How not to botch an interview

I just dealt with an attempt to interview me by email that checked off pretty nearly every possible mistake in the form. As a public service, I now reproduce the advice I gave after bailing out halfway through the list of questions.

Asking your subject questions you should already have known the answers to in order to be qualified to do the interview is very irritating. When you do that, expect your subject to be reluctant to respond at all.

Do your homework first, then come back with questions that go beyond what the subject has revealed in his or her written work. Try to make the questions interesting and specific, not vague and general.

A good heuristic to apply before writing down each question is: how many times do I estimate the subject will have been asked this before? The likelihood that the subject will be unspeakably bored by having to repeat him or herself rises with that number. If your estimate is in double digits, discard the question.

Also, when presenting a numbered or bulleted list of questions, it’s bad form to bundle many divergent sub-questions under what is nominally a single question. It comes off as lazy and scattershot.

If you ask two dozen open-ended questions that properly require essay-length answers, you are not being respectful of the value of your subject’s time. Sharper, more focused questions to which you can expect shorter answers are better.

As an interviewer, you must put as much time and thought into making the interview experience thought-provoking for your subject as you do into making it interesting for your readers. If you do not do this, you have no grounds for complaint when your subject’s responses are curt and boring.

You botched this attempt rather badly, I’m afraid. Think carefully about these tips; they will help you improve your performance.