Interviews Are Conversations, Not Confrontations

What was the last time that a job interview felt like a conversation?

You may be thinking back to a point in time when interviews that you've

had have felt like interrogations,

when the people on the other side of the call of the meeting are peppering

you with questions like, Tell me about yourself,

Can you think about a time when you X?

Can you tell me about this project?

It may seem as though it's one question after the other.

And to any narrativergent person,

that can just be overwhelming and ridiculous to have to be ready

to answer what feels like every single question under the sun.

And all you wanna do is crawl into a ball sometimes.

I felt that way. It's awful. And I'm sure that you felt that way as well.

The reality of the situation is that job interviews are not meant

to be interrogations, are not meant to be situations where

one side of the conversation holds all the power.

Job interviews are meant to be conversations.

I'm gonna say that a lot throughout the course of this podcast episode,

because it's true. When you have a conversation with a regular person with

a stranger, that is generally a two way,

two sided conversation. You can have more than one person and obviously

you can have a multiple way conversation with multiple different people.

But most conversations that you're going to have on average are conversations.

There's no one person who generally holds the power or has the influence

or is trying to lopsidedly effect specific change in something.

You might just be getting cough with somebody and learning more about them.

You might be on a networking call or a mentoring session with somebody

and you have the terms of the conversation set.

I have worked with a career coach in the past.

I work with therapists. I have been on calls before where I have

a very specific goal in mind, and the relationship between me and

the other people or the other person in this call is very well defined.

If you speak with a therapist,

you are working with them on specific things,

you are talking to them about how you

feel about your life, about experiences.

I'm not gonna sit here and tell you what you talk to your therapist about,

but the point of that is that you have a relationship with your therapist where

you both define the terms of the conversations that you have.

The same thing is true when you have a conversation with a partner,

with a spouse, with a friend, with a mentor.

Sometimes those definitions of the relationships can be a bit vague

and wide and broad, but sometimes they're very well defined.

And job interviews are no less different

In a job interview, it is your responsibility to not only answer

the questions that somebody has,

but then also make sure that you have a chance to ask questions that

you have about the job and about the employer.

You might say to yourself, I have certain questions that I can't find

the answer to online. They're not on LinkedIn,

they're not on their social media pages,

they're not on their website. And the only way that I can find the answer to these.

questions is to ask a human or email them if you have their email.

And email can sometimes be slow.

You might want to know the information before going into the conversation.

Live interviews, whether that's a call or an in-person meeting,

are generally where you would want to be able to really get down

to the nitty-gritty and ask those questions.

In reality though, a lot of these conversations can feel very lopsided.

I have been in many a coding interview or software engineering interview where

the entirety of the conversation is focused on one or

two different technical problems,

whether they're whiteboarding or coding challenges,

and I have to explain

explain

myself over the course of fifty minutes how I solved the problem.

And fifty minutes of that conversation is about me proving my candidacy

for the role, how good I am at this particular problem,

and then and then maybe, just maybe,

if we have time, then I can answer questions.

Most skilled interviewers will know if it's time to move on to the next thing

in order to give you the opportunity to ask questions.

And I say that in a vacuum because in reality,

the skill with which interviewers have can really vary from person to person.

It's that sense of knowing, hey,

it's time for me to move on to the next thing.

That way I can give the job seeker or the candidate the opportunity

to ask questions about the role.

That is how it should work in practice.

We don't live in that world, to be honest with you.

The experiences can vary. And I wish that I could say to you that every single

interviewer you were ever going to have in a conversation is going to leave

you with the time to ask questions.

You might also wonder, what are those questions?

What should I be asking? Why would I ask them any questions at all?

This comes up very often because you might think to yourself,

I need to prove myself beyond a shadow of a doubt to the interviewer.

And they might think that asking questions is as if me challenging them

or trying to give them a hard time about it.

But in reality, the employer wants to know that you've done your homework

and that you care about the role as well.

And by not asking any questions that might sound a bit vain or superficial

on the surface if you haven't done any of your research.

The questions that you are going to ask really vary based on a more practical sense

and it's based on what you need,

what you want, what your interests are.

