Interviewing 101: Tips for interviewees AND interviewers
15 Feb 2024 · 34 min
Karina Clingman, a scientist and CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm, shares best practices for job interviews in biotech. The discussion covers follow-up etiquette, how to design interview processes, evaluating candidates fairly, and staying authentic when you're nervous.
So we have had quite a few people who are in the process of interviews right now. And this is a weird time of year for a lot of reasons, but right after the first of the year it seems like there's this big boom. A lot of jobs are posted and so a lot of people get interviews quite quickly. That actually overwhelms the team and then things move really slowly. Not to mention we've got JP Morgan, we've got ridiculous numbers of holidays, and we've got, if you're in the Northeast, snow days and sick days. So it's actually a really messy time of year to move the process forward. I can tell you from a recruiting standpoint, the number of times we actually have to cancel interviews or move them or how difficult it even is to get them scheduled on our part. For the from the company side, things are moving slowly. It's not like you're going to have your first round with the recruiter. The next day you're going to meet with the hiring manager and you know, two days later you're going to meet with the full team. That's not a realistic expectation. So the questions that we get quite often are when should I be following up after an interview, how long should it be? And kind of what does that follow up look like? What is the best way to follow up?
I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees.
So I know what works and what doesn't work.
When it comes to landing a job.
And then excelling in it.
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In the right place. And so there's no one size fits all answer because you really have to use your common sense here because it depends on the day of week and is it a long weekend and is it JP Morgan week? And there's like a lot of things to note that we talk about as caveats, but in general I like to recommend a thank you note to anybody you spoke with within 24 hours, a maximum of 24 hours. If you have a conversation with a recruiter or the hiring manager in the morning, send them a thank you note that same day. If it's more Toward the end of the day, pushing five o', clock, send it the next morning. Make sure though that you are sending a follow up thank you note that is complimentary, that says thank you for your time. Thank you so much for telling me about this fascinating thing. And that should come right away with then an open ended question about the next steps so that they have the opportunity to reply to you.
Yeah, I think that open ended question part is really key because otherwise sometimes what we see is someone will say, oh, they didn't reply and we say, okay, well show us what you sent them and there's nothing to reply to. And so you're back in the thank you thing where it's like thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Yep, perfect. Open ended questions. Also, don't overstress it too. Like sometimes you just write the thank you thing and send it and you've done your thing and there's no point to agonizing over the timeline of when someone else gets back to you.
There are two important things to note with thank you notes. There's probably more than two, but I'm going to note two. Every single interaction you have with a hiring team is important. So the tone and the grammar and the spelling, that all matters. It really, really does. If you can mirror the tone of your interview. If it was a, if it was a real chatty interview with a chatty hiring manager, make your thank you note in the same type of style. If it was more of a formal interview and the interview team was a little bit more formal, a little bit more staid and you got the sense like, well, this is more of a formal company, make it a little bit more cordial. However you slice it though, use a tool like Grammarly to ensure that you have no errors in grammar, spelling or punctuation. Because I don't care if it's chatty or formal, that matters, that matters very deeply. And so that's such an easy thing. Especially with the technology we have today. There is no excuse, there is no excuse to send less than a perfect thank you email.
Yeah, I think there's something to unpack there as well. So yes, you definitely want to tailor your tone to how the conversation went. But if you find yourself being like, oh, I'm having to sound so formal because they were so formal and I'm not a formal person, is that an environment for you?
True.
It's a really good time to reflect on. Did you actually really like the impression you got? Because if you're having to change your personality to you know, make an email sound right. Maybe it's not right for you. And I'm not saying that's your only point of, you know, thought when you're thinking about is this the right job? But it's certainly something to think about because the person you presented during that interview and the person you present in the thank you note and the person you present throughout this entire hiring process is the person they expect to show up on the first day of work and to be their colleague. So just make sure that's in line because I think it is really important that you like where you work because it. You bring your whole self to work. Right.
I love that point so much. We actually had a pretty deep dive on that today during office hours because one of our accelerator members is in an interview process and had a first interview. So they skipped right past the recruiter and ended up meeting with the department director, which would be their boss. And it was a 45 minute interview. She called it an exam. It was a 45 minute exam. And she said there was no banter, there was no back and forth. And knowing this person, my first question was, do you want to work with that person? Because she's quite bubbly. She's, you know, so I'm seeing like, okay, we all have had to take exams, but if that's your first interaction with somebody and that's your boss, the question is, is that how they manage? Is it, is it always going to be that intense? Maybe it's not going to be, but my advice to her was, even if so, if they're skipping steps in the process, it's a small company. It's not unheard of to get an offer after just speaking with the hiring manager. At very small companies, there may not be that many more people in the company to even interview with. It is within your rights to ask for another conversation because you are interviewing them too.
