Interview like a journalist (1)
I had to write this because of recent firsthand experience with post-interview feedback like this: “you didn’t have enough experience in this one thing” …when no one in that 5-round process asked a single question about it.
I walk away from these thinking, “but if they’d have asked, I could have told them a whole bunch of stuff”— especially true when you’ve been at this career thing a while.
Let’s rewind the clock a bit. All the way back to 1996, in fact.
One of my first jobs was as an editorial assistant for a journalist named Pam Moore, whom everyone respected and deeply feared.
Her workspace looked like entropy in action — every surface, including the 6-foot bookshelf shoved into her cubicle, was full of papers and binders and books constantly threatening to cascade to the floor. When they did, they stayed there.
Pam hated computers, and hated Microsoft Windows 3.1 with the white-hot heat of 1000 suns, but that’s not the point of my story. Though it was my way into working with her — I handled layout and getting things to the printer downstairs.
Every single Thursday afternoon at 1:30pm, she would freak out. She would stand over me and poke at my monitor, worry about column formatting, orphans and widows, and say things to me like, “I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”
(One of my first professional triumphs was spontaneously asserting after one of those days: “my way of handling deadline pressure is not the same as yours.” I was just… super calm. Windows 3.1 could be tamed. She never commented on my work ethic or methods again.)
After many months of making her deadline, which she was well-known for missing before I worked with her, she trusted me enough to let me write and interview for her newsletters, Federal Grants & Contracts Weekly and the “Health” edition, focused on NIH & CDC.
(Some things really stay with you… Masthead: Palatino, bold italic. Copy: New Century Schoolbook, 11 pt with 13 pt spacing. 3.2” first column on the first page for a story, .5” gutter.)
Now my job was layout plus: I drove from Annapolis, MD to southeast Washington, DC, arriving at 9:30am, where the next day’s Federal Register was available at that exact time. I would make a copy and head to the office in Alexandria, VA.
I’d comb it for grant information across federal agencies and call the contact person to get what I needed to write an entry in our newsletter.
I would ask them some questions, get off the phone, and she would spin around and ask things like “what about the online version?” or “when is the early filing deadline?” or “who’s eligible?” and I would look down at my notes and see that I was missing that thing.
Goddammit.
“Call them back,” she would say.
It was SO embarrassing to call the same person back four times in one day.
But you know what? Eventually I got really, really good at it. Pretty soon I was writing all the grant stuff in her newsletters every week — about 15 pages of copy, in all.
How did I get good? Other than sheer embarrassment, I started to write down everything I needed to know — everything that was missing in the Register or whatever I had to go on — before I made the call.
I did that by starting to write the piece before I talked to anyone, which showed me all the holes I needed to fill with correct information.
Eventually, the contacts knew who I was and started sharing even more interesting tidbits with me. And my little articles got better.
So, here’s my interview advice, straight from learning-the-hard-way, 23-year-old me:
KNOW WHAT YOU NEED
ASK ALL YOUR QUESTIONS
TAKE NOTES
What this means:
you should know what you need to ask before the conversation
formulaic is good — you should not go off script or you won’t get through it all
take good notes — you will not remember what one person said, especially when you are interviewing a bunch of people in one day
even better: send them out in advance so the candidate can prepare, which has the side effect of keeping you honest, too
This means you should NOT:
use context shared by near-past candidates against near-future candidates — meaning, if the last person built an app all by themselves, that doesn’t mean you get to exclude the next person because you failed to ask if they did and it’s suddenly “super important” for the role
get to the end of an interview process and hear yourself say, “that person didn’t have X experience” when you didn’t ask them about it… and have no notes
And if you forgot to ask someone something, or a new topic comes up and you need more information…do the right thing. Call them back.
