How to talk yourself out of a job
Some reasons for failing a job interview are unavoidable, at least within the interview itself:
The interviewer asks you to do something you just don’t know how to do.
Your preferences are fundamentally incompatible with theirs (e.g. remote/nonremote, work-life balance expectations)
You and the interviewer personally dislike one another.
Sure, you can become a better programmer or learn better people skills, but that’s not interview prep. It’s just developing your skills.
In our data set, these kinds of short-term unavoidable rejections cover around two-thirds of the total: about 50% were technical rejections, and another 15% or so were unavoidable nontechnical rejections. The rest - about 35% of the total - were avoidable rejections. If the remaining ~35% of candidates