EverydaySpy Podcast - The Ultimate Hack to NAIL Every Job Interview

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

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What interviewers really like isn't people that they like. It's people who are alike the interviewer. Really? So I guarantee you that the people that you have liked interviewing the most, I'm even willing to bet that you will admit in this conversation at some point, we'll put that on the line, that a big portion of your hiring is because you see elements of yourself in the people that you hire.

I mean, like, I don't consciously know that, but I totally believe it. Because when you see someone who has, who reflects elements of you, you immediately go through the sense-making process and you flip to like and trust. Interesting. So we need to clarify this because when you say elements of myself, there's parts of myself that I'm like, I'd never hire. Correct. But that's not the part of you that you like. Yeah. It's the part of you that you don't like.

You trust that part of you to not be good at the job. Yeah. But there's other parts of you that you trust to be good at the job. and that's what you shoot for. Yeah. Right? I'm also willing to bet that there's people

that you hire because you know that they're good at areas that you know you're bad at. Yes. So that's all interviews. All interviewers everywhere. What they dream of

is that they walk into an interview and across the table is someone almost exactly like them. Who they enjoy talking to, who they can relate to, who they feel instant connection and chemistry with because then it becomes an enjoyable interview.

Because what every interviewer hates is walking into an in in a interviewer. interview that is draining and terrible and hard and painful. That's what they don't like. And most of the time, the people interviewing are not actually the people who will be the supervisor for the person that gets hired. Oftentimes, they're just an intermediary interviewer. So all they really want is to just get, find somebody who meets the qualifications

technically, but has some sort of common ground with the interviewer themselves. So how do I make sure I'm that person? you know, how do I, what can I do to make sure that, say that you are interviewing me, or say that, let's do the other way around, I've got the job that I'm looking for, looking to fill, and you've come for an interview today. So I'm going to do, I'm going to go through the sense-making process. Okay. Right?

As soon as I get on this call with you, I'm new to you, so what does that mean I know? I know that you don't want to be on this call with me. True. Avoidance, I can assume coming in. So what I have to do is I have to keep investing enough to get through the avoidance. phase. Well, what am I going to talk about? How am I going to invest in this conversation? I'm going to pull as much as I can from verbal and nonverbal cues that you give me. I'm going to look at the decorations on the wall behind you. Whether it's in person or whether it's virtual, I'm going to try to

pull from my environment. I see that you're using an iPad. I see that you actually like to write on your iPad. I see that you use different colors when you write on your iPad. I also see there's a journal under your iPad. I can assume that inside that journal are handwritten notes that are actually done in pen and ink, right? There's certain things that I can start to observe. You have a very clear You put clear effort into the way that you shave your face. You have a very handsome look to your hair. Thank you so much. You've got the job.

You've got the job. No, I don't need to him. It's yours. But I'm going to cool from all of this for the competition phase of the sense-making process. Because all I need to do to get you to comply with my wishes, my wishes are to get the job. What I need to get you to comply with the wishes, I need you to engage in a conversation with me that is competitive, meaning you will invest in me and I will invest in you.

Think about how, don't think of competition like a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser. I hear competition, I hear arguing. That's what most people hear. Most people think of competition as zero-sum game.

Somebody wins, somebody loses the competition. Think of it more like a scrimmage in your favorite soccer team where like the red shirts play the green shirts, but it's still the same football club, right? They have spring training for baseball in the United States.

It's all the Yankees, but they're just playing the Yankees to practice with each other. What are they doing? They're competing. They're honing their craft through competition. They're investing in each other, right? They're pitching and batting and trying to strike each other out and trying to catch each other at the bases. But it's all for themselves. It's all to improve the whole of the team.

That's the competition that exists in the sense-making process. I want to invest in you with my thoughts and my ideas. and my questions, and I want you to invest in me with your thoughts and your ideas and your questions. And yes, sometimes they will be different, but in the difference, we will find the similarity, and regardless of whether we find differences or similarities, we are filling the cup of investment to get towards compliance.

Okay, so give me a specific example of how you might get me to go into that competition with you. Okay, so I'm going to start in an interview, most interviewees expect that the interviewer will ask most of the questions. Yeah. I would challenge anybody going into a job interview, ask more questions than the interviewer.

Really? Ask more questions than the interviewer because when you ask questions, especially open into questions, it makes the person you're talking to feel like they're interesting, feel like they're important, feel like they're special,

and guess what's not going to happen with any other interview that day? Nobody is going to ask them questions. So if you were interviewing me for a job, and we met on the phone, I would say, Stephen, thank you very much for making time to talk to me. How's your day today?