There's lots of different kinds of questions that you could ask.

But

Sometimes it really comes down to the things that you know that you need

to be able to do your job. If you are somebody with a visual impairment,

if you are partially blind, if you have a hearing impairment,

if you are deaf, then you are going to need different things on the job

to be able to succeed. One question that you might ask in a situation would be,

do I have the ability to install assessive technology or software

on my company-owned computer to be able to do my job?

And you can list the software that you could use.

And they may say, yeah, sure, no problem.

Great. But if for some reason they say,

there's restrictions, we have to get it approved,

there's some other roundabout reason they don't give you a straight answer,

that non-answer to the question tells you a lot about them.

And now here's an example for more specific neurodiversity.

Let's say that one accommodation that you know that you need with a capital

N need is headphones. I personally am pretty religious about headphones.

films. I frankly can't really operate well without them in a open desk office

environment that I work in day to day.

And I need that. I have asked for it.

No one's ever given me a hard time over it because I am very forward articulate

about that sort of thing. Those are the sort of thing you may you might

be able to judge from an interview and not even need to ask the question explicitly.

But there's typically never any harm in asking that sort of a question

if it is something that you definitely need.

If I knew that there was something that I needed to be able to do my

job in an interview and I could not do my job well without it,

that is a question that I need to know before I can do anything else

in this interview. If the answer that I get back is no,

or they give me the run-around,

or I'm not getting the conviction that I even care,

that's a pretty big signal that this company might not be the right fit for me.

There's a couple things that are in there.

There's first off the space to ask the question,

and then the response to the question itself.

One example of a question that you might ask could be:

Do you provide training to managers of managees with disabilities

or who are neurodivergent? They may say,

Yes, of course we do. It's a part of every training that we do for every manager

who comes through the company.

Great. Question answered. Your manager is likely going to have some familiarity

or awareness of neurodiversity and disability.

They might not know exactly what you are.

That's for you to talk about later.

And I have different episodes on that subject about how you talk

to your manager about your neurodiversity,

but at least you know that your manager is going to have some awareness

of neurodiversity disability. And if you have the chance to talk

to them during interview process them before you even start the job,

that's also important to just ask them straight up and say,

hey, you are my new manager. I am going to need your help with these certain things

because.

I am neurodivergent, because I have dyslexia,

because I have ADHD, because I have autism or something else.

There's lots of different things you could say to the hiring manager to really

get a sense of do you think that they are going to be able to go to bat for you?

The answer to that question may be no.

They may not answer that question.

They may not give you the space to ask the questions.

All of those things say a lot about a potential employer and hiring manager.

The space that they create for you to

Ask the question in the first place,

the way that they answer the question,

and then what the actual answer to the question is.

And if any of those things give you a bad vibe or an itch or just some weird oddity

that makes it hard for you to understand,

that is information for you to take away from the interview.

The interview is meant to give you a lot of information about the company as well.

It should never be you always going up.

onto the stage to perform every single time it has to be two ways and

if you find yourself getting up there onto that stage exhausted

and socially drained over and over and over and you just can't keep doing

it anymore it's worth it to build in those questions into the interview

and even set that up front with the interviewer to say hey I have

a couple of questions that I want to get to in this conversation can

you please make sure

That at the end of our time, whether it's an hour or so,

that we have space for me to ask my questions.

And a competent interviewer should say,

Yes, I'll say what I need to say,

ask what I need to ask, and then leave time for you to ask questions.

At the same time, don't feel like you have to invent questions to fill

up the space precisely. If you have a list of questions and the total time that

it takes for you to have your questions

asked and then the interviewer to have their questions answered doesn't

add up to the full interview time,

don't feel like you have to stretch that out either.

You don't need to fill the empty space with questions that might seem silly,

because then you might ask questions that might give the interviewer

the impression that you haven't done your homework.

If there were stuff that you could find on social media,

on their website, under jobs or careers page,

there's lots of reasons why asking too many questions might have

the unintended effect and might hurt you in the other direction.

But you want to ask good questions.

