Job Interviews

Questions and model answers

1. How do you usually prepare for an interview?

   I write out three stories and stop there. Not answers to questions — stories, with a beginning and something that went wrong in the middle. Almost anything they ask can be answered with one of them if you choose well, and three is few enough that I actually remember them under pressure. I used to prepare twenty answers and it was worse: I'd be hunting through a list while somebody waited. The other thing I do is read the job posting again the morning of, because I always find one line I skimmed. Beyond that I stop preparing. Past a point it stops being readiness and starts being anxiety with a notebook, and you can hear that in the room.

2. In an interview, is it better to be completely honest or carefully polished?

   Honest about the substance, polished about the delivery — and I think people collapse those two on purpose so they can defend whichever one suits them. Inventing a strength you don't have is a bad trade even when it works, because you then have to do the job. But saying the first version of a true thing that comes into your head isn't honesty, it's just a lack of preparation. I've watched a good candidate describe a real failure in a way that made everyone uncomfortable, and the failure wasn't the problem — the shapelessness was. Same fact, ninety seconds of thought beforehand, and it would have been the strongest answer in the room. So I'd spend the prep time on shape, not on what to leave out.

3. Tell me about an interview that didn't go the way you hoped.

   I had one where I answered the first question for about four minutes. I could see it going on and I couldn't find a way to land it — every time I reached something that sounded like an ending, I added one more clause. By the time I stopped, the interviewer had visibly checked out, and we never really recovered. Afterwards I worked out what had happened: I hadn't decided what the answer was before I started talking, so I was composing it live and hoping to arrive somewhere. Now I take the two seconds. It feels much longer than it is, and it is the difference between an answer and a monologue. I count to two now, which feels stupid and works.

4. Do you think the first round of interviews should be anonymous?

   For anything that can be judged on work, yes — and the fact that it is rare tells you something about what interviews are really measuring. Blind auditions in orchestras changed who got hired, and nobody argues the music got worse. If a screen produces different results, the screen is not the distortion; it is revealing one. Where I'd stop is the point where the job genuinely is the person. Anything client-facing, anything where trust is the product — you cannot assess that from a transcript, and pretending otherwise just moves the bias later in the process. So: anonymous while you are testing whether someone can do the work, named once you are asking whether you want to work with them.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.