Hi Reader,

The most common opening question in interviews is "tell me about yourself."

It sounds warm. It sounds open. And...it is one of the weakest questions you can ask.

At best you get a polished story. At worst, a ten-minute walk through the CV you already read. Either way, you learn almost nothing about whether this person can actually do the job.

Here is why it fails. It hands control to the candidate, rewards confidence over competence, and produces a performance instead of evidence. You leave the room with a feeling rather than a fact.

I spent 20 years watching the same handful of questions quietly sink good hiring decisions across more than 12,000 interviews.

So I wrote them all down. Why each one fails. And exactly what to ask instead.

Get to the Point: The Interviewer's Playbook is now live on Amazon.

This is not a list of questions. It is a complete system for reading people accurately.

More than 160 interview questions, each one dissected: what it is really testing, the exact follow-ups that pull the truth out of a rehearsed answer, what to listen for in the reply, and the red flags that tell you to keep digging. The frameworks that hold a conversation together, so you always know where to go next. The five mistakes that quietly weaken even a strong question. And the logic underneath all of it, so you are not memorising scripts, you are learning to see.
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Get it here: https://geni.us/get-to-the-point​

One lesson from inside you can use in your very next interview. No cost.

"Tell me about yourself."​
Hands over control and invites a CV recital. Replace with: "What is something you have worked on recently that you are particularly proud of?" Open, but grounded in real experience.

"What is your biggest weakness?"​
You already know the answers. Perfectionist. I care too much. Rehearsed performances, not insight. Replace with: "Can you share a time when something you were working on did not go as expected?" Then pause, and follow up on what they actually say.

"How would you handle a difficult stakeholder?"​
Asks the candidate to invent a scenario. Invented stories give you theory, not proof. Replace with: "Have you ever worked on something where the goals changed halfway through?" Now you are asking about real behaviour.

"Sell me this pen."​
Even Google's former head of People Operations called these a complete waste of time. They reward improvisation, not the ability to do the job.

The single shift underneath all of it.

Every question has one job: to get the candidate to show you what they have actually done, not what they would like to think they would do.

Past behaviour is proof. Hypotheticals and polished principles are not.

Before your next interview, take one question from your usual list and ask yourself: will this surface real evidence, or just a good story? If it is a story, rework it until it points at something the person genuinely did.

Most interviews do not fail because the questions are hard. They fail because the questions never ask for proof.

Fix the questions, and you fix the decision.

Three steps from here:

1. Take one live role you are hiring for and rewrite your three weakest questions using the shift above. Just three.
2. Read the book. It gives you the other 160 plus, with the follow-ups that make them work: https://geni.us/get-to-the-point​
3. If you like it, leave a review. It helps other leaders find it, and it helps me keep writing things worth your time.

Until next time,
Konstanty

P.S. If there is one interview question you have always felt uneasy about but kept asking anyway, reply and tell me what it is. I will send you back a sharper version that actually surfaces evidence. I read every reply.

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