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.
Worth Reading
See all books →
Creating Improvised Theatre
Tools, Techniques, and Theories
Mark Jane
Improvised Theatre and the Autism Spectrum
A Practical Guide
Gary Kramer; Richie Ploesch
Improve
How I Discovered Improv Comedy and Conquered Social Anxiety
Alex Graudins
Putting Improv to Work
Spontaneous Performance for Leadership, Learning, and Life
Greg Hohn
Improv Comedy (20th Anniversary Edition)
Andy Goldberg
Improvisation for Actors and Writers
A Guidebook for Improv Lessons in Comedy
Bill Lynn
Related Games
Interview Switch
Interview Switch is a scene game in which the roles of interviewer and interviewee suddenly reverse mid-conversation. The performer who was asking questions is now answering; the performer who was answering is now asking. The power shift catches both performers off guard and changes the scene's relational dynamics in an instant. The game trains the ability to adapt to a changed status dynamic, to find and occupy a new position in a relationship immediately upon the reversal.
Henry
Henry is a short-form game in which a character with a fixed name and identity appears across multiple unrelated scenes, played by the same performer throughout. Other performers create new scenes with different premises, and the Henry character enters each scene, bringing the same personality, quirks, and behavioral patterns into wildly different contexts. The running character provides continuity across otherwise disconnected scenes. The game rewards a strong, memorable character who can fit into any scenario while remaining recognizably the same person.
Old Job New Job
Old Job New Job is a short-form game in which one performer plays a character in their current occupation while simultaneously being haunted by habits, skills, and reflexes from a completely unrelated previous career. The comedy arises from the collision of two incompatible professional worlds within a single person.
Understudy
Understudy is a scene game in which performers replace one another mid-scene and must instantly continue as the character just vacated, adopting their voice, physicality, and emotional state. The replacing performer must observe closely while waiting and commit to a specific replication rather than a generic impression. The game trains character observation, physical specificity, and the ability to enter mid-scene without disrupting its reality.
Little Voice
Little Voice is a scene game in which one performer provides a running internal monologue for another performer's character, speaking the private thoughts aloud while the character plays the scene with a different outward presentation. The technique adds psychological depth by externalizing what the character would never say. The gap between the inner voice and the outer behavior creates comedy, dramatic irony, and character complexity. The game trains performers to play with subtext and demonstrates how much scene work depends on the difference between what characters think and what they reveal.
Alter Ego
Alter Ego is a short-form scene game in which each main character has a second performer standing directly behind them who voices the character's inner thoughts. Two players perform a scene with dialogue and action while their respective alter egos narrate the unspoken subtext: desires, fears, judgments, and contradictions that the characters would never say aloud. The contrast between what a character says publicly and what they actually think generates natural comedy and dramatic irony. The game highlights the role of subtext in scene work and rewards performers who create clear, exploitable gaps between surface behavior and true feelings. Alter Ego appears across multiple improv traditions and is documented in Andy Goldberg's Improv Comedy among other sources.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Job Interview. Retrieved September 28, 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 September 28, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.