The Other Side of Interview Advice

Ten minutes into the interview, I knew I wasn't taking the job.

Every question was read word for word from a script. When I answered, nobody nodded. Nobody smiled. Nobody asked a follow-up or said anything that wasn't printed on the page in front of them. I tried to connect with my panel of interviewers. I smiled. I brought in some humor. It all felt like it hit a brick wall. I simply got the next question in return.

I understand what they were going for. My guess is those interviewers had been trained to be consistent, to treat every candidate identically, to keep their own reactions from tipping the scales. That's a good intention. Bias in hiring is real and worth fighting. But the impact on me was simple. I withdrew from the process before I ever found out whether they wanted me. This was not a team or a culture I wanted to be part of.

Lately, I keep noticing LinkedIn posts full of advice for candidates, especially early career and university candidates. Research the company. Use the STAR method. Be concise while also being relatable. Send a thank-you note. Much of it is solid advice I’ve shared myself.

But almost nobody writes the other half of that post. So here it is. This one is for the people on the other side of the table. The managers, leaders and HR professionals interviewing a 22-year-old for what might be their very first real job.

1. Decide how much room you have to hire on potential. Before the first interview.

Most hiring teams never have this conversation. They build a job description, schedule the loop, and let each interviewer figure it out. And when there's no agreement, interviewers default to the safest question they know: has this person done this before?

For an early career candidate, the answer is almost always no. That's kind of the point.

Here's what makes that default so costly. In 2022, Paul Sackett and his colleagues published a major re-analysis of decades of hiring research in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Structured interviews came out as the strongest predictor of job performance. Years of job experience? Near the bottom. It barely predicted performance at all. The thing so many interviewers lean on hardest tells them the least.

In my years working in early career development, I've watched new grads with no direct experience pick up a skill in weeks and then do it better than the people who trained them. Not every time. But far more often than a hiring rubric built around proven ability would ever allow.

So before interviews start, sit down with the hiring manager and ask: Which of these skills does this person truly need on day one? Which could we teach in the first 90 days? You almost always have more room to hire on potential than you think. Know how much before you walk in. I will almost always take the candidate who is curious and builds strong relationships over the candidate who has simply done it before.

2. Look for reasons to say yes.

A lot of interviewers are trained, formally or not, to hunt for red flags. Find the weak spot. Find the reason to pass.

That approach might work with a seasoned candidate who has fifteen years of polished stories ready to go. It falls apart with early career talent. They don't have a deep bench of experience. They aren't practiced storytellers yet. And many of them are still overly humble. They say "we" when they mean "I." They skip past the part-time job they worked all through college because it doesn't feel "professional" enough.

If you're looking for reasons to say no, they'll hand you plenty. If you're looking for reasons to say yes, you'll have to dig.

To be clear, this isn't lowering the bar. The bar stays exactly where it is. Your job is to find the evidence that's hiding underneath an unpolished answer. Ask the follow-up. "What part of that project was yours?" "What did you actually do when your teammate stopped showing up?" "Tell me about a tough night at that restaurant." Someone who handled a packed dining room and an angry customer at 19 knows something about staying calm under pressure. They just don't know that it counts.

Sometimes you have to help them tell their own story.

3. Teach the test before you give it.

Some candidates walk into your interview knowing exactly what a behavioral question is fishing for. A parent coached them. A career center drilled them. An older sibling walked them through it over dinner.

Others have never heard the phrase "tell me about a time" in their life.

That gap is often called the hidden curriculum, and it hits first-generation college graduates hardest. If you don't close it, your interview isn't measuring who can do the job. It's measuring who happened to have the best coaching.

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Tell candidates what to expect. Share the format. Name the skills you're assessing. Give them an example of what a strong answer includes. Several large tech companies already publish interview prep guides for exactly this reason. You aren't giving away the answers. You're making sure you're grading the right thing.

4. Remember that you're being interviewed too.

Back to that silent interview room.

Here's what I wish those interviewers had understood. The way you show up in an interview is what the candidate believes they'll get if they say yes. A cold, scripted interviewer doesn't read as "fair." It reads as "this is what working here feels like."

And candidates act on it. LinkedIn research has found that 83% of candidates say a negative interview experience can change their mind about a role or company they were once interested in. I was one of them.

I'm not asking anyone to throw out structure. Structured interviews reduce bias, and the research supports them. Keep the same questions. Keep the same rubric. But structure and warmth aren't opposites. You can ask every candidate the identical question and still smile when they finish. Still nod. Still say "That's a great example, tell me more." Consistency is about what you ask and how you evaluate. It was never supposed to mean pretending you aren't human.

5. Close the loop, even when the answer is no.

Early career candidates talk to each other. A lot. Campus group chats, career center advisors, Reddit, Glassdoor, the friend who interviewed with you last semester. When you ghost a new grad, you don't just lose one candidate. You become a story that gets told on that campus for years.

For many of these candidates, your "no" will be the first professional rejection of their lives. You get to decide what that feels like. A short, kind, specific message ("Here's one thing that would have strengthened your case") takes five minutes. It might be the most useful piece of career feedback they get all year. And it might be the reason they apply again in three years, when they have exactly the experience you wanted.

What this advice looks like in practice

Many years ago, I interviewed an early career candidate who was not great at telling her story. She rambled. Her answers ran long and wandered into details that didn't matter. I had to ask follow-up after follow-up just to figure out what she could actually do.

By the end, she was hands down the best candidate I'd interviewed. I knew she'd be a great fit. I also knew the interviewers after me probably wouldn't dig the way I had.

Before she left, I thanked her for her time and asked if she was open to some feedback. She said yes, excitedly. We talked about how to button up her stories. I took one of them, incorporated the details I'd pulled out with my follow-up questions, and showed her how I might tell it.

Later that week, she found out she'd moved on to the next round. Eventually, she got the offer.

She came back to me soon after and thanked me again. The feedback helped her storytelling, she said, but it did something bigger. It gave her confidence. And it told her this was a place where people really cared and would help her succeed.

Was that fair to the other candidates? I've asked myself that question. But I didn't give her the answers. I helped her show us what was already there. It's the same idea as teaching the test, just one candidate at a time. The better question is why every early career candidate doesn't get that kind of help.

The same thing that pushed me out of that silent interview room is what pulled her in.

…

Early career candidates are nervous. They should be. This matters to them more than almost anything else they're doing right now.

The question is whether you're showing up with the same level of preparation you expect from them.

Think about the last early career interview you ran. If that candidate had been interviewing you, and they were, would they have said yes?


If your team is rethinking how it hires and develops early career talent, I'd love to hear what you're experiencing. Reach out here.