How to Blag an Interview

Filed under Getting Old, Journalism, Me, Not Really, PR, Security, Silicon Valley

I realized today that Frank Shaw is one of my favorite bloggers. Unlike the majority of the few hundred blogs I find myself compelled to scan on a daily basis, I’ve found that I enjoy reading what he has to say, and I usually agree with it.

Take his post today, “How to Do a Great Interview“, for example. Spot on. Guy knows what he’s talking about.

Frank gives ten rules that we hacks, in a perfect world, really should aspire to in every interview. And he’s almost 100% bang on the money.

Of course, it’s not a perfect world. With that in mind…

How to Blag an Interview

Every now and then as a technology journalist, you’ll find yourself agreeing to participate in what is referred to a “Press Tour”. Vendors do these once or twice a year, when they have a shiny new product to talk about.

This means you sit in a room with them for 30 minutes to an hour and talk.

Their job is to persuade you to tell your readers that their new product is the absolute bollocks. Your job is to try to get them to say something interesting instead.

The first thing to remember is that these people always turn up 15 minutes early. This is because they know that you’ve set aside those 15 minutes to visit their web site and remind yourself just who the heck they are.

If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to remember what the name of the company is before adjourning to a meeting room, which should give you some indication of what they do. This is a bonus.

The Players

Interviewees generally come in threes.

There’s the Main Guy, the Other Guy, and the PR Bodyguard.

You can tell which is the Main Guy because he sits in the middle. You can tell which is the PR Bodyguard because he has longer hair and wears a skirt and smells nicer. Whatever remains is the Other Guy.

Sometimes, a fourth person will enter the room and sit down about ten minutes into the interview. This person was either parking the car or taking a piss. They can be safely ignored.

The job of the Main Guy, whose title will be either CEO or Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development (check later), is to read from a Powerpoint and generally steer you in the direction of thinking his new product is the absolute bollocks.

The job of the Other Guy is to know the answers to your interesting questions. His title will be CTO & Co-Founder or Director of Product Management.

Your job is to write down what the Main Guy says. Main Guys always speak in quotes. You can write down what the Other Guy says too, but don’t worry if you get the words in the wrong order or spell them wrong. Other Guys always speak in facts.

Introductions

At this point, you should be sitting at a table in a meeting room with two business cards in front of you, belonging to the Main Guy and the Other Guy. PR Bodyguards don’t give you their cards — they’ll call you.

The first thing to do is to take a glimpse at the business cards. Don’t worry about the names. The Main Guy will be called Bob or Bill. The Other Guy will be called Steve.

Just look at the address. If they’re from out-of-state, ask if their flights in were good. If they’re from in-state, ask about traffic. DON’T write down the answer — we haven’t started yet.

Now it’s time for a lame ice-breaking joke.

“So, you guys haven’t been acquired by Symantec yet?” works in about 75% of interviews. The rest of the time, you’ll either get a slightly concerned look, which means they actually are in the process of secretly being acquired by Symantec, or a very puzzled look, which means they are Symantec.

If they are Symantec, write it down.

Whatever the response, just nod and smile until the Other Guy has finished booting up the Powerpoint.

The Powerpoint

As soon as the Powerpoint is ready, you have a very crucial decision to make.

Some Main Guys find it impossible to stop a Powerpoint once it has started. This leads to a situation 45 minutes later when the interview is over and you’ve got a general impression that the new product is the absolute bollocks but absolutely nothing to write about.

You wind up staring at the final slide in the deck, which says simply “Questions?”, and the only thing you can think to ask is “Anybody fancy a pint?”

However, if you dive right in at the beginning and start asking questions, you’ve got to hope that these people are interesting enough to sustain a proper conversation for at least 30 minutes.

Main Guys can build a 20-slide Powerpoint around a single trivial feature upgrade that is entirely 100% identical to something their competitors introduced and briefed you on three weeks ago. In that case, if you start asking questions right at the start, the interview really only needs to last about five minutes, then you’re left in a prolonged uncomfortable silence.

“Oh, you’re doing the same shit as your competitor? Entirely the same? No? Oh, yours is better? Ok. Cool. Anybody fancy a pint?”

In this case, you’re far better off just listening to the Powerpoint. Just have at least two questions ready for that final slide.

It’s a fucking tightrope, and no mistake.

How interesting do these people look? How lazy a reporter do you want to be today?

The Lazy Way

If you choose to passively go along with the Powerpoint, you can switch off completely.

This is what Powerpoints say:

The first slide tells you the name of the company and the name of the person giving the presentation. The name bears no relation to the name of the person actually giving the presentation, so don’t write it down. But please write down the name of the company if you haven’t done so already.

The second slide tells you that the company raised $7.5m in a round led by Sequoia Capital, and that the Main Guy used to work at Intel.

The third slide tells you that the company has “almost 25″ customers, and that one of them is a credit union in Florida.

At this point, you need to show that you’re paying attention. So ask, “What are your target verticals?”. The answer is “healthcare and financial services”. They’re the only verticals with a) shitloads of cash and b) federal regulations telling them they have to buy this crap.

The fourth slide tells you that IT managers have a problem that, to date, nobody has been able to solve. This problem was caused by the vendor you interviewed last week.

The fifth slide introduces the product, and contains the first tantalizing hints that it may in fact be the absolute bollocks.

The sixth slide has a diagram with some boxes on the left, some people typing on the right, and a cloud in the middle.

The seventh slide has a big colorful circle divided into four sectors with arrows around the outside and words in each of the sectors. At the top, it says: “An End-to-End Solution”.

The eighth slide has a checklist of features, in which the vendor’s shiny new product is compared to products that two competitors were selling a year ago.

The ninth slide tells you that the product supports LDAP and Active Directory.

The tenth slide has the name of an analyst you can call if you’re a fresh-out-of-college rookie or just totally fucking clueless and lost.

“Questions?”

The trick to doing an interview the lazy way is always to know what the next slide is going to be. That way, you can keep asking questions that you know the next slide will answer and still appear that you’re actually listening.

“Does it support LDAP?” works 100% of the time. No exceptions.

If you’re bored, but want to look like you’re paying attention, it’s a good idea to look thoughtful, chew on the end of your pen for a moment, then say “I think I understand, but I’m just trying to draw a diagram in my head” in order to immediately skip ahead to the middle of the deck.

It’s not necessary to know what LDAP is, so don’t worry about that.

The Hard Way

If you choose to do it the hard way, the ball is in entirely in your court for the next 45 minutes.

Asking a question from Slide 8 before the Powerpoint is even warm is a surefire way to throw the Main Guy utterly off his stride. He’s got his patter down sequentially, in slide order. If you start going all random-access on his ass, you risk shutting him down completely and you’re going to spend the rest of the interview mainly talking to the Other Guy.

And all he has for you is facts.

Remember, the Main Guy is probably the CEO (check later). He hasn’t got a clue how any of his stuff works, and he hasn’t been prepped with answers to any of your interesting questions. That’s what the Other Guy is there for. If the Other Guy says something interesting, the company has plausible deniability.

If you are insisting doing this the hard way, you’re probably going to have get your story from the Other Guy. You’ll feel bad about this. Sitting in a room with a Main Guy and getting all your juicy information from the Other Guy is just embarrassing.

You’ve got to get at least one quote from the Main Guy.

The simplest way to deal with the Main Guy is to ask him the difficult questions that he has been prepped for. These are generally questions of a financial nature.

If the interview is going badly, the easiest way to fuck with the Main Guy and get a lazy story at the same time is to ask him what the company’s exit strategy is.

There is no correct answer to this question. Nine times out of 10, they’ll tell you they’re on the IPO track.

This is obviously ridiculous. This isn’t 1998. If this outfit is still getting excited about $7.5m of Sequoia money, it means that their product is a feature of a Cisco box that just doesn’t know it yet.

The Main Guy knows that. But if he tells you they want to get acquired, nobody will want to buy their stuff any more. So he’ll tell you he’s going for an IPO, which gives you a lazy headline.

Occasionally, the Main Guy will say that his company is “open to strategic partnerships”. This, you should infer, means that it is six to 12 months away from being acquired by Cisco.

(If you’re feeling particularly cruel and lazy, you can hang a story on this quote. Just bear in mind that, if you do, nobody will buy the vendor’s products for the next six to 12 months, and when Cisco does acquire them it will be at a bargain basement price. You’ve just helped a monster get even more monstrous for cheap. How do you feel about that? Hmm?)

If you’re relying on the Other Guy, your best bet is to goad him into trash-talking his competitors. Other Guys are far better at this than Main Guys, because the company has plausible deniability.

It’s actually fairly easy to do. You don’t even need to know who their competitors are.

“I can think of at least two of your competitors who have been doing this for months. The usual suspects. Can you tell me why your product is better than those two?”

You then have two options. The lazy option is to write a story that has the word “Slams” in the headline and burn all your bridges at once. The smarter option is to sit on the trash-talk, and only bring it up next time you talk to their competitor.

The Wrap Up

Clicking your pen, putting it on the table, and sitting back in your chair is a good way to let your interviewees know that you’re ready for them to leave.

You may want to compliment them on their product around this time.

If you can’t think of anything nice to say, just remember that all IT products are designed to let IT guys like your IT guys make life miserable for regular people like you.

So just say: “Gosh, I sincerely hope that my company doesn’t buy this product!”

The interviewees will assume it’s a compliment. They’ll believe that you believe that their product is the absolute bollocks, and they’ll fuck off moments later.

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Anyway. That’s all. I hope you appreciated it. The above text is absolute fucking gold-dust. I could charge PR agencies $500 an hour for this kind of insight, and you just got it for free you lucky sod.

(with apologies to Neal Stephenson)

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2007-01-10  ::  Kevin Murphy