Everybody Writes, 2nd Edition



62Better Interviews with These Nonobvious Tips

In my first job right out of college, I was a staff writer covering the banking and real estate industries for a weekly newspaper in Boston.

Because I was so fresh and inexperienced and the topics I was writing about felt foreign to this English major, I tried to fake a level of knowledge so I wouldn't seem stupid.

I'd ask a banking executive my carefully constructed question about the lingering aftereffects of the housing boom, for example. He'd answer, and his response would sound utterly alien to me—he might as well have been telling me how to resolve a vector into Cartesian coordinates.

Maybe he was?

I had no idea what he was talking about. I would be too embarrassed to ask for clarification. Because of that fear-of-looking-stupid thing.

I've learned since then that it's better to embrace your ignorance and admit what you don't know. There's no shame in it. If you don't understand it well, you can't explain it to your audience.

If you've ever been tasked with interviewing someone who has deep expertise in a subject, you might have a sense of what I'm talking about here. It's a little scary to admit, “Wait, you lost me there …” But you are far better off being up front about it. And (as I ultimately realized), subject-matter experts usually love to explain what they know.

Before we get into interviewing tips, I'm going to assume that you've got the basics already covered: ...