Shift Your Interview Strategy: Positioning Yourself as the Solution

Interviews Aren’t About You (Sorry)

Greg Hatchuk, an experienced hiring manager, analyzed patterns from over a hundred interviews. He found that successful candidates focus on the manager’s problem rather than their own achievements.

Why This Matters

Candidates often treat interviews as a ‘talent show’ or performance art, focusing on a generic list of accomplishments. In technical reality, every open role is a symptom of a specific internal pressure—such as system instability or loss of domain expertise—that is rarely captured in a standard job advertisement.

Key Insights

• The Problem-Solution Gap: Job ads omit critical drivers like the departure of the only engineer who understands a payment system (Hatchuk, 2026).
• Detective Mindset: Using targeted discovery questions (e.g., ‘What prompted the opening?’) to surface hidden pain points instead of providing prepackaged speeches.
• Relevance over Autobiography: Connecting specific past experiences—such as managing trade-offs under pressure during fast scaling—directly to the team’s current struggle.

Practical Applications

• ). Use case: A candidate identifies a team struggling with coordination and highlights their experience with ‘glue work’ to demonstrate empathy and utility.
• ). Pitfall: Treating the interview as a stage for listing achievements, which fails to answer the manager’s primary question: ‘Can this person solve my problem?’

References:

• https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/05/18/interviews-aren-t-about-you-sorry/