how do I interview with the person I would be replacing?

A reader writes:

I have recently made it to the second round of interviews for a role I’m very interested in. The conversation is with the person who is leaving the role I’m interviewing for.

I’ve never interviewed with the person who is currently in the job in question, but I take that to mean that she’s leaving the organization on good terms and for her own reasons, and that they trust her to make a recommendation on who will succeed her. Would you agree with that take on the situation, and if so what kinds of questions do you think I should ask or expect? How do I sell myself for the role without coming across as “I’m going to be better at this than you were,” which I’m sure would be a turn-off?

There are two possibilities:

1. The interview is primarily for her to evaluate you as a candidate and, while you’ll still have the opportunity to ask your own questions, it’ll be more or less like any other interview and you should approach it that way.

2.. Or, the main purpose of this meeting is for you to be able to talk to the person who’s currently doing the job and get your own questions about the role answered. In this scenario, she will likely still provide feedback to the hiring manager about you and other candidates, but it’s not the primary purpose of the conversation.

Have they said anything to indicate which it is? Sometimes an employer will say something like, “We’d like to give you some time to talk with the person who’s doing the job now so she can tell you about the work with more nuance” — and that’s a sign that it’s more likely to be #2 (or at least mostly #2). Or they might not say anything like that in advance, but when you sit down with her she’ll make it clear that that’s the bulk of the agenda.

Either way, you should prepare for both scenarios — meaning that you should come into it expecting #1, but be ready with a lot of your own questions if it tuns out to be #2. (You should be ready with a lot of your own questions regardless — because in either scenario it’s an opportunity to hear firsthand from the person who’s doing the job now — but if it turns out to be #2, you don’t want the conversation to stall because you only prepared a couple of questions.)

Questions you can ask the person who’s doing the job you’re interviewing for include things like the best things about the job, the most challenging things about the job, the manager’s management style, secrets to success for doing well in the role, and whether there’s anything she was surprised by or wished she’d known before she started. You should also ask about workload, what the busiest times of the year are, and what those look like, because you might get a more accurate/honest answer than you will from others. And depending on the job, you might ask technical questions too, like what software they’re using for X, or how they’re handling a particular known challenge with that software, etc.

As for selling yourself without coming across like you think you’ll be better at the job than she was … I’d argue you should never really be coming across that way in an interview, even when you’re not talking to the person you’d be replacing, since you can’t possibly know from the outside if it’s true! Good interviews don’t feel like sales pitches; the best ones feel like a conversation between two potential colleagues trying to figure out if a collaboration between them would make sense — and that’s how you should approach this too. Listen to what they’re looking for, talk about how you might be able to help with that, pull out things from your professional history that relate to what they need, and — while they’re assessing you — ask the questions that will help you assess them back.

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