Article · Both sectors

Interviews are conversations, not exams

Preparation should never mean scripting answers. Understand the role, sharpen your proposition, and make it about the client’s problems.

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The candidates who interview worst are often the ones who prepared hardest, in the wrong way. They arrive with answers to the questions they expect, and they deliver them whether or not the question was asked. It reads as rehearsed because it is.

Preparation should never mean scripting answers. It should mean understanding the role, the firm and the person across the table well enough to have a real conversation with them. Who are their key clients? What has changed in their market this year? What would make the next twelve months a success for the person hiring you? If you cannot answer those going in, you have not prepared.

In the room, ask intelligent questions about the client and the problems they are trying to solve. Make it about them. Then bring in the relevant parts of your experience, much as a consultant would: here is a similar problem I have seen, here is what we did, here is what I would look at first in your case. That is how senior people talk to each other, and it is how a hiring partner decides you can sit in front of their clients.

Sharpen your proposition before you go. One or two sentences on what you are good at and the evidence for it. Numbers where you have them. Firms described if not named. Everything else in the conversation hangs off that.

And treat the interview as the first meeting of a working relationship, not an exam. The firm is deciding whether to work with you. You are deciding whether to work with them. Both of those are easier to judge in a conversation than in a test.

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