Yes.
Yeah. Because, yeah, you're right. You have to be authentic. You have to be comfortable with the environment because you're going to spend a lot of time there.
I mean, I think that's really the key of the whole thing, right? Is that show up as the person that you want to be at work, show up as, you know, the colleague that you want to be and bring that person through your email interactions and through your interviews. Because, yes, everyone has bad days, but be the person you want to be. Right. But don't be someone you're not because it's not going to work out for you long term. You're not going to like it, you're going to burn out and it's just not worth it. So I think that's a really key thing and I think that was good advice you gave that person to reflect on. Like if this is, if this is the offer stage next, you need to think this through.
Yeah, absolutely. I just, knowing her, I want, I want her to be her bubbly self somewhere. That's really important. It's important to me too. And you know, thinking about how I interact and a lot of the advice I give to candidates when we're workshopping emails that they're going to send or you know, interactions that they're having, people get really wound up about this follow up stage and when do I follow up and how do I follow up and all this stuff. And often when I'm helping to write emails, I have to say, well, this is how I'd say it because I would inject like a little bit of humor here. But if that's not you, then don't do it, you know. So for instance, after a long weekend we, we know because we're on the hiring side, so we see the candidate requests and emails come through. If you have an interview, this is where the common sense piece comes in. If you have an interview on a Thursday before a long weekend, the Friday before a long weekend, everyone's going to be checking out mentally by midday. But before that they're just trying to get stuff done so that they're done and they can go enjoy their long weekend. That Friday you're probably not going to hear a whole lot in a meaningful way because nobody's in the right frame of mind to like move candidates forward, get interviews scheduled, all of that. You might, but it's unlikely. And then let's say then the Monday's the holiday, the Tuesday, everyone's just digging out from their long weekend. So the best day to follow up would actually be Wednesday or Thursday of that week. It feels like a long time to you, but that's a long time in regular days, that's not a long time in work days. And that's what we have to really operate on. So then we have people who get really, really upset because they'll say, oh, I made a mistake and I followed up on Tuesday and now they're not gonna see it. And I don't know what to do. I would reply and I'd say, well, that probably wasn't the best day to email you. I'm sure this got buried under 5 million emails. I'm just popping this to the Top of your inbox. That's the way I would handle it. But that's totally my style. And to your point, you have to bring your own style to these conversations.
I wanna go back to something you said about Grammarly. I think that's a really good point. And here's what I would think about. If you are like, I'm just gonna fire off this thank you note from my iPhone and it doesn't even matter because I did the thank you note thing. Check the button, whatever. Just think about that. That interaction, that email you send is how people are going to see you as a colleague.
So if you do it really fast.
And there's spelling errors and it doesn't really make sense, that's not necessarily someone I want on my team because I want to know that things are done correctly and with some thought and well done. So try to approach things from that thing too. Like, yes, it takes a little more work, but you are really showing the level of work and quality that you're going to bring to the job. So don't discount that.
Ultimately we're making drugs. That's what biotech is doing. We are making things that will go into patients and so the level of detail expected of that if we're thinking about filing inds and pushing things into the clinic and all of that, yeah, it's important. Detail matters. And so every interaction until they get to know you really, really well and they might know like, oh well, she's on vacation and firing off a quick email. So that makes sense. But you don't get that privilege until you have shown who you are and that on a day to day basis you are that detail oriented, you care that deeply, then you get, you earn the right to have the occasional silly email that has the spelling error or it doesn't make sense. But not until everyone makes mistakes.
And of course, like you know, we're all in Slack and I don't always capitalize everything in Slack. Sometimes you're just firing things off. But when push comes to shove, my whole team knows that when something important is going out, I am going to be reviewing it and we're going to be running it through Grammarly and I'll probably even have someone else look at it because Grammarly is great. There's no substitute for someone else reading it and being like, I don't understand what you're saying here. So just keep that in mind. These little small things, they do make big impressions. So Karina, have you ever reached out to a candidate and things started off really really well. And then they just fell apart because, like, maybe their emails got really weird, or maybe you had a super strange interaction and you're like, this is bizarre what's happening here? Or have you gotten someone almost to the end and then something went awry?
