Interviewing Quotes

“I also often ask my guests about what they consider to be their invisible weaknesses and shortcomings. I do this because these are the characteristics that define us no less than our strengths. What we feel sets us apart from other people is often the thing that shapes us as individuals. This may be especially true of writers and actors, many of whom first started to develop their observational skills as a result of being sidelined from typical childhood or adolescent activities because of an infirmity or a feeling of not fitting in. Or so I’ve come to believe from talking to so many writers and actors over the years.”
― Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists

“Question for job applicants: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
― Peter Thiel

“Hanging out is good historical methodology.”
― Jean Pfaelzer

“Bad boss? Fire him/her. When you're interviewing for a job, You're job is to interview them. You are an equal.”
― Richie Norton

“Your goal is to learn the art of hiring based on the presence of a person rather than the skills of a person.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.”
― Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

“The cane is just not going to cut it. I shared with some of my colleagues that these brothers live in neighborhoods where they are getting whapped with a piece of stick all night, stabbed with knives, and pegged with screwdrivers that have been sharpened down, and they are leaking blood. When you come to a fella without even interviewing him, without sitting him down to find out why you did what you did, your only interest is caning him, because you are burned out and frustrated yourself. You say to him, ‘Bend over, you are getting six.’ And the boy grits his teeth, skin up his face, takes those six cuts, and he is gone. But have you really been effective? Caning him is no big deal, because he’s probably ducking bullets at night. He has a lot more things on his mind than that. On the other hand, we can further send our delinquent students into damnation by telling them they are no body and all we want to do is punish, punish, punish.
Here at R.M. Bailey, we have been trying a lot of different things. But at the end of the day, nothing that we do is better than the voice itself. Nothing is better than talking to the child, listening, developing trust, developing a friendship. Feel free to come to me anytime if something is bothering you, because I was your age once before. Charles chuck Mackey, former vice principal and coach of the R. M. Bailey Pacers school.”
― Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father

“Action is the spark that ignites potential.”
― John Long, Career Judo - The Martial Art for the Mindful Career

“People tell journalists their stories as characters and dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them.”
― Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer

“Some employers out there do want you. Yes, you. But it's not their job to find you. It's your job to find them.”
― Richard N Bolles

“Hiring is about alignment, personality, culture, heart, and work ethic.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“On my drive home, I want to kick myself. For thinking I could just waltz in and demand answers. For thinking she'd stop feeling like the maid just because we were at her house, because she wasn't wearing a uniform.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Waking up Thursday morning to another dreary day and the sense of being physically stuffed, they focused on FISH. While Charlotte interviewed the postmaster about the origin, techniques, and ingredients for his best-in-Maine lobster bakes, Nicole set off to gather recipes for glazed salmon, baked pesto haddock, and cod crusted with marjoram, a minted savory unique to Quinnipeague, and sage.”
― Barbara Delinsky, Sweet Salt Air

“Getting an interview with someone is like asking your good-looking cousin to go out with a friend of a friend on a blind date: you must approach the subject Just So.”
― John Brady, The Craft of Interviewing

“Producing a great interview requires you to acknowledge the fact that, or to pretend as if, the person you are interviewing is more knowledgeable or interesting than you.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Surface interviewing means you don’t fully dive in with questioning this individual. You meet your candidate; they seem nice, and you never get around to fully understanding what makes them tick, their career goals, background, and accomplishments.”
― Denise Wilkerson, HIRE with FIRE: The Relationship-Driven Interview and Hiring Method

“Great leaders understand that it is impossible to compartmentalize elements of life, so they create opportunities for people to grow in every area.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Believing you can’t find good people is like saying you can’t grow your business.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Culture has the single greatest impact on your bottom line.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Interviewing is the single most critical phase of hiring.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Hiring and firing people is about compassion. It is about alignment and care and empowerment.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Learning the art of listening is needed when interviewing.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“You must design a system for training and onboarding that gives people a real, fighting chance at success.”
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

“Never let anything go out into the world that you don't understand.”
― William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

“Critics—as well as the network and his own producers—often cited Jay Leno’s apparent lack of interest in the stories guests on the show told. Certainly most of the staff knew that Jay devoted little time preparing to speak to guests. Worse, was a habit Jay adopted later in his Tonight Show run. As described by one A-level movie star guest, an appearance with Jay could be thoroughly disconcerting...

'I’m sitting there telling him a story about some damn thing that happened and I realize he’s not looking at me at all,” the star said. 'His eyes are going straight past me. The audience can’t see this because he’s still looking vaguely in my direction, but his eyes are not on me at all. When he went to commercial I took a look over my shoulder. There was a guy with cue cards standing off to the side behind him. Jay was just reading the questions off the cards. Not paying attention to me at all. The whole thing was so artificial; I was totally put off by it.'

”
― Bill Carter, The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno & the Network Battle for the Night

“I want this job because
it sounds like something I could do
and I’m hungry, physically.
I have extensive experience
in studying what water says as it plummets.”
― Jordan Kapono Nakamura

“My two letters of recommendation are
f and u. They can be used in surf, which
is one way to step on what wants me drowned.
I have heard the hinges of the doors of the sea
creak, so I read a book beneath a tree.”
― Jordan Kapono Nakamura

“I can definitely think of a time
when I had to multitask while under immense pressure,
but would prefer not to. My goal is to recall my past lives
and be free in each. My strength is being scattered
and rooted at the same time. My weakness is entertaining
a party of every kind of consequence.”
― Jordan Kapono Nakamura