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Developer Content Specialist
DevRelCon London 2023
In this talk from DevRelCon London 2023, Kai shares their expertise on conducting wonderful interviews. With a background in journalism and content creation, Kai has developed habits and skills that make interviewing a breeze.
They emphasize the importance of preparation, curiosity, and empathy in creating engaging and meaningful conversations. Whether you’re a content creator, journalist, or simply interested in improving your interviewing skills, Kai’s insights and tips will help you become a better interviewer.
This talk was part of the Core Skills track at DevRelCon London 2023, organised by You Got This!
Kevin Lewis:
Hello everyone. We are going to get started with our second talk, one of my favorite people in the whole world, Kai, talking about how to conduct wonderful interviews with people. For those of you who are just joining us, this is the core skills track at DevRelCon. There is also a main track. That’s the one we started in and there was an unconference at the back that will run throughout today. I really don’t need to take much more of this time, so I’m going to hand the stage over to Kai. A big round of applause. Standing ovation. Round of applause. There we go.
Kai Katschthaler:
Thank you so much, Kevin. I was fine actually this morning nerves wise, and then I think I should not have been allowed in for your talk because it reminded me that stage fright exists, and now I’m like, okay, but I’m going to do this anyways. My name is Kai. My pronouns are they them. I am a developer, content and technical communication specialist, and I’m really good at interviews, and I don’t mean job interviews because I’m actually really, really, really bad at those because my nerves get the better of me and I wig out and not good. Do not listen to me with advice about job interviews. But the type of interviews I’m actually good at is journalistic interviews. To be fair, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I have a background in journalism, including an MA in journalism and a background in marketing.
I’ve been creating content for over 20 years. Things like daily news have to be done by 6:00 PM or the newspaper doesn’t go out, but also countless blog posts. I have done video content from writing, directing, editing all the way through and live streams, podcasts, and much, much more. And throughout all of my work interviews have been a really crucial part of it. They’ve played an important role and at the end of the day, interviewing is a skill. The good thing is skills is that they get better if you practice. So today I’m going to share my interviewing secrets with you and I’ll show you how I got good at interviewing basically certain habits that I’ve developed over the years that helped me prepare and conduct interviews with relative ease. I say relative because just like stage fright when you talk, you always get a little bit of stage fright before interviews as well.
My way of doing this is obviously not the only way, but maybe I can give you some starter ideas and just help you get started. And I’m also going to share why I’m good at interviews, not just the how, but also the why, which is possibly a bit more complicated and essentially boils down to why people talk to me. Very simply put, I’m good at interviews because people tell me things, which in a personal situation is not that practical. I’m the type of person, stranger in the street tell their life story to whether I want them to or not. I just get to learn it. But it is helpful if part of your job is getting information from people. I’ve briefly considered a career, but I think I am not stealthy enough just in general, but is people opening up to me based on a skill or is it something else? I think it’s certain personality traits that I have and have nurtured over the years. We’ll talk about those traits, why they’re important and also how you can develop them. So why are we talking about interviews to begin with today? What’s so great about interviews, interviews are a fantastic way to get content. You can use them as content by publishing a recording of an interview, doing a podcast, doing a live stream, writing them up as blog posts, but you can also use them for content. Say you’re working on something, on a topic you’re researching, you interview a bunch of people, you get some quotes to bolster your content with and so on. So there are multiple ways to use them, and in fact, many people outside of our jobs, res content marketers, et cetera, use it.
Journalists of course, but also any good novelist writer knows that they need to do their research and interviews are a great way to do that. The point is that you can’t be the expert on everything, so you need to learn how to get experts to tell you everything. You have to basically become an expert and interviewing expert, and I found the key to interviewing is to be prepared. The more prep I do, the better I can react in the moment. Of course, you can’t always prepare in depth. For example, if my job was to walk around a DevRelCon today and tomorrow and talk to people, interview them about how they’re liking and get some quotes from them, I couldn’t do any in-depth prep. I would come up with a few questions and I would just go in and see what I can get in the moment.
