How to Prepare for an Interview When You Have 10+ Years of Experience

The email comes in. We'd love to invite you to interview. And somehow, with 10, 15, maybe 20 years of experience behind you, you start acting like you have an exam on Friday for a class you forgot you were taking.

You Google the most common interview questions and pull up the job description again. You try to remember how the STAR method works. You rewrite your answer to "tell me about yourself" for the 14th time, then practice until some of your answers are so polished they barely sound like you anymore. If the interview is three days away, you're now trying to cram an entire skill into 72 hours.

We've made interviewing much harder than it needs to be.

Why experienced professionals keep starting over

Interviewing is one of the only career skills we treat like an emergency. You don't wait until the morning of a big presentation to learn how to communicate, and you don't become a leader from scratch every time someone needs you to lead. But with interviews, a lot of very experienced people start over every time an opportunity comes along.

I understand why. Most interview preparation advice is organized around the interview in front of you: what they might ask, the best answer to the weakness question, a good conflict example, what to say about why you're leaving. Those are useful questions. They can also teach you to get good at preparing answers instead of getting good at interviewing, and those two things aren't the same.

What the hiring panel actually remembers

For almost two decades, I sat on the hiring side of the table as an HR leader at Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. I've been in a lot of debrief rooms after the candidate walks out, and one interview I still think about was with an interim leader.

She had stepped in when the department's leader went on leave. When that person didn't return, we posted the role and she interviewed for it.

Every answer was about the team. We did this. The team pulled together. This group held the department together. Even when we asked probing questions about her part, she kept giving the credit back to them.

She may very well have set the vision, set expectations, followed up, and given the team the direction and support that kept them steady. We suspected she probably did. But she never told us. By the end, it sounded like the team survived almost by accident, and her leadership disappeared inside her own answers.

What worried the panel wasn't whether she was a good person to work for. It was whether she had the vision to lead, or whether anyone could have stepped in and gotten the same result from such a strong team.

In the end, we hired an external candidate. She walked us through how she had stepped into teams before and brought strong leadership, and she offered a perspective that made us think differently about what the department could become. We could picture the team getting better under her.

With our interim leader, we could picture the team staying steady. The department would keep running, and that mattered. But we couldn't tell whether she would challenge the team, raise the bar, or take it somewhere new. The other candidate made it clear that's exactly what she was there to do, and it was what we needed.

Crediting your team is a strength. But a panel can't hire the team. They're hiring you. They need to hear what you did to make the results possible, and where you'd take things next. Keeping it running and making it better are two different pitches, and only one of them tends to get the job.

"She can do the job" vs. "We need her"

While you're interviewing, the panel isn't only deciding whether you're qualified. They're deciding how much they want you.

There's a real difference between a process that ends with she can do the job and one that ends with we need her. I've watched both conversations happen, and those two candidates don't walk into the offer conversation in the same position. The one they need usually has more room to negotiate, and more people inside the company pushing to make it work.

That's why I don't teach interviewing as just a way to land a job. It's the first part of getting paid for the value you bring.

If you're tired of cramming every time an interview invite shows up, I built the 7-Day How to Interview Like a Badass Challenge for exactly this.

Save My Spot

Your problem isn't a lack of examples

Early in your career, the hard part really is finding an example. Later, you might have twelve. You've led the team, fixed the broken process, influenced the executive, made the mistake and recovered from it, then done it all again at a larger scale.

So the challenge isn't having enough to say. It's knowing what deserves to be said. That takes a different set of interview skills than most prep advice covers. You need to:

• Look at an opportunity and understand what they really need to know about you.

• Know your own experience well enough to choose the right proof.

• Tell that story so the point is clear, without giving them the director's cut.

• Do all of it when the question doesn't arrive in the wording you practiced.

None of that comes from memorizing more answers.

How to interview instead of preparing for interviews

I want the next interview invitation to feel less like I have three days to get ready and more like Okay, let me figure out what matters for this one.

That's what I mean by mastering interviewing for good. The goal isn't to predict every question. It's to be so comfortable using your own experience that you don't need to.

That's what the 7-Day How to Interview Like a Badass Challenge is built to do. For seven days, October 12 to 18, you'll spend about 30 minutes a day learning one framework and practicing it out loud. Every lesson ends with what the hiring team would actually say about your answer after you leave the room.

By the end of the week, you'll be able to:

• Get clear on what a hiring team needs to believe about you, and the one sentence you want repeated in the debrief.

• Deliver a "tell me about yourself" built for the role in front of you, in 60 to 90 seconds.

• Find the strong stories already in your experience, and see how one story can answer several different questions.

• Build an answer that makes your part clear, even when the win was a team effort.

• Handle the question you've been dreading without losing control of the conversation.

• Close the interview in a way that reinforces your value, and answer the salary question when it comes up.

• Complete a full mock interview and hear the difference between your Day 1 and Day 7 recordings.

• Learn how to become the candidate they're still talking about after you leave the room, and why that matters long before the offer conversation starts.

Lessons are released each morning, and both live sessions are recorded, so you can take part on your own schedule.

If you're ready to stop cramming and start building a skill you'll use in this interview and every one after it, save your spot at latoyabaldwin.com/challenge

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About Latoya Baldwin

Latoya Baldwin is a former HR executive with 18+ years of experience making hiring and promotion decisions at Target, Lowe's, CVS Health and Lennar, most recently at the VP level. Through Era of Leadership, she shows ambitious corporate women how hiring and promotion decisions are really made, so they can go after the roles they want with an insider's advantage.