Help the employer picture you actually doing it

In the 1998 film Meet Joe Black, Brad Pitt’s character, Joe Black, meets Susan Parrish, played by Claire Forlani, in a New York City coffee shop. They share an immediate connection. During their conversation, Joe invites Susan to imagine what it would be like if they were married.

Suddenly, two strangers are imagining a possible future together.

Joe uses what’s known as “future pacing,” getting someone to picture a shared future. The same technique can be a game-changer in a job interview.

Ask a forward-looking question such as “Say I’m six months into this role and looking back at a massive success. What did I achieve?” Now you’re not an applicant defending your work history; you’re a colleague solving a problem, which makes hiring you feel natural.

Thanks to self-proclaimed career coaches, many job seekers fixate on superficial interview etiquette, such as what to wear, how to sit or whether bringing a coffee looks unprofessional. Flawless manners alone won’t win an offer, though they help. What matters is controlling your narrative.

Obsessing over supposed interview “rules” creates unnecessary anxiety. You’re so busy worrying about yourself that you forget to get the interviewer thinking about working with you.

An interview isn’t a social hangout where you casually nurse a drink; it’s a theatrical performance of competence. For me, whether in a professional or social setting, I perform best when I stop worrying about what others think. That eases the self-imposed stress of having to be perfect.

Instead of worrying about whether I should’ve worn my blue sports jacket, brought copies of my résumé, taken notes (I never do), accepted the water I was offered or whether my handshake was too limp or too firm, I focus on the one thing that actually moves the needle toward being hired: psychological alignment.

The best way to make that connection isn’t to recite your qualifications. It’s to get the interviewer imagining what working with you would look like.

Great leaders inspire their teams by asking them to imagine what they could accomplish together. Great salespeople help customers envision how a product could improve their lives. Steve Jobs understood this. He didn’t pitch a hard drive with technical specifications; he offered consumers “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

The principle is no different when you’re selling yourself to an employer. You’re fighting an uphill battle against their fear of making a bad hiring decision. They’re scrutinizing your background, comparing you with other candidates and wondering whether hiring you will solve their problems or create new ones.

If you spend the interview defensively explaining your past, you risk becoming another forgettable candidate.

You must flip the script.

Conversational hypotheticals act like a Trojan horse, getting past an interviewer’s initial skepticism and transporting you both into a future where you’re colleagues rather than simply rehashing your employment history.

You don’t have to wait until the interviewer asks, “Do you have any questions for me?” to start changing the conversation. By then, you may have spent most of the interview playing defence.

The trick is to ask questions that get the interviewer thinking about what you could accomplish together. Here are five ways to do that:

1. “Say we’re sitting here six months from today, celebrating the turnaround in this department. What’s the single biggest operational bottleneck we cleared?”
2. “Suppose you handed me the keys to this project on day one. Imagine walking into the Friday review meeting. What results on that whiteboard would make you feel that hiring me was the best decision you made?”
3. “Let’s pretend I’m on board and we’re tackling the supply chain lag you mentioned. How do you prefer we work through roadblocks like this?”
4. “Imagine we’ve just wrapped up our first quarter together and the team is hitting its stride. What’s a habit or mindset you’ll see me bring to the floor every morning?”
5. “Say you look back a year from now and realize that bringing me on board made a real difference. What did I master first?”

These aren’t magic questions. Don’t deliver them like a salesperson working through a script. Listen to the answers, ask follow-up questions and connect the employer’s challenges to something you’ve actually accomplished. Give them a reason to believe you can do it again.

Stop treating interviews like interrogations where you’re forced to account for your past. Treat them as collaborative auditions for a future that hasn’t yet happened. Don’t ask for permission; make your interviewer picture you in the role long before they say, “You’re hired!”

Nick Kossovan is a syndicated columnist and career expert with over 20 years of experience in the corporate hiring landscape. He specializes in providing pragmatic, unsweetened advice on career navigation, workplace dynamics, and professional growth.