But if I’m doing a bigger in-depth interview, then I would be wasting a great opportunity if I didn’t take the time to prepare first. So let’s have a look at some of the prep work that I do to make things easier for myself. My first step is always to figure out what do I want out of this interview? Ask yourself, why am I doing this? Do you want to, as I said, publish an edited video? Do you want to record it for a podcast? Are you live streaming it? Are you writing it up as a blog post? Are you using it as background for quotes, et cetera? And depending on what you want to do with it, you have to pay attention to different things. For example, if you’re live streaming, how you structure your questions is going to be important because you want the conversation to flow and to just one thing lead to the next in a chill and easy way that doesn’t feel manufactured.
But if you know you’re going to edit this up into a video afterwards, then that’s less important. You can move things around on your timeline, but you want to focus on how you ask your questions. You want to make sure that they’re really clear and concise because if they’re not, it’s going to be hell to edit. And I say that because I made that mistake recently because I’d been out of the editing game for a while. So definitely, definitely make sure you ask clear questions and not just half sentences tacked onto what your partners just said, and also, what vibe are you going for? Do you want just to be a chill conversation between two industry experts or do you want your interview partner to be like the person giving expert advice to your audience? That’ll also inform what you do. Your next step is research. I always recommend researching the topic, even if you think you know enough about it already do your research and also researching the person and what they’ve previously said about the topic.
Like I said at the beginning, we can’t all be experts on everything and content people are notoriously jacks of all trades and research is kind of what gives us an edge, isn’t it? Because research helps us know just enough about a topic to be dangerous, just enough to ask those really good questions that gets you those really juicy quotes. And while you do your research, you also will finally get, you will understand where the conversation could go, all the directions it could take, and that will help you guide it where you need it to go.
Yeah, and then once you know all that, you can come up with your questions, just write them all down and including potential follow-up questions and put them in a logical order. I usually just write them down and then move stuff around until it makes sense. And by makes sense, I mean you want to have a thread that guides the conversation that seems natural, natural rather than having a disjointed kind of q and a where you just ask a question, they reply, and then you’re like, okay, next question, because that’s awkward. Sometimes it’d be like that, but that’s not what we’re aiming for.
Oh, yeah, if you have lots of questions, you can totally group and subgroup them, that’s totally cool. And you create a a questions catalog, and then I recommend having a call with your interview partner because you need to tell them what you’re planning to talk about and also give them a chance to see what they would like included and then add that to your questions. I also think it’s always a good idea to ask if anything is off limits, especially when you’re doing a live interview, a live stream, you want to make sure that you don’t venture into any errors you should venture into. And personally, I also think it’s a good idea to ask them how to introduce them. Has their job title changed? How do you pronounce their name? Many names are tricky, mine included, and also ask for people’s pronouns. That’s something I always advocate for.
Obviously, all in all, it’s like a 50 minute call that’s really helpful to put people at ease with each other, especially if you haven’t met someone in person yet. So how complex your questions catalog is depends on the topic. I’ve got a bit of an example here. I’ve been doing some live streams earlier this year about core skills topics actually, and we’ve talked about things like public speaking and live streaming and networking, and those questions are relatively simple. I usually have a few questions about the person and a few questions about the topic, and we just have a conversation, take questions from the audience. It’s easy, it’s chill. But earlier this year, I also did an interview with an AI founder, and that was a much, much more complex catalog of questions that you can, I mean, this is just like a simplification of it, but I had to ask questions about the product, about AI ethics, about AI frugality.
We even ventured into AI politics, so that took a lot longer to prepare for, but it was definitely worth it because I was a lot more prepared to go with the flow and with what he had to say in that moment. Of course, how you prep is ultimately up to you, but I have one big piece of advice for you, and that’s don’t try to look smart, honestly, we all fall for this, but an interview is not a place for you to show off how much you know about something. An interview is a place for you to make it easy for the person you’re interviewing to share their experience, to share their knowledge with your audience. In fact, I’ve often had really good luck with being come across as slightly clueless. So it’d be like, oh, could you explain to me why your AI uses less resources than others? Have I researched this before? Of course. Have I mostly understood it? Of course. But if I ask the question this way, I get a more complete answer. And if I get a more complete answer that then the content that I put out is going to be way more accessible to a broader range of people, not just the people who already know a lot about the topic, but even people who are just starting out with it.