So many times. So, so many.
Really?
Yeah. It's interesting because I, I've used this a few times now. But like, job interviews are a bit like dating, right? And so you're gonna see people over multiple interactions. That's why we structure interviews the way we do. There's multiple points where you're gonna interact with people at the company and if you are putting on some sort of false personality, it's. It's likely to come out at some point. Right. Even if it's an accident that, you know, maybe it. Maybe the weird interaction we got was a result of something that was out of your control, it's gonna just raise that little pink flag. Is like, is this person real? Are they bringing their authentic self to this? So, yeah, every interaction ends up being a data point and we. All we can do is look at the data at the end of the.
Day, you know, that's super interesting too, especially when people are looking at remote jobs. I think there is a different dynamic to interviewing in person. I feel personally than there is to doing everything remotely where it feels like you're still not completely reading the room and everything. So every interaction really does have that much more weight. Every email is a little bit more okay, like, this is my only correspondence with this person. Like, I'm not gonna meet them in the parking lot and bring them in the building and have that casual chit chat. So here we go.
Yeah, that's a really good point. We have fewer data points in this online world than we would in the pre pandemic world. We used to fly candidates out all the time for interviews. They might have an interview with me on the phone and then they might have an interview with the hiring manager on the phone. Not zoom on the phone. We weren't doing zoom. And then we would fly candidates out if they weren't local to meet the whole team in person and make a whole day of it, including lunch. Like it was a whole thing. We don't do that anymore. And so there are so many fewer data points to get that read on people. So you, you really have to think about pretty critically what image you're putting out during your interview. You want it to be authentic, but you also want it to be professional and in line with the other things that you're that are happening in your interview. So if you send a bunch of really good emails, lots of professional emails, no spelling mistakes, and then suddenly out of nowhere, this weird email that doesn't make any sense. It's, you know, terrible grammar comes through. People are going to be like, what?
You know, it's interesting. I'm sure most people have heard this and it is just good advice. So, like, take this and run with it. But the way that we used to talk about hiring in previous companies was how did they act with the first person they met? So if you are rude to the person sitting at the reception desk, that would be the first question I asked anyone. You know, right after they. Right after we interviewed someone, I'd go out and say, how were they? And sometimes for a lot of my career, I was that person. I'd be like, they were great. Or I'd be like, oh, they were horribly rude. And that dictated everything. It did not matter what the response was after that. Like, if they were like, they could have been the best hire, but if they were rude to the people who they thought didn't matter in their interview, that. That shows you everything you need to know. So that's another data point that you know, no matter who you're interacting with, your initial phone screener has a lot of sway. If they're like, they weren't polite and they were really rude, well, that. That's pretty important to know.
We just let a candidate go today because they were not professional on the phone with one of our recruiters. We're not sending them through to. I mean, I'm sure that they were thinking, well, this is just the recruiter screen. It does not matter. No, they will never be seen by the hiring manager because we ultimately don't feel that they're a fit for the company because that's not the culture of the company or they're not rude there. Hey, I just want to cut in to say that if you are enjoying this podcast, you may enjoy the Building Biotechs podcast from our sister company, Recruitomics Consulting, which is a talent acquisition strategy firm that specializes in helping small biotechs hire exceptional talent. In that podcast, we interview amazing people who are building biotechs. They are industry leaders in all different verticals and it will allow you to explore career paths in biotech and to get to know companies that maybe you've never heard about. So if you are a biotech fan, you are exploring careers in biotech. I highly recommend the Building Biotechs podcast. We'll link that in the show notes, or you can search for it on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right, back to our show.
That's really interesting.
I think, though, it goes the other way, right? If you are interviewing with a company and you're getting weird signals from their team, those are data points for you as well. It's the same thing. You're not spending a ton of time interviewing. You're not meeting everybody at the company. You're not getting to sit down and have a meal with people necessarily anymore. So you don't have a lot of data points to go on either. True. So it's also within your rights to interview them back.
So let's pull that thread a little bit. At what point do you start getting pink to glaring red flags when someone's like, oh, yeah, I've been on eight interviews with the same company, or I've had to do this crazy project for free because they want to see my work, like, where are you? Kind of like, oh, boy, this is not looking so good.
