Reading to Interview
Dear Reader,
There are books to read in preparation for an interview, but those fall into the general self-help genre, perhaps narrowed to “business” if you want. But this isn’t about self-help reading. Instead, it’s about reading in preparation to interview someone.
While I’m not a journalist in the narrow sense, I have been interviewing people for twenty years now. My first interview is the least notable, as it was the one you’re forced to do in high school: find someone who does the profession you’d like to work in, and ask them questions. Out of possible career paths, I chose the person who was easiest to schedule an interview with, though he worked in a job that was bottom of my list. (Look, I thought it was a dumb assignment and my goal was to get it done, no more.)
After that uninspiring start to interviewing people, I decided—as a foolhardy college student does—that I’d totally interview Ben Bradlee in Washington, D.C. For those unfamiliar, Bradlee was the executive editor at The Washington Post during the Watergate scandal. How I landed the interview is a fun story: I called him, got his personal assistant, and scheduled it. He even tried canceling but I told him the flight was already booked and I’d see him in a month. I’m still not sure how any of that worked, but I had my interview…
Since then, I’ve befriended NPR journalists and seen how they prep for interviews, been interviewed a few times myself, read several books on narrative nonfiction (which invariably contain advice on interview prep), and interviewed more than twenty CEOs for my critical thinking project, most of whom invited me to follow-up with them any time. (This is not normal for CEOs, to be clear.)
None of this makes me the world’s greatest expert on interviewing. It does, however, give me a pretty decent background for considering how one reads in preparation to interview someone else. That I’ve been both the subject of interviews and the interviewer helps, as, of course, does the benefit of learning about interview prep from professional interviewers.
Reading to interview isn’t that complex. Doing the necessary search engine work can be a little complex, but the reading itself isn’t that complex. Still, you have to know whether you’re doing a longer, rambling interview like you might find on a podcast or a narrower two-minute TV spot.
I’m not going to focus on the TV spot, as that’s typically a one-pager handed to the host by the producer. Trivia in, trivia out. The longer podcast interview or interview you might do for a newspaper or book, though, that interview requires a bit more work. (Admittedly, some journalists don’t do this preparation; it also shows in the pieces they write and the interviews they conduct.)
Here are four things one should read for while interview prepping:
1) Main Purpose or Theme
2) Related Territory
3) Filler
4) Courtesy
For the main purpose or theme, either you’re hunting for what you already know you want to ask about or you’re trying to find what your theme should be.
For example, since a local philosophy group I belong to is hosting Zena Hitz for a Zoom seminar in two weeks, I’m preparing questions and conversation points. I’m thus reading her book with a particular purpose in mind, and I’m doing some background reading from articles she’s written, transcripts of podcasts she’s been on, and the college she teaches at.
For my CEO interviews, I already knew the core question I had to ask, and so my reading in preparation for those interviews was focused on how I could use their backgrounds to naturally lead to the question essential for my own research.
Related territory is important in a conversational interview so that you can pursue interesting tangents that you hadn’t planned to focus on. While you might have a theme, the related territory research allows you to shift if the interview’s original focus isn’t as engaging as you’d imagined.
When you’re pursuing a particular goal in your interview, you’ll need related territory questions to help you circle back around to your core question. Interviewers have been known to ask the same central question as many as ten different ways in order to get a response. (For the record, such persistence is exhausting even if you’ve prepped well, but if you haven’t prepped well, such persistence exhausts both you and the interviewee, lowering your odds of getting the response you need.)
Filler? Filler. In a conversational interview, sometimes you need a moment to collect your thoughts, to figure out how you can get to the thing you really want to ask. Or you need to figure out how to get the interview back on track. Some little sidebar that you don’t have to mentally care about that allows you to regroup.
That sidebar can also be something that lets the person you’re interviewing feel more comfortable. Maybe they’re exhibiting signs of being on edge. Using a little filler question can let them expand on some stupid sidebar that you don’t care about, but will let them settle down.
When you’ve got a goal-directed interview, a filler question is great if you’re taking handwritten notes alongside a digital recorder. That way, you can ask the filler question and completely ignore their response while you finish scribbling down what they’ve said in response to your prior question.
But you’ve got know enough about the person you’re interviewing to have a filler question at the ready. And really, you need more than one filler question, simply because you want to have ones you can organically weave into the conversation. It’s also possible that there’ll be several occasions in which you struggle to keep up with handwritten notes, especially if you’re like me and your shorthand isn’t that of a stenographer’s.
Courtesy is the most important thing. In a conversational interview, having done your research can help you to avoid asking a question that really makes them uncomfortable. And it can help you to ask an uncomfortable question more precisely when it is actually your intent to do so.
Further, people open up more if you’ve done your background. Many of the CEOs I’ve interviewed were shocked that I knew some stray particulars about them or their company. For example, one company’s CEO had mentioned how many patents her company possessed in an interview more than a year before I met with her. Since I’d read that interview, I could ask her specifically whether that was still the number of patents they held/had pending or if more had been applied for since then. Not only did I get to update my file on how many patents her company held, I was granted ten extra minutes for my interview and an offer for follow-up questions if I needed to make them. All because I’d bothered to track down a stray detail.
(Utility aside, though, it’s basic human decency to have researched a person and their work enough that they don’t have to repeat the same basic facts every time. Not enough interviewers do this and it’s an insult to the person being interviewed.)
When you’re reading to interview, it’s a focused sort of read. Sometimes you don’t know exactly where you’re focusing, not at the start, so you may take an assortment of random notes. Eventually, though, you do know where you’re focusing. And then, while psychologists love to bemoan “motivated reasoning” as a blight upon our human minds, you’ll be quite motivated in your reading, looking for information that serves your end goal. This is no cognitive bias: you’re doing your job.
That’s what makes reading to interview kind of fun—the novelty isn’t typically in the preparatory reading itself. Sure, it can be there. It’s just that the novelty is something you have to prepare for. The novelty appears as a result of your reading, emerging in the interview itself. Thus, reading to interview isn’t typically an end in itself—the end is the successful interview, not the read itself.
Happy reading,
Kreigh
P.S. Next week is a holiday week, and also many states are starting to open back up, so I’m taking this opportunity to downshift to twice-a-week postings next week. Without anticipating too much, we will probably be down to once a week for the summer, as people start to read outdoors and have no wish for a screen. I also prefer to write at that pace. Indeed, I’m hoping come fall to be sending out two of these essays a month instead of writing at my current two-books-a-year pace. Yes, I have many topics to write about, but they still require thinking and writing.
P.P.S. Remember “Setting the Scene”? Well, The Point has once again decided to enter my territory (remember, my series on reading was started before theirs), and they’ve got a new theme: “Where do you read?” And once again, they do what I do a million times better. Not only is “Two Rooms” a far better reflection on where we read than anything I summoned, but it doubles as a deep reflection on re-reading). I’d be depressed by the comparison if I weren’t so looking forward to re-reading it myself.