Yeah, so that’s your prep work. Now you’ve got your prep work done, and I’m telling you to forget, don’t forget your prep work, obviously, but I want you in the interview itself to use your prep work, your crutch as your confidence to be in the moment and to go with the flow. And there are a couple of things that you can do in an interview that’ll make this easier for you as well. Sorry, side note. I didn’t always love interviews. I love them now, but I actually hated them when I was a young journalist. Also, I look young, but I am not that young, and when I was a young journalist, recording devices were not as ubiquitous as they are now. I know this horribly dates me, but that’s just the truth of it. We had three in the newsroom and you had to book them in advance, and then you took them away and then you had to bring them back again.
It was just not a nightmare. And a lot still, a lot of the time, you didn’t have recording devices, you had to take notes. Interviews were often spontaneous. The worst thing was interviews on the phone. My audio processing is arguably pretty bad, and the newsroom was loud, so interviews were a source of stress for me. I was like focusing on trying not to miss anything, and I couldn’t focus on a conversation. I couldn’t actually focus on asking good questions. So I know it seems like a no-brainer, but if you know this background, you know why I’m saying please record interviews. Even if you think you don’t need the recording, it’s going to free you up in the moment. You don’t have to focus on notes. The only notes you should take are if your interview partner says something, you’re like, oh, there’s another question I need to add.
You jot that down, you’re good. Speaking of questions, tick them off as you go, and then you have an easy way to see what’s left and what if you’ve already asked If the conversation stalling, don’t panic. That happens. Just take a breath. Just like with the stage fright, take a breath, say, lemme just quickly check my notes. And then you go, yeah, no, I do have another question. Or maybe you don’t, but it’s totally okay to just even on a live stream. Lemme just quickly check my notes. Breathe. Probably the other person’s happy to get a sip of water.
I also have a secret tip for ending interviews. This is something that’s worked really well for me. It is a total no brainer, I know, but I always like to ask, is there anything I haven’t asked you yet or anything that you would ask yourself if you were interviewing you that gives them the opportunity to share their message again? And if they’re like, no, I think we’ve covered everything, then that gives you a good segue to end the interview. But all in all, I really want you to enjoy yourself. An interview at the end of the day is just a conversation between two people, which leads me to the next part, which is how do you make it a good conversation?
So people often tell me that I’m easy to talk to in interviews, I mean, I guess otherwise as well, but in interviews specifically. And then I make it possible for them to present their best selves in the situation. It’s a nice compliment, but I think it’s neither sorcery nor superpower. I think I meet people in a way that makes them feel comfortable, and then they’re more likely to share their experiences with me or information or whatever. And this is where finally, I bet if I’ve been waiting for it, finally Drew Barrymore comes into this unlikely, but Drew Barrymore and I have some things in common, two things actually. The uncanny ability to pose awkwardly for photos, but more importantly, I think it’s how we interact with people during interviews where I’ve seen some similarities and I think that’s what makes it work for both of us.
I dunno, who here has ever seen the Drew Barrymore show? I think the ones in the US are more likely to have seen it here. You can. Yeah, if you’ve never seen it, please, I beg you, look up some clips on YouTube. It is so worth it. It is amazing. The way she interacts with people is so special. As you can see, she leans in, she gets up close and personal. She kind of puts all her self-consciousness aside and you can tell that she’s really genuinely interested in people and she gets so many good things out of those interviews. It’s really amazing how well it works. Now, of course, a talk show or interviewing celebrities is different from what I do, sadly. If you want to hire me for that, drew, call me.