One thing that we see more inexperienced hiring managers want to do often is basically they don't trust themselves to make a decision. So they want everybody in the company to sort of meet this person, back them up on it, and it becomes a really disjointed process. Just because now we can do things through Zoom doesn't mean we should spread the interview out over days and days and days. It's still emotionally and mentally draining to be interviewed. It doesn't matter if it's on site or on Zoom. It's probably a little bit less draining on Zoom, but you still have that anxiety, that workup, that all of that. And if you spread that over multiple days, that is hard. It's hard for candidates, and they don't like it. We've had that feedback specifically from many different candidates. They don't like it. So it is still advisable to keep the interview team small, to keep it tight, because really good candidates that are in high demand, they have choices and they're interviewing you. And if the only data points they have about your company are that the interview feels really disorganized, they have to come back for lots of different interviews, they're on different days. Sometimes they get moved or canceled. What are they going to think about the company? The only data points they have are that your interview process was terrible. Are they going to think you're an organized company, a good company to work for? It's unlikely. So that is huge. The second thing that you brought up was Doing projects. We have had some clients before ask us to put together what they call case study interviews. And this in principle is okay for some roles, but where it crosses into not being okay is if we are asking candidates to do a case study on actual work at the company that could be used to further the company's interests for free. That is not something that you should be doing. And if you are asked to do that, please jump into the Slack community and workshop that with us. We are happy to answer questions about how to turn down an interview like that politely, but if you get the suspicion that you're basically being asked to solve an engineering problem for a company, that's. That's probably not okay.
That would actually be harder for me. I would much prefer to go on site and meet people. I'm just more drawn to being in person with people. And so there's that element too that like, it's exhausting no matter who you are. And it is really like, I feel like it's personality dependent to an extent, but it's just. Just don't do it. Just don't make anyone sit through so many zoom interviews.
We revamped a process recently where they had 13 people meeting with a candidate one on one. Oh, they did it. I know they did it over a period, usually of four or five different days. Because they couldn't get all 13 people who were mostly remote or hybrid to be able to coordinate on a certain day or time. That's. That's just really tough. I don't care who you are. That is grueling. When we started the process, we were working with some candidates that were working through that process already. And we basically had to go back to the company and say, this is the feedback we're getting. These candidates are leaving the process because of this. I don't want to see more than eight people throughout an entire process, which includes HR and the hiring manager.
The thing is, is that everyone has lives, right? You might be looking for a job, but you're probably not just sitting there like being like, do, do, do. I'm totally available for interviews all the time. I mean, think about the childcare element. If you're asking someone to do 13 interviews and. Or if they are employed and you're asking them to step away from their job 13 times. That is wild.
It is in fact pretty common practice with smaller companies. What happens? It's pretty natural. It's. You have these really tiny companies right where it's actually fine to have somebody meet with everybody at the company because they're six people or eight people. It's a tiny company. Well, then the company grows, and they don't want to exclude someone from the process. And then pretty soon you've got your 13 people at the company, your 15 people at the company. They don't want to exclude anybody. But there is a point where you just have to say no. Who's actually pertinent to making this decision? And in the interest of time, who really needs to attend and just triage it down. And you know what? The employees are not going to feel like they're excluded. They're probably burnt out from doing so many interviews too. Not everyone in the company needs to be on every interview.
I actually think that's a super interesting psychological thing as well. If you're an employee and you're not included in the interview, okay, they hired someone and you don't agree with it, you don't get along with them. Well, like, whatever. You didn't weigh in on that. So that was the way the cards were dealt. But how bad is it if you're like, no, I really don't want to work with this person, or like, no.
I don't think they have the skills.
Or X, Y, Z. And the company disregards that feedback because then you are sort of in a position of being like, well, I had to take all this time to interview this person. No one even listened to my feedback, and here we are. So I think the smaller interview team is essential for several reasons. One of them is you have too many cooks in the kitchen, then you're gonna have some unhappy cooks.
