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50Nonobvious Interview Tips

In my first job, I was a new reporter covering the banking and real estate industries for a weekly newspaper in Boston. Because I was so young and the topics I was writing about felt foreign to this humanities major, I tried to fake a level of comfort so I wouldn't seem dumb.

When, for example, I'd ask a banking executive my carefully constructed question about the lingering aftereffects of the housing boom in New England, and he'd answer, his response would sound utterly alien to my ears—he might as well have been telling me how to resolve a vector into Cartesian coordinates. Though I'd have no idea what he was talking about, I would be too embarrassed to ask for clarification. Because of that fear-of-looking-dumb thing.

Since then, I've learned that it's far better to embrace your ignorance and admit what you don't know. (I suppose that is true in interviewing and in life, now that I think of it.) Because if you don't understand it well, you can't explain it to your audience.

Content marketers who have been tasked with interviewing someone with deep expertise in a subject might have a sense of what I'm talking about here. It's a little daunting 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 generally love to explain what they know.

Before offering interviewing tips, I'm going to assume that you've got the basics already covered—for example, you've at ...