I have interviewed people about all kinds of topics, including personal ones such as mental health, but most of my stuff is obviously tech topics and I assume so is yours. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t use the same techniques rub Barrymore uses. And by techniques I actually mean personality traits, which are curiosity and empathy. So let’s look at curiosity first. The saying goes that curiosity killed the cat. I think that’s bullshit. I think maybe being nosy killed the cat because curiosity is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as a strong desire to know about something, whereas Nosiness is defined as wanting to know too much. I think that’s the key. And yeah, Drew Barrymore clearly has a strong desire to know about the people she interviews and so do I. We’re genuinely interested in who you are, what you’re passionate about, why you do what you do, what moves you, and what motivates you.
And this desire to know and understand makes it easy for us to talk to people. I think they can tell I’m interested and simply put it flatters them. I don’t dunno how many of you know this, but I’m actually originally from Austria, and I have taken a surprising liking to Austria’s favorite expert Arnold Schwarzenegger in recent years. I actually subscribed to his newsletter, which if you into fitness is really cool. And in a recent one, he said, people can tell when you’re interested in them, and they love that no matter who they are and what they do. I think arnie’s absolutely right with that. But what he, and what I will tell you straight out is that that interest has to be genuine. You can’t fake it. They know. They can tell if it’s fake, so don’t fake it. I know it’s easier said than done, but hear me out. Okay, yes, not everyone is interesting. I’ll grant you that, but I would wager that you can find something interesting about everyone. You just have to put in the work.
I think as children, we innately have this kind of curiosity, and then it gets educated out of us with some of us that education didn’t take. But this is also why I think that you can rediscover this kind of curiosity if you’ve lost it. Yeah, like I said, it just takes a bit of practice. So I’m going to give you homework now. I want you to practice being interested in people. For example, when you meet someone, let yourself be curious. But today, tomorrow, talk to people. Put your own, like what do you want to gain out of this conversation? Put that aside and just listen and be curious and ask questions and let yourself connect and see how that feels. Which leads me to the second trait that I think Drew and I have in common, which is empathy. I know it’s such a buzzword these days, but the Oxford Dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand another person’s feelings, experience, et cetera.
Essentially, it’s putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes at the same time. There’s this tenant in journalism that they taught me in school that you must always remain objective, meaning you must keep a distance, but objectivity doesn’t exist unless you’re doing Watergate level reporting. It’s nothing that you need to strive for in your interviews. Instead, let yourself engage with people. I’m not saying crawl into their laps like Drew Barrymore does. That seems maybe don’t do that unless you have consent. But let yourself empathize. Let yourself make a connection. Show that you understand, show that you relate by sharing one of your experiences that is similar to what they shared with you. Essentially make them feel heard because people who feel heard are willing to talk.
Ultimately, I think engagement is where it’s at. If engagement happens, when you bring both curiosity and empathy to the table, it makes people want to tell you things and that’s how you get great content. No. So as one of my favorite Star Trek captain says, engage age, Picard has Let me down canvasing. Weird thing. Sorry about that. But yeah, it’s basically Picard going engage. Do that. Don’t hide behind an interview is facade or anything. An interview is meant to be a conversation and not an inquisition. And you can get that. You can’t get that without engaging. I’m bitter. I’m bitter about this salty. I at least it’s one there. So let’s recap how you’re going to get good at interviewing. Preparation is your friend. Do your research, prep your questions, tick off your questions as you go so you know what you’ve asked and what you haven’t.
Record your interview even if you don’t think you need to engage and allow yourself to be interested. And remember that interviewing is a skill and like most skills, it takes practice to get better. I’ve done a lot of shitty interviews, but each one of them has helped me get better. And last but not least, please remember to enjoy yourself. I’ve got another Dr. Aramark quote for you. She recently said, I get to learn from people every day. I get to have these incredible conversations that I definitely take something away from. It’s always improving my life. It’s profound. It’s fun. Honestly, I have nothing to add to that. So if you want to get better at interviews, channel your inner Drew Barrymore, integrate the advice that I’ve shared with you today and watch yourself improve with practice. Sorry. And after all this, you still don’t enjoy interviews. Please, by all means outsource that to someone who does. If you think that’s someone’s me, I’m actually currently open to talking about interesting jobs at cool places. But yeah, thank you so much for coming today. I hope you have a great time at DevRelCon. I hope you meet interesting people and talk to them. And feel free to drop me a message on social media and let me know how that goes for you. Do we have time for questions or no?
