Formats›An interview, in six rules

An interview, in six rules

A reusable format. Take it, alter it, use it again — for research, for a hand-over, for finding out what somebody actually does. Nothing in it is specific to one field.

Download interview-format.md The file you fill in. Plain text — open it in any editor, or hand it to an agent.

What this is for

An interview is not a document you fill in. It is an encounter with a shape: one person asks, one person answers, and the asking side has given up several things it would normally be allowed to do. Those refusals are the format.

Every rule below is about the asker. There is nothing here about the person answering, because the difficulty is all on the asking side.

Six rules, and five of them are things you do not do. An unformatted interview drifts into a conversation. A conversation is two people arriving somewhere together, which is a fine thing and is not this.

The format

ONE ASKS        only one person asks, and it is said out loud at the start

ONE QUESTION    exactly one is prepared, and it is written down
NO SUGGESTIONS  you may ask; you may not propose
THE SILENCE     belongs to them, and you do not fill it
THEIR WORDS     you ask back using their words, never your better ones
YOU STOP IT     you name the end, and you end on time

NOT THIS        it is not a conversation, not advice, and not a survey

One role above, a refusal below, and five rules between.

What each rule is asking

ONE ASKS. Said at the start, in a sentence: I am going to ask, and I am not going to answer back. Without it the other person spends the first ten minutes waiting for their turn and answering accordingly.

ONE QUESTION. Prepare exactly one and write it down. A list of prepared questions is a form being administered out loud, and it will get you the answers to your questions rather than what the person knows. Everything after the first question comes out of what they just said.

NO SUGGESTIONS. You may ask anything; you may not propose anything. Have you thought about doing it the other way? is a suggestion wearing a question mark, and once it is in the room the person is responding to your idea and the interview is over. If you have an idea, it keeps until afterwards.

THE SILENCE. After they stop talking, do not speak. The sentence that arrives in that gap is usually the one they had not planned to say. I lose more interviews by filling that gap than by anything else I do. Count to five if counting helps.

THEIR WORDS. Ask back using the words they used, not the better ones you have thought of. You said it gets messy — what kind of messy? keeps the thing theirs. Substituting chaotic hands them your frame and they will start using it, and then you are interviewing your own vocabulary.

YOU STOP IT. Say at the start how long it will take, and end on time even mid-flow. An interview that runs over is one somebody is enduring, and everything after that point is politeness.

NOT THIS. Not a conversation, not advice, not a survey. Say out loud which of the three the person seems to be expecting, and say plainly that it is not that. It is usually advice.

A worked one

ONE ASKS        "I'll ask, you talk. I'm not going to argue with any
                of it, and I'll shut up when you're talking."

ONE QUESTION    "Walk me through the last time you had to do it by
                hand." — written on a card, and the only one prepared.
NO SUGGESTIONS  Held back three times, including a fix that would
                have taken them ten minutes. Said it afterwards.
THE SILENCE     Three long gaps. Two produced nothing. The third
                produced the reason nobody uses the tool.
THEIR WORDS     They said "faff". I asked what kind of faff. I did
                not say "friction", which is the word I was thinking.
YOU STOP IT     Said forty minutes at the start. Stopped at forty
                minutes, mid-sentence, and said we could go again.

NOT THIS        Not advice — said so at the start, because they had
                asked me to look at their process the week before.

Note that the format did nothing to make the good part happen. It kept three things out of the room: my fix, my word, and my voice in the gap. The good part happened in the space that left.

How to use it

  1. Write the one question the day before, on something you will be holding. Not on a screen.
  2. Say the shape out loud before you start. Who asks, how long, and what this is not.
  3. Ask, then stop talking. Every question after the first comes from their last two sentences.
  4. Write nothing during it that is not their words. Your observations will still be there afterwards; their exact phrasing will not.
  5. End on time.
  6. Afterwards, write down the three things you could not have known before. If there are none, the format was followed and the question was wrong — that is a finding about the question, not about the person.

Three ways an interview fails

It becomes a conversation. You said something interesting, they responded to it, and now you are both building something, which is why you will leave with a good feeling and with your own idea handed back to you.

It becomes a survey. You had eleven questions and got through all of them. The transcript is complete and contains nothing you did not already suspect.

It becomes advice. They asked what you would do and you told them. From that moment they are agreeing or disagreeing with you, and their own account of the thing has left the room.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: specification-format.md. Yours to alter.