Tips to Improve Your Interviewing Skills (and a request for more!)

I’m working on some of the final chapters of my book about interviewing and am interested in the ways that people have developed their own skills as an interviewer. I’ll list a few but this list can only get better with your input.

  • Practice, man, practice. It’s how you get to Carnegie Hall and it’s how you get better at interviewing.
  • Create your own practice occasions: that chatty seat mate on an airplane, the extroverted cashier – ask them a question and then ask them a follow up questions!
  • Reflect, just like a football coach who reviews the game films; watch your videos, read your transcripts, and look at what worked well and what you might have improved
  • Be interviewed whether it’s for a survey or a usability study or a poll, experience the interview from the other side of the lens
  • Critique the interviews of others (without resorting to your just-got-your-drivers’-license-know-it-all we all were at 16)
  • Observe others at work including great interviewers and poor interviewers – this can be in your work context, or in the media (Marc Maron, Charlie Rose, Terry Gross, and others) 
  • Collect war stories (more on this coming very soon)
  • Try improv 

That’s my starter list, but what have you done to get better as an interviewer?

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