Yeah. We can also mitigate that with creating a more scientific interview process. And it's really interesting to me how a bunch of scientists at a company typically don't treat the interview process scientifically at all. And so one of the things we like to do when we start working with a company is create a scorecard system where everybody in total isolation fills out a scorecard with their thoughts and their feelings about a candidate's fitness. And then after everybody's filled those out, then compare what we see often, which, if you think about it, we're talking about a bunch of scientists. They would never do this in an experiment. They would never do this. But they all interview candidates. They sometimes capture notes. They chit chat in the hallway about it. And then there's this process of group think that happens because people are starting to have these sidebar conversations before actual data has been analyzed. It's really fascinating and something that I have always been just so confused about. And then we introduce scorecards, and they're like, oh, yeah, this is a much better way to do it. Like, well, you. You analyze your data like this. Like, I know you're doing your experiments better than this.
That is so interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.
There's a lot of ways to mitigate a lot of those pitfalls, but you kind of need someone who, like, knows how to do it.
Well, if you're listening to this podcast and you are going to hire some folks for your team, you can do a really basic, very rudimentary scorecard using Google forms. It can be, you know, you don't have to have a fancy applicant tracking system if you're not going public anytime soon. You can absolutely do this in a, in an easy way and collect that data and then have a good sit down with the blinded data and have people come forward with their thoughts. Um, but after seeing the data, gotta see the data first. It's interesting too, when you point out, you know, the one outlier that maybe doesn't like the candidate, they don't want to hire that candidate. Often when they see raw data where it's like, okay, well, they were a four and a half star on this. On this. And there were, let's say there were 13 people and they were the one person who marked them a one star and everyone else wrote marked them a five star. That is a lot more compelling to them usually than just being overruled. But it's more of just like an argument if that makes. Yes.
Yeah, well, you're taking the personality out of it. Right? Like, going back to your point, not everyone is going to like each other. That is just human nature. But if you can't sit down and actually say, these are the things that are pertinent to the job and can this person do it and take the personality out of it? To an extent.
I mean, you still have to be.
A good person that people want to work with and be a nice colleague. But, you know, you can accomplish those things without being best friends with everybody. And so I think that is really interesting. I could see that being super effective in getting people on the same page.
It really is. Yeah. Before we revamped some processes with previous clients, we heard feedback as we were sort of starting up. And I would ask, well, what are your pain points with the interview process? And often it came down to this feedback session, which was a completely unformatted feedback session where people had talked to each other earlier, formed their little, little opinions from little clicks, even came in and brought that to this feedback session which then it's. I mean that's not useful. Nobody finds that useful. And I would hear things like somebody would come and be like, well, I didn't like their, their shirt. Somebody said that they didn't like someone's shirt because it had a sparkle, like a sparkly thing on the side, which I'm in, I'm interpreting as an embellishment, you know, probably.
Wow.
How did that, how is that pertinent in any way, shape or form to their ability to perform the job? So this is where we take that, that element out of this process. It's. And it's so easy to do. It's just a matter of standardizing it. So if you are ever confused about that again. Our Slack community, we, we do a lot of work with job seekers, but if you're hiring somebody, come in and ask us about that too. We love to talk about best practices for hiring and we can give you some really easy tips and even some templates and things like that. I just got together an interview cheat sheet for a client. It has almost 200 behavioral based interview questions on anything you could want to interview for. And I just have this in our drive. So if you're interviewing people, jump in our Slack community and ask for that because that is gold. That takes a lot of the guesswork out of crafting these questions.
Here's a thought.
Yeah.
Can we also share that with accelerator members and say, look, if you want to practice for interviews, here you go.
Already done. Yeah, that's actually in our interview module. Yep. They should have no trouble. Although it's a little overwhelming if you're like, oh, these 200 questions. The nice thing though is that there are themes. Right. And so the questions are behavioral based questions, which means you would provide a story to go along with your answer. And I can't actually imagine the need for more than about five stories because the themes for those questions tend to circulate around detail oriented communication, teamwork. Like there's a lot of the same themes. And so as long as you're pulling together stories that paint those types of pictures, you, you should be fine. They might ask you about teamwork and you'd prepared a story about dealing with a challenging colleague. But that actually is okay. You can pull it back to teamwork. Right. So there's a lot of ways that you can mitigate the work that you might think that 200 questions might cause for you. It actually they, they bucket.
Yeah, I think that's the whole thing. If you Practice a few of them. It's in your brain. It's more just thinking about, like on the fly. It's so hard to be like, ooh, when did I work with a difficult colleague? And then you just sit there silently and every second feels so long. But if you're like, oh, yep, I kind of knew I should, like pull one of these out and one of these, and at least then you've kind of made your brain go back in time as well, which I think is really helpful.