Kevin Lewis:
There was not one moment of hesitation with this question. I’m in. I’m a question. I was going to say we have some time for questions. Firstly, thank you so much. Thank you. I love that talk and I now have an overwhelming urge to watch this as well. So we have about 10 minutes for questions. So
Kai Katschthaler:
Yeah, there was a five minute warning. I was like,
Audience member 1:
Do you have any tips for developing empathy and practicing empathy for those of us who don’t necessarily have it built in and have to work on that explicitly? What
Kai Katschthaler:
Do you mean by don’t have it built in? The only people who actually don’t have it built in are sociopaths as far as I know.
Audience member 1:
Okay, so those of us for whom it doesn’t come easily, and we have to sort of work to understand other people’s experiences. This is something I’ve done really rigorously go, okay, what might this person be feeling? How might these person’s experiences have informed where they’re coming from?
Kai Katschthaler:
Is it a neurodivergent question?
Audience member 1:
This is a neurodivergent question. Yes.
Kai Katschthaler:
So if it’s relating to autism, then I would say that you have that empathy.
Audience member 1:
Do you have tips for accessing it more easily in situations where you feel like you might be lacking it?
Kai Katschthaler:
So you have a situation, you’re like, I’m not empathizing, but I feel like I should ask more questions.
Audience member 1:
Okay.
Kai Katschthaler:
Just ask for details if that’s appropriate, obviously. Yeah. I think asking more questions until I understand is what I do. And that also applies to emotional understanding, which I think empathy is in a way.
Audience member 1:
So leaning on the curiosity
Kai Katschthaler:
And just dig further. Obviously don’t be intrusive, but yeah.
Audience member 1:
Okay. Thank you. You’re welcome.
Kai Katschthaler:
Okay.
Audience member 2:
Any advice for when you are interviewing someone who’s giving you monosyllabic answers and not expanding on anything?
Kai Katschthaler:
Why are you interviewing them to begin with? Did you research the person first? No, those people are difficult. You have to ask a lot of follow-up questions and dig, and sometimes it’s as brutal as saying, could you expand on that, please? Could you tell me more about that? But ultimately the question is why are they being monolithic? Do you have nothing to say about the topic that you shouldn’t be interviewing them to begin with? Are they having stage fright? Then maybe you can make them more comfortable in advance. Sometimes I have this quick call with people to just say, Hey, these are the questions, whatever. But sometimes it’s a bit more just making them at ease. I had a part in the talk that I took out that was about making people at ease, making sure they have all the information beforehand. I’m autistic. As much information as I can get beforehand, I appreciate. So if you’re going to tell me what a situation is like, I’m going to be more relaxed in the moment. So if you suspect in the pre-talk, that pre-call going to be difficult to get information out of, then figure out what you can do to make them more at ease and also even be like, Hey, I noticed you give very short answers. How can I make you get long answers from you?
Audience member 3:
I interview people that get carried away a lot and go off the beaten track. How do I better create questions that keep them short, sharp, and easily editable?
Kai Katschthaler:
I mean, if you know this in advance, you can focus the questions more and just ask smaller questions if you know what I mean. And also, so you mean you’re doing it for knowing that you’ll have to edit is basically the thing? Yeah, that’s difficult. I do a lot of audio editing. I go by the wave and then I try to cut people off, but that’s obviously not ideal, but that’s what I do. You can try interrupting, taking a deep breath and being like, and sometimes that works. And shorter, smaller bites of questions is the best thing you can do in that situation. Or maybe just mailed them. Although I’d argue that’s a better problem to have than that one. I’d prefer that one to that one.
Audience member 4:
Adding on to the empathy question, can you give some examples of the ways that someone has made you feel like, oh, I feel really heard and seen? What are your favorite ways? In addition to being asked questions of feeling like, wow, this person is really empathizing with me. I’ve often been told you think, oh, I’m empathizing with someone, but the other person’s like, actually, I don’t feel that from you.
