What Interviewing Has Actually Taught Me
by Mark Escott
Over the years I’ve sat through a good number of interviews, enough to notice patterns in what actually works and what doesn’t. At some point I stopped treating them as tests to pass and started treating them as conversations to get right. That shift changed almost everything about how they go.
Here’s what actually moved the needle, in no particular order of importance, because they all mattered.
Stop narrating your own stumbles
Early on, if I fumbled a question, I’d say something like “ugh, this is where I blow it” or “let me try that again, that came out wrong.” I thought it read as self-aware. It didn’t. It just handed the interviewer a reason to doubt me that they hadn’t noticed on their own.
The fix wasn’t getting better at avoiding stumbles. It was getting comfortable pausing before I answered instead of filling the silence while I figured out what I was trying to say. A three-second pause reads as thoughtful. A minute of verbal backtracking reads as unprepared, even when the underlying answer is fine.
Name the real tool, not the ideal one
“How do you stay organized” is one of those questions that invites a made-up answer, the version of yourself you wish were true rather than the one that actually shows up to work. I used to answer it in the abstract: prioritization frameworks, time-blocking, the usual. It always felt hollow, and I think it sounded that way too.
What worked better was naming something specific and real, the actual tool I use, the actual habit, and then giving one concrete example of it holding up under pressure. Specificity is what makes an answer believable. Nobody’s checking whether your method is optimal. They’re checking whether you’re telling the truth.
Say what your role actually is
I spent a while dressing up my current role as more than it is, inflating scope, borrowing language from titles I don’t hold. It never felt right, and I don’t think it landed right either. At some point I stopped. My contractual title is Product Owner. What I actually do, day to day, is the business analyst function underneath three people who hold the Product Owner role for real. Saying that plainly, no varnish, no overclaiming, has made the conversations that follow easier, not harder. Interviewers ask sharper follow-up questions when they sense you’re being straight with them, and sharper follow-up questions are exactly the kind you want, because you can actually answer them.
The lesson generalizes past titles: whatever the gap is between how a role sounds and what it actually involves, naming the gap up front costs you less than getting caught not naming it.
Anchor your number, don’t chase theirs
Salary conversations used to feel like guessing games where I was terrified of the wrong answer costing me the offer. What helped was going in with a modest, defensible step up from what I currently make, held as a range rather than a single number, and treating it as a starting point for a conversation rather than a final position to defend. It’s a small mental shift, from negotiating to anchoring, but it took most of the dread out of the question.
The stories you tell should be the ones you actually did
I have two or three stories I go back to in almost every interview, a system I helped design, a migration I coordinated the requirements for. They work not because they’re impressive on paper, but because I know them cold enough to answer any follow-up without reaching. A story you didn’t live through falls apart under a good interviewer’s second question. A story you did live through gets better under questioning, because you have more of it to give.
None of this makes a job search short, and there’s no reframe that makes the waiting comfortable. But it did make the process feel less like performing and more like just telling people, clearly, what I’ve actually done. That turns out to be the thing that works.