It is, yeah. And humans love stories. We connect over stories. Even if you're not asked a behavioral based interview question, there's often a lot of wiggle room in your answers to bring in a story. So one of our members asked how they would respond to a question which is just a terrible question, but what's your greatest weakness? Which we almost never hear that question in interviews. But that's the question everyone fears because we, we've been told, like, oh, just say, like, I work too hard or something. Like, no, that's, that's not. I just care too much. I'm a perfectionist.
Like, I am so detail oriented. I mean, it's such a bad question.
It's a bad question.
And no one's gonna be like, oh, I am. Like, I don't know, I swear, like a sailor. Like, no one's saying that. I mean, maybe they are. I guess if we're telling people to bring your authentic self, I guess you could throw it out there, but don't.
My example today for the accelerator member, she's an immunologist. And I was like, well, it's not like you're gonna come out and say like, I don't know, immunology. It's a terrible question. I think there's a way usually to turn around those questions, even if they are kind of bad questions, to pull in a story and almost turn it into a star based question. So my example for that is for me, and this is how I would even answer the question. I am aware of a weakness of mine. I work on it all the time because it's something that's very present. I generate a lot of ideas and I overwhelm my team members with that because I will just, in my ideation, I will throw out ideas. And because I lead a team, some team members get stressed out about that. They want to go into action, they want to start enacting those ideas. But I've not provided any clear framework for whether they're good ideas, bad ideas. And frankly, many of them should not see the light of day. Right. So the way I have trained myself to mitigate this is I try to write things down now, and I try and sit on them for 24 hours, and then a lot of them get crossed off my list. But the ones that I do feel are good, I want to provide a little more context and framework before I just throw them out in a meeting. This is something I work on constantly. I know it's a problem, and it's something that I think is also a strength of mine, but in the wrong context can really overwhelm a team.
That's an excellent answer, and I would definitely hire you.
Thank you. But you. You see how I can take that terrible question and sort of bring in a bit of a story. It's not a full story, but it's. It's a scenario. And it also shows my thought process. Here are the steps I've taken. So in. In her case, I advised her to think back to something she actually learned from her last job. Something that was a weakness that she was aware of. One thing I noticed in my last position was that I was weak in X area. So I took X, Y, Z steps to improve. I'm still working on it. It's something I continually want to work toward, but I am, and this is what I'm doing. And so to sort of bring it back.
Yeah. I think the ownership piece of that is what is, like, just super critical. People love when you just say, yeah, I know, and I own this aspect of it. And then following it up exactly like you said, these are the steps I'm taking. No one is perfect. And I think very few people are actually really good at delineating and owning their weaknesses in a way that, you know, really shows growth.
Yeah.
So I think that's perfect answer. It's a lot better than the time I interviewed at a company and I was asked what type of a tree I would be.
Ooh. What?
I know, like, four trees. I think I said a palm tree. Cause I like, like the heat and being in Florida, which, like, the job was in Massachusetts. So they were probably like, oh, this isn't going to work out, because you clearly want to be down south.
But that's a really interesting question that I can't actually discern the use case for.
No, there. It was, like, so random. And I was just like, oh, so.
Early on, there was a client that liked to ask wacky questions. And that was something I challenged them on, was like, what's the utility of this question? And they were like, well, we just want to see how creative someone's answer is. And. Okay, but we're a biotech.
That's right.
I mean, fine, but expect candidates to be a little put off by that, because it's. You can understand. Even if it's a bad question, you can understand the question, what's your greatest weakness? You can understand that they're trying to understand something about you. The palm tree or the. The tree question? I don't know. What does that tell you about someone? I don't.
I mean, basically what I told them is that I only know four types of trees. Like, I was like, my tree knowledge is like, I don't know, Christmas tree, a palm tree, and then maple. I don't know. I'm kind of, like, grasping here. So clearly they knew, and I wasn't.
Even like, it felt like it was a garden center. Yeah. Nothing to do with trees. I'm married to a woodworker, and I would not be able to answer that question. I have no idea. I have no idea. He's always like, I found the coolest tree. I'm like, cool? I have no idea what type of tree. I could not walk outside and tell you what trees we have in our yard.
Maybe that's my greatest weakness. I am very poorly educated on trees.
I would say that's a huge weakness and something you should work on.
Definitely affects my day to day.
Thanks so much for listening to the.
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