Tips for Nailing Your Next Interview

Nervous to start interviewing guests on your podcast? Join Priscilla and me as we share simple and reliable interview strategies that give you the confidence to prepare for, navigate, and execute a great guest interview!

If you have questions about preparing for your next interview, email us at support@buzzsprout.com.

Keep podcasting!

Chapters

• 1:44 Preparing for the Interview
• 5:06 Strategies for Defining Your Questions
• 7:31 Navigating an Interview
• 9:35 When to Veer Off Script

Transcript

Cara Pacetti: 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. The topic we're covering for this episode was actually inspired by a podcasting Q&A episode that we released recently, where we were talking all about salvaging an episode because the interview went wrong. And while that's great and those tips are wonderful, and we want to salvage bad episodes, what we really want to do is nail the recording the first time. And so that's what we're going to focus on today. So I've asked Priscilla to join me in answering this question. Priscilla is the head of our podcaster success team here at Buzzsprout, and she has been hosting her own podcast for the last two years. I'm inspired by her because she's really mastered the art of interviewing guests. She does a really great job of getting pertinent information to her listeners while also keeping the interviews not only conversational, but also entertaining. So, Priscilla, thank you so much for being here with me today.

Priscilla Brooke: 1:06

Thanks for having me, Cara. I'm really excited. If you had told me a year and a half ago that I would feel confident doing interviews, I would have told you absolutely not. Your crazy interviews scare me so much. But I do feel like in the last couple of years, getting in the repetition of doing them, I feel a lot more comfortable doing them. So I'm excited to talk about some of the things that I do and some of the things that, you know, we recommend our podcasters do.

Cara Pacetti: 1:30

I would say that you are not alone in that. I think a lot of podcasters feel that way, me included, when I first started podcasting Q&A. So let's dive into some of the tips that we've come up with. The first step in nailing your interview honestly occurs before the mic is ever turned on. So you want to be really intentional about how you are prepping for your interview. And to do that, I always say to start at the end and kind of work backwards. And what I mean by that is start with the goal. What is the goal of the episode? What is the outcome that you want? And what do you want your listeners to know, experience, feel at the end of your episode? So working backwards from there, then you want to think of questions that would lead to that goal. And all of that has to take place before you're ever face to face with your guest.

Priscilla Brooke: 2:20

Yeah, I think that's a really good way to approach it. I would say don't be afraid to do your research. This doesn't mean you have to spend eight hours researching every little thing about a guest before you sit down and interview them, but have a good idea about who it is that you're about to talk to. Listen to other podcasts they've done, read articles they've written. If they have a book, read the book, look at their website, get familiar enough with them so it doesn't feel like you're meeting them for the first time when you sit down to record with them. And so then you can start putting your questions together and you can look for questions that are not going to be the same questions that everyone asks them, but you can look for those places where you can ask the question that maybe they don't answer all the time.

Cara Pacetti: 3:01

That's a really great point, Priscilla, because if you are doing the research and you're listening to other episodes, maybe that they've been featured on, I guarantee some of those niche questions will pop up. Another benefit of doing your research is that going into an interview, your guest is then going to feel comfortable knowing this host did the research. And so I know that I can answer these questions honestly and I can feel comfortable knowing that they know my background.

Priscilla Brooke: 3:28

Well, and one of the things you're doing as the interviewer, your job is to make your guest feel at ease. And so you just mentioned it, sending them the questions ahead of time. That allows them to prepare. Again, it doesn't mean you have to send it to them a week out, but maybe the day before you send them their questions so they have an idea of where you want the conversation to go. And then another level to that is when you get in the recording space with them. So whether it's through, you know, an online recording situation like Riverside or if it's in the room with them, take a few minutes to just casually get to know them before you start recording and give some time to bring those nerves down and to keep things, you know, casual and fun. And then that'll make everything a lot more comfortable when you're actually getting into the recording and the interview. The last thing that I think about when I'm in that preparation stage is how am I gonna transition between questions? And so I try not to get too down in the nitty-gritty of how I'm gonna say everything. Sometimes in my script, I'll give myself some simple transitions between segments or between questions, just so that if in the moment I can't come up with a good transition, I can look at my cheat sheet and my outline and use that as a way to get through from question to question. So that's something that helps me that might be helpful for someone who's nervous about an interview.

