Issue 26 · Thursday, 25 June 2026
Twenty-five minutes, usually by phone, usually with somebody who does not do the job you are applying for. Candidates treat it as an obstacle. It is better understood as a form with four fields, and the recruiter's job is to fill them in without annoying you.
| The question they ask | The field they are filling |
|---|---|
| Tell me a bit about yourself | Can this person be put in front of the hiring manager without embarrassment |
| What are you looking for in your next role | Does the job as written match what the candidate says they want |
| What are your compensation expectations | Are we within a workable distance of each other |
| What is your timeline / are you interviewing elsewhere | How much urgency to apply, and to whom |
Everything else in the call is texture. If you answer those four cleanly you will almost always advance, because advancing you costs the recruiter nothing and rejecting you costs them a conversation with a hiring manager who wanted more candidates.
You will be asked. In a growing number of places they must give you the range if you ask for it, so ask first: what range has been approved for this role? Said early and pleasantly, this works more often than people expect, because the recruiter would genuinely rather not waste four rounds discovering you are forty thousand apart.
If they will not say and press you instead, give a range whose bottom you would actually accept. The bottom of your stated range is the number that gets written down. Everything above it is decoration.
Two things, and they are both about risk to the recruiter.
The first is whether your story hangs together. Not whether it is impressive — whether the dates, the titles and the reasons are consistent with the résumé in front of them. A gap you explain in one sentence is invisible. A gap you get flustered about becomes the thing they remember.
The second is whether you have read anything at all about the organisation. The bar here is comically low. One specific, accurate sentence about what the company does clears it. Most candidates do not clear it.
Technical depth. The recruiter cannot evaluate it and cannot pass it on. Detailed architecture, methodology, the clever thing you did with the reporting pipeline: save all of it. Answer at the level of “what I own, what changed because of me, how big it was” and hold the rest for somebody who can appreciate it.
And ask, at the end, what the process looks like and how many stages there are. Nobody minds the question, the answer is genuinely useful for planning, and a process that cannot be described is a process that has not been designed.
Written by Nadia Prewitt. Every issue goes to the list first and lands here a day or two afterwards. There is no tracking pixel in the email and there is none on this page; if you want me to know you read it, tell me.