Lenny RachitskyHost of Lenny's Podcast | Author of Lenny's Newsletter

Take control of job interviews

20 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Lenny Rachitsky says "Tell me about yourself" puts you at a disadvantage. Instead, ask the interviewer what excites them, dig into the actual problem they're solving, and summarize to show you understand. You'll gather intel and steer the conversation like a consultant, not just recite your resume.

Chapters

Too many interviews start with, tell me about yourself. Tell me about this stuff in the past. If you're talking about your past, you're on the back foot and you're losing that conversation. You're the one revealing information. You're not getting anything. We instead want to have a conversation and say, look, some of the best interviews I've always had felt a little bit more like consultations or brainstorming sessions. Are you open to having a chat like that today? Typically they say, yeah, that sounds way better than me trying to drill you with questions. So let me ask you, like, what are some of the things that you're excited about? What's exciting to you? I want to clarify why I'm in the room with you. So we do that as a PM. Oh, it sounds like you have a challenge with this product line. It sounds like AI has been a problem and we need to shift towards native AI. Is there anything that I missed? Then they're revealing information. You take control of that conversation.