Cara Pacetti: 4:53

That is such great advice. And especially when those nerves kick in, you could have all the best laid-out plans in the world and then your mind just goes blank. And so having that little cheat sheet would be so helpful. All right, I want to move on to during the interview. So the questions that you're asking. One piece of advice is to use open-ended questions. And so you don't want to answer the question for your guest. You want to let them shine. So I want to give an example of this. So I'm gonna use this question. Was it hard to stay motivated or were you already really disciplined? Do you see how that kind of cuts off the answer? It doesn't really give the guest the opportunity to answer. Another way to phrase this to make it open-ended, would be to say, what helped you stay motivated through that process? Then crickets. Let it be silent. Let that guest respond. Silence is going to be filled, and you kind of have the upper hand as the host or the interviewer to let your guest fill it with their answer. If you're just creating scripts for the first time and you kind of don't know where to start, think about asking questions that begin with how, what, or why. You want to invoke feeling. And so these questions allow your guest the ability to storytell and to really keep that human element involved in your interview and in their responses.

Priscilla Brooke: 6:20

Yeah, that's really good. I also think AI can be really helpful in this realm of creating questions. Sometimes you'll run into a roadblock and you don't know what other questions to ask, or you've got a list of 10 questions and you don't know if there are any gaps that you're missing. I would say once you've written your questions out, send them over to Chat GPT and ask for any areas where there might be missing information or any questions that aren't included that could be included. Tell them about the episode that you're creating and what your goals are with the episode. And you don't have to take their questions and use them word for word, but you can take those questions and let them inspire other questions for you. It can be a really cool brainstorming tool. And so if you're not using it, this is a really cool way to start playing around with AI and help let it help you come up with some questions.

Cara Pacetti: 7:14

I love that idea. Use the tools that are out there. Make this process a little easier on yourself. So we've walked through the preparation, we've walked through kind of outlining your questions and what you're going to be asking. The last piece involves the actual recording. So you are in the interview with your guest. My advice here is to keep it conversational. When I was first starting with podcasting Q&A, Priscilla actually gave me the advice of you're a real human talking to a real human. And it sounds so simple, but it was exactly the advice that I needed because whether you are interviewing the guest that you've always dreamed of interviewing and their success list is miles long, at the end of the day, you're a human and they're a human. And so just talk to them, have a conversation.

Priscilla Brooke: 8:01

I really think it's so important to remember the humanity. You can get so caught up in the, oh, this person is this huge name author, and I'm super intimidated to talk to them. Just remember they're also just a regular person. You know, you are also very cool and you have a podcast and you're bringing them on, which makes you a cool person too. I think there's something to be said about keeping the human connection there. It'll make the conversation way more listenable, and it will also make it more fun for you if you remember that humanity.

Cara Pacetti: 8:32

Absolutely. And that kind of leads into my other point of active listening. So you've worked so hard to create a script, you've outlined these questions, but the worst thing that you can do in the interview is to be staring at your guest, thinking of your next question. You want to practice really listening to what they have to say and offering a genuine response. If you have formulated your questions correctly, if your guest is kind of aware of the goal of the end of the episode, then hopefully if you jump on a conversation that wasn't necessarily scripted, it will still end up in the same way. You're not going to go down a rabbit hole. But if you do see an opportunity to kind of engage in a conversation because you were listening to what the guest was saying, go for it. That it that makes it so authentic. And again, like Priscilla said, listeners appreciate that. They can relate to that.

Priscilla Brooke: 9:26

Well, and I have this analogy for it, okay? Because I think that's such a good thing, it's maybe the most important thing about having a good, successful interview is letting things go where they're gonna go. And so the analogy I have is, you know, you go on vacation. The best vacations you go on are the ones where you planned what you're gonna do. You have your itinerary down, you know what restaurants are available, you know what tours you want to do, but then in the moment you learn something, you're on the vacation, you learn something about this cool restaurant around the corner. Well, what are you gonna do? You're gonna go to that cool restaurant, or are you gonna say, no, we can't go to that restaurant because I already made a reservation at this other restaurant? No, you're gonna go because that is the cool in-the-moment thing that a local told you to go to. And so there's a beauty in being prepared, but not holding yourself so tightly to the outline that you've written and going, hey, if the conversation goes somewhere else, I'm gonna follow that. Now, if the conversation starts to veer way off course and it's no longer gonna get me to my goals, I'm gonna bring it back to the outline. But being able to navigate that in the moment, that's the hardest part of an interview. And it is one of the most important parts, but it's totally doable and it's something you'll get better at every time you interview another person.

Cara Pacetti: 10:46

Thank you, Priscilla. You've offered some really great tips here today. And so I know these are gonna be useful for not only new podcasters who are maybe a little nervous to go forward with an interview they've been planning, and even experienced podcasters who just want to refine their skills and maybe try a new way. And so I really appreciate you sharing your expertise that you've learned along the way. If you are planning an upcoming interview and you have questions that you'd like the podcaster success team to help you answer, we'd love to do that. You can reach us by emailing us at support at buzzsprout.com. If you have a question that you'd like us to focus on on a future podcasting Q&A episode, click the send us a text link in the show notes, and we can feature that on one of our upcoming episodes. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.