normally your team would do their job properly). And it was a challenge and a test of your skills, because normally you don't do jack squat at work. In fact, the reason you're looking for a new job is because if you don't quit your current employer will fire you.
Now you have a great story to tell an interviewer about how you completely fail to do your job properly. But by dressing up the words a little bit and using some creative euphemisms, you can make it sound like you went above and beyond. And it's not really a lie, because you did go above and beyond... eventually. You just didn't have to do that if you had worked properly. All you have to do is leave out the fact that you're a massive slacker.
So you get the job because you told an awesome story of how devoted you are, and all you had to do was leave out one single fact (that the deadline was only tight because you procrastinated). Meanwhile your really awesome coworker tells every single fact 100% true and you get the job instead of him, because your story sounds better.
I think this is a good point, but an even more likely one is just claiming credit for someone else's accomplishment. People who are good at self aggrandizing have an advantage for these kinds of questions.
If the interviewer follows up with all the team members who were actually there it wouldn't work, but I kind of doubt this happens a lot.
Yeah, but "I took on the undesirable task of fixing all the shitty excel cleaning because no one else was going to do it" isn't going to score you many points in a job interview.