Kai Katschthaler:
I mean, I try not to do resting bitch face. I always say I can’t change my face. Yeah, no. What I consciously will do is I will do that whole reacting, just like if you record your sound separately, it’s fine if you’re recording one sound for both, try to keep your reactions muted, obviously. But I do a lot of nodding and understanding and the physical signs that we as humans have agreed are signs of understanding. It’s like, oh, yes, yeah, understand. Okay, that’s your question. Okay. Things like that, it sounds so silly and you kind of overdo it a little bit. Then it goes via video. If you’re video conferencing or whatever, it comes across as well. But yeah, and sometimes it’s simple saying, oh, I understand. Or like, oh, something similar has happened to me, and then I know you’re not supposed to bring yourself in, but as I said, I’m autistic. My way of relating is to say, oh, that has happened to me as well, and brief anecdote and then move on. So yeah, stuff like that was someone else, I think, but maybe not.
Audience member 5:
You may have this one. Thank you. Love your workshop. Thank you so much for this. I wanted to ask you, how much of your questions do you share with your interviewee in advance so that they don’t prepare sort of fully composed answers to it?
Kai Katschthaler:
So I usually give them a rough overview of topics I want to talk about. With the AI example, I would be like, I want to talk about why it’s frugal, the ethics of it, how your product works, stuff like that, that they’re usually prepared for. I if it’s a personal topic such as mental health, which I’ve done with Table Raza, my nonprofit, I would probably be more kind of thinking about content warnings and be like, these are topics I want to talk about. Is that okay with you? Some people genuinely want you to share the answers so they can think about it first, which in job interviews, if I know what’s coming in a technical interview, I’m going to be more relaxed. I don’t have a problem doing that as long. I just thank people like, please don’t prepare and read off of it. And they mostly know not to do that. So I don’t think that’s a problem to share it with someone who asks for it. If they don’t ask for it, just keep it loose with the topics.
Audience member 5:
Okay, and follow up question, how much of your own opinion do you share during interviews?
Kai Katschthaler:
I mean, it depends on if I’m doing it for my own stream a lot. If I’m doing it for work for an employer who doesn’t want me to share a lot of my own opinion, then less so if I can edit it out, I might be like, oh yeah, no, I agree with you on the AI ethics issues, but I’m going to edit it out. I do think interviews are better if I bring my whole self to the thing rather than just otherwise you have the inquisition thing, the question, answer, question, answer, and yeah.
Audience member 5:
Awesome. Thanks.
Kai Katschthaler:
It’s okay to be you basically.
Kevin Lewis:
One more, your hand went up first over here,
Kai Katschthaler:
Bringing you the mic. You can ask me afterwards.
Audience member 6:
This is a very short question you may have just answered, but if I wanted to, is your live stream the right place if I want to see your technique unedited in action to learn
Kai Katschthaler:
From? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it’s linked somewhere, but I’m the grumpy enby everywhere, including on Twitch. There’s not a lot up because I got busy with job search stuff and so on. But yeah.
Audience member 6:
Okay, thank you.
Audience member 7:
Hey, thanks for this. This was great. Kai. When it comes to prepping, that has been somewhat of a black box for me. Do you find yourself, is it more of a grind and it’s just like, Hey, social media profiles, you’re going on LinkedIn, finding out these folks and Googling them or whatever. Is there any kind of other tips or things that you found useful when prepping?
Kai Katschthaler:
Do you mean about the person specifically when
Audience member 7:
You’re Yes. About the person you’re interviewing?
Kai Katschthaler:
Yeah. No, that’s pretty much it. As well as obviously Googling, if they’ve done previous interviews about this topic or I’ve written a blog post about it, then I’ll look at that. Stuff like that. I mean, simply put, you can also ask them, Hey, what is the stuff that we should focus on for this? Because your stuff best, and you’re the expert on this, what should we focus on?
Kevin Lewis:
A huge round of applause for Kai.
