Interviewing is a transfer of conviction

A first principles analysis

As a career-focused content creator, one of the topics I find myself spending inordinate amounts of time pondering, and which I also get many questions about, is how to interview well.

Everybody knows that you have to do interviews to get a job, and that to pass an interview it often requires you to impress your interviewer and do the right things to get on their good side, but what does this actually mean?

Google Search AI overview for “how to pass an interview”

There are many factors that influence whether a candidate progresses, with varying degrees of “influence-ability”. A few examples below:

Influenceable factors:

• Your ability to convey you have the qualifications to do the job (e.g., technical skills, industry knowledge, prior experience)

• Your ability to come across as legit vs full of BS (e.g., do you come across as someone trying to pretend you are more qualified than you are?)

• Your ability to demonstrate a genuine interest in the company (e.g., did you do your homework, network beforehand, etc.)

Less influenceable factors (think: reasons you still didn’t progress to the next round despite being qualified)

• The interviewer’s disposition and biases (e.g., maybe the interviewer was having a bad day and in a horrible mood, maybe they unfairly prioritize candidates from their alma mater)

• Hiring needs at the company (e.g., maybe they filled the spot a day before your interview)

• Strength of your competition (e.g., you weren’t bad, there was just somebody who was a better fit or more impressive)

Now obviously we can’t really influence who our interviewer will be, whether the company is still hiring, or who our competition will be, so all the advice you’ll find on the internet focuses on the influenceable aspects of interviewing, like making sure you tick off all the boxes for interview “etiquette”. However, most people don’t really think too hard about the WHY or the first principles of what an interview even is.

Interviewing is a transfer of conviction

Hiring is a costly activity for all companies, and you can pretty much rest assured that you will be ROI negative for the company in at least the first 6 months of your employment. And so it is the responsibility of the interviewer to err on the side of being more skeptical about you, because one bad hiring decision has implications for the entire team (and in the case of a startup, the entire company).

Naturally, they’ll come to an interview with a relatively lower level of conviction about you as a candidate. Conversely, you are coming in with very high levels of conviction (ideally).

High conviction thoughts:

• “I have the right experience and abilities for this role”

• “I am the most qualified person for this job”

• “I’ve worked really hard to get here, all I need to do is show them I’m the right person for the position”

Now, as I mentioned the interviewer will not match your level of conviction, but that’s expected. Put yourself in their shoes for a second, and imagine they are interviewing 10 people this week. By the time you come around as candidate #9, they’re not expecting anything - in fact they may be just looking forward to finishing up this gauntlet of 10 interviews (yes, interviewing is mentally taxing for the interviewer as well!).

So they’ll have low levels of conviction about you as a candidate, and it is your job to raise their level of conviction during the next 30 minutes, so that they either match your level of conviction (very hard to do), or at least end at a higher level than they started (more doable). Everything you do and say thus has the net effect of raising, lowering, or maintaining the interviewer’s level of conviction about you as a candidate.

The conviction transfer mental model

Let’s imagine a hypothetical example.

• You smile at the beginning of the interview, and ask them how their day is, commenting that they must be ready for the weekend since it’s a Friday - demonstrating warmth and basic social skills (+1 conviction points)

• You give your 2 minute story, making sure to stay concise but detailed enough to highlight why you’re interested in the role - making it clear you have relevant experience & good verbal comms (+3 conviction points)

• You mess up a technical brain teaser question (-2 conviction points)

• You manage to get the interviewer to laugh while telling them about a time when you messed up and overcame failure (+3 conviction points)

• You almost fumble a question about why they should hire you over the next guy, but manage to come up with a passable answer off the cuff (0 conviction points)

So you end with +5 conviction points by the end of the interview. Not bad - but is it good enough to progress you to the next round? Assuming +5 conviction is enough to move on in the average 1st round interview, then it’s likely you’ll progress unless your competition performs significantly better or something random comes into play (e.g., they extended an offer the day before to somebody else).

Note, however, that the threshold of conviction to move to the next round or extend an offer will also vary depending on things like:

• The stage at which you are interviewing: stakes are lower during the 1st round vs final round

• Relative cost of hiring the wrong person: smaller firms often incur a higher relative cost if they hire the wrong person, for example hiring the wrong engineer #1 is far worse than hiring the wrong engineer #100

• How many offers will be extended: if they only plan to extend 1 offer vs 10 offers for the same size candidate pool (e.g., lower offer rate), the bar will be higher

• How desperate the company is to hire: if they are looking to hire ASAP, they may lower their standards vs waiting for the next round of interviewees

The key takeaway here is that there are A LOT of firm specific variables at play, and you will almost always come in blind to many of them. Ultimately, I’ve found that having this kind of first principles understanding of what influences hiring decisions helps me avoid falling into the trap of internalizing every rejection I face.

Internalizing your rejections is a slippery slope

How have you tried to make sense of the job hunting process?