Most interviews suck. Not because the questions are bad or the candidates aren’t prepared, but because the interviewer is phoning it in. You’ve seen it. The person across the table is half-reading their laptop screen, burning through a checklist, and already thinking about what they’re doing after this. The candidate can feel it. It’s uncomfortable for everyone.
Running an interview well is actually a skill, and most people treat it like a chore to schedule around rather than something worth doing right. I think about the interviewer’s job as having three distinct responsibilities that all have to happen at the same time.
The first is managing stress.
The person you’re talking to is nervous. Even if they seem calm, they are not fully calm. Part of your job is to keep the conversation at a pace that doesn’t feel like an interrogation. Pay attention. If they stumble on a question, go blank, or seem like they’re losing confidence mid-answer, don’t just wait it out or move on. Pull out a detail from what they said and ask about it. “Oh, you used that framework? What did you think of the initial setup? I always liked how they handled X.” Give them a foothold. Let them feel competent again before you move forward. A candidate who is spiraling on nerves isn’t showing you their real ceiling.
The second is actually getting signal.
You’re not just collecting answers, you’re trying to figure out if this person can do the job and be a good teammate. And that’s genuinely hard to assess when the questions feel scripted. The best interviews feel like a real conversation. You’re following threads. You’re curious. When something comes up that’s relevant to how your team actually works, you go there. Ask follow-up questions that a human would ask, not just the next line on your question list. This is the only way you get honest, unguarded answers that actually tell you something.
The third is selling.
This one almost always gets skipped. Candidates are evaluating you just as much as you’re evaluating them, and if you’re not actively making the case for your team and company, you’re leaving it to chance. The trick is weaving it in naturally rather than launching into a pitch. If they mention their current team doesn’t have great product-engineering alignment, that’s your cue: “We run pretty tight refinements because our PM does a lot of prep work up front, it’s actually one of the things I like about how we work.” That’s more useful to them than any job description.
Near the end, I shift gears. I ask them something about their career — where they want to go, what they’re hoping to grow into — and then I actually share how we think about that stuff. Not a pitch, just an honest answer. It humanizes the whole thing and usually gives you a real read on how fired up they actually are about the opportunity.
The best interviews I’ve done didn’t feel like interviews. They felt like two people figuring out if they wanted to work together. That’s the goal.