It's been great, thank you. I'm really excited for the job, but one of the things I have a question about right away is when I look you up online, it looks like a lot of what you do is marketing, but I don't know if it's like social media marketing or if it's more like an internet marketing like advertising. How would you characterize the core function of the business? It's kind of both. We do all of the above, paid marketing, all kinds of marketing. Which one is your favorite? And my favorite's probably social media marketing, I think. Is it because social media is like so dynamic and always changing? Or do you like social media marketing for some other reason. Yeah, and also I just think, I think it's very much the future in many respects.

So I think it's the fastest growing medium. So that's kind of where we focus. I also think it's the future. And I spend so much time on social media. And my family spend so much time on social media that I really feel like if you want to connect with somebody, you have to be in the social media world because it feels like a simulated relationship. I completely agree.

So, and then I'd start asking the questions. You would ask a question, and then I would answer your question. but I would still continue to show investment into you by asking questions. And what does that do? So I come away from that interaction, and you've asked me a lot of questions. What do I come away feeling?

You tell me. What does it feel like when people ask you questions? Feels like you're building a relationship. Feels like you care. Feels like you've thought critically before you came here. Yeah. Feels like you prepared. Feels like you're curious.

And the opposite. Well, there's two opposites. One opposite is I just pepper you with questions and then you leave. And the other opposite is that someone that just talks about the whole, like you pepper, me with questions. I was in, I've had a couple of interviews. I remember two last week. Part of my feedback was I basically didn't say anything. And it's funny, I actually said to my chief of staff, I said, oh, God, interview was an hour long.

And I go, gosh, I didn't say anything in the whole, in the whole hour. And do you know what, I came away feeling. I came away feeling that if that's what the job working with them is going to be like, I don't want to work with them. Because for one hour I sat there and this person just like, at me. And now you say it. Now I kind of understand why I felt that way.

Because you do want people to ask you questions. And you, I think it's that, but also part of me was worried that every day this person is going to just like kill my eardrums. Or is it just the ego part where I'm just like, be interested in me? I don't know. Or is it both? Well, first of all, I am not advocating peppering with questions. So I want to make sure that we don't give anybody the mistaken idea that rapid-fire questions are the way to go.

Yeah, I was giving short answers. This is the problem. It's all good, because what the core thing to understand here is you didn't like being spoken at. They were talking all the time, which means they weren't asking you questions. They asked me, we're in our interview. They asked me zero questions. And when I said to them, if you've got any questions you like to ask me, they asked me one, but that was actually just teeing them up for another 20 minutes.

I walked away and logically I rationalized it to my team. I was like, I think that person would be quite difficult to deal with because I think they'd be quite distracting. And this particular role is working with alongside me personally every single day. And I just thought, gosh, I'm not going to get anything done. But maybe that was a prefrontal court text. I think that your decision was 100% correct. But what I want to do is I want to juxtapose that process

against the person who would have asked you questions. Which I experience a lot. So if people ask you questions, how do you feel at the end of those calls? I feel like the person, I feel like they're more thoughtful and I feel like they're smarter because why the hell would you come into an interview and not ask the person questions? You're also making a commitment for your entire life to this company, this job, to this person. You want to make sure it's correct. So a smart person would be interviewing me as well because they value themselves.

So if I wanted to win you as the interviewer. And I wanted to win that by making you feel like you and I were similar people. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What you just said is, why the hell wouldn't you ask a bunch of questions? Which makes me think that what you believe is if you want to work for a company for the rest of your life, you want to go in there asking a bunch of questions. Yeah.

So when somebody comes in asking questions to you, that checks the box of, this person is thoughtful, this person is committed, this person is responsible, this person is doing what I would do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that means on the sense-making no-like trust framework, you're going to fall into trust for that person much faster than you're going to fall into trust for the person who comes and word vomits on you. And that's all we're doing. We're not saying that every employer is going to be the right employer for you,

but what we're saying is if you want to take your probability of winning an interview from, I don't know what my probability is, to you have a solid, predictable, 30% chance of winning this interview. It really is as simple as going in there with the idea to win the interviewer. Read their body language, listen to their verbal cues, hear the things they talk about, reflect and mirror their behavior and their terminology, their tone of voice, how fast the cadence of their speech, reflect that back to them, and then use this process of asking questions, open-ended questions that give you more information that you can turn into knowledge that you can ask questions about to create that flywheel of information,

knowledge, and experience that we talked about. It's a fresh song.