How to Interrupt Well

The ability to interrupt confidently and gracefully is a must-have skill for interviewing candidates. It's also one of the most counterintuitive things I have to teach almost everyone that I coach.

Here's your 7-point cheat sheet for interrupting better:

1. Your Job

Unlike a podcast with an expert guest, your job is not to simply give the candidate a platform to speak. Your job is to gather data not simply listen to monologues. This requires interrupting well because the candidate cannot possibly know the ideal length of time for their responses and the areas where you'd like to go deeper.

2. Your Energy: Curious > Polite

Many people are afraid to interrupt out of a misplaced sense of manners. At some point, they learned that "interrupting is rude" and so they do not know how to handle a long-winded candidate. While obviously true in the average social setting, it's not good advice for interviewing. The key is to be more curious than you are polite. (You can still be polite, but it's not the primary thing you're optimizing for.)

3: Up-front Tactic

You can kick off the interview by letting them know you're excited to hear about their story and that you'll occasionally jump in to keep things on track time-wise. Use this in your intro if you struggle to interrupt. It will help pre-wire the candidate. If you've heard a particular candidate struggles to keep answers short, you can let them know you have a culture of "executive headline" communication and that you'd appreciate a brief answer where you can dig in with further questions. Feel free to customize this to your culture and use case.

4. Nod + Vocalize

General rule: Don't let the candidate speak for longer than 20-30 seconds without you nodding and verbalizing (at least slightly). Small vocalizations ("yeah", "mmm", "interesting", etc.) are important. Why?

Have you ever noticed how it's slightly awkward when you are talking and you get nothing back from the other person? It's like you're talking to a brick wall. It's hard to know when to wrap up. It's 10x worse when you are a candidate trying to impress someone. Vocalize!

5. "W" face + "S" Sound

If you're on Zoom (video), just start saying the word "What". If it's audio-only, just say the word "So". Then pause for a second.

This gives the person a beat to process that you're going to jump in. That way you don't stumble over their words.

6. Fascination Wins!

The biggest tactic is to simply jump in with fascination. Unlike a political debate, you are not interrupting them to talk over them. You are fascinated by their story and cannot wait to get to the next key moment in the journey. It hits 100% differently—we interrupt CXOs in exec interviews (assessments) all the time, and they rarely notice it.

When someone is eager to hear the next part of your story you don't process it the same way as when someone cuts you off to make their point. It's in service to the candidate.

7. You Owe it to Them

Unless the main criteria for the role is concise communication, you owe it to yourself and the candidate to interrupt them. Otherwise, you're likely to default to a "no hire" just because they were long-winded and you weren't able to get enough data.

The other side of the same coin: many false positives are the result of being charmed by a candidate who performs well in the interview, but doesn't deliver on the job. Passing on a (potentially nervous) over-talker who *does* deliver is the opposite: a false negative!

In both examples, it's a case of how a passive/inexperienced interviewer will end up making the decision more on the metadata of the interview rather than the candidate's actual value.

Interrupt. Get the data. Your future self and teammates will thank you for it.