You want to ask questions that are going to give you information about things that

you could

Could

not find online, that you couldn't ask a search engine or an AI tool to find.

You need to ask them questions that only a human who works there could really

answer, or can answer authentically and honestly.

One question that I've asked in the past very often is:

Does your organization have an ERG or community for people who

are neurodivergent or have disabilities?

And that tells me a lot about the organization as well.

That may matter to you. That may not matter.

But that's an example of a question that isn't always obvious to find when looking

on the internet. Not every question,

not every company broadly advertises their ERGs or communities the

way that they should. So sometimes you're going to assume that a company

may not have a SAC channel or a group for neurodivergent employees when

in reality that they do. And conversely,

you might see that as information about there on the website that might

be out of date, and that community may

not exist anymore and it may have split.

Something that I see happens very often is that you'll have disability community

and sometimes you might have them split into disability and neurodiversity.

And not every interviewer is going to strictly know the difference

or distinction and they will say,

I don't know the answer, but I won't follow up with you.

And at least at that point you have the commitment you're going to get

the answer to the question. And it's not something that could be easily

or trivially answered by yourself or over

email. Asking the question over the call does leave a good impression that you're

looking for things and want to get answers to questions that might

be challenging to find. And when it all comes down to at the end of the day,

there's this sense that you

don't want to feel as though you're being peppered over and over and over

and over and over until you're blue in the face on the same questions.

And you just don't have it to give.

I don't think anyone should be expected to constantly be peppered

and hammered with questions as if they are in a police interrogation suite trying

to have things pull out of their mouth

And it's just exhausting. Like,

ca if you can do that for multiple interviews on end and just have

the same answers to the same questions and never have one moment to defend yourself,

talk freely about yourself, get to the heart of what cares or what matters to you,

then what's going on? That's not that's not always even no.

What is important to you in an interview?

you may care about the same things no matter which company it is that you apply to.

And if you don't have the answers to those questions,

you don't have the ability to honestly make an assessment of if the company

is the right fit for you. And that goes two ways.

That's the other side as well.

Employers need to know if you're the right fit.

So that's why asking for accommodations is always helpful.

Because if you don't have the right tools to succeed in the interview,

then they're not going to be able to judge you or evaluate you fairly

during the interview or on the job.

And if you are holding back requests for accommodations because you don't want

to be a burden on them, that only hampers your ability to have

an equitable interview as compared to everybody else.

And you may think to yourself,

~ if I ask for an accommodation in the interview process,

if I ask this question, they're going to think poorly of me.

Well, would you want to work for a company that's ableist like that?

That looks pretty

Poorly upon you because you are asking for accommodations,

asking for clarifying questions,

trying to learn more about their policy,

disability, and accommodation and neurodiversity?

Do you want to work for an organization that's like that?

Think to yourself about that. If the answer is no,

then you will learn a lot about them by how they do or don't handle your request

for reasonable accommodations in an interview.

If they can work with you to develop the interview process in a

way that creates equity.

Great. If they create space for you to answer questions or to ask questions,

great. If they tightly constrain and control the process and leave

no room for flexibility, that says a lot to how you might experience your time there

on the job. If you're somebody who benefits from some flexibility with things like

working from home, assessive technology,

having an understanding of your manager,

tools of the trade, fidget devices,

whatever it is, if they're not going to have any flexibility.

Flexibility or give you any amount of time or space to advocate for yourself

and say something, that says a lot about how they're going to treat

you on the interview and under the job.

It's not all doom and gloom though,

because for those organizations that are flexible and are accommodating

and want to help you, those are the ones you really want to ace interview

for and really prepare for. And I think that speaks a lot to those employers that

do care, and there are companies out there who do genuinely care and want

want to create an equitable interview for you.

And for those companies that don't,

well, they're losing out on top talent like you.

And if you want to work for a company really badly,

but they're giving you it a cold shoulder,

unreasonable accommodations, and have no respect or comprehension of what

it means to be neurodivergent,

they're losing out.

And you're gonna find an employer who respects you,

who supports you, and wants you to be as successful as you can.