Ask About the Past, Not the Future

The second principle: talk about specifics that already happened, not hypotheticals and generics about the future. 'Would you pay for this?' invites fiction. 'Tell me about the last time this happened' extracts fact.

People are terrible at predicting their own future behavior and remarkably good at recounting what they actually did last Tuesday. When someone walks you through a real past incident, you get the context around it: what triggered the problem, who was involved, what it cost, what they did next.

Third principle, paired with this one: listen, don't talk. The interview succeeds when you extract information, not when you deliver it. Aim to spend the overwhelming majority of the time listening. If you catch yourself pitching, you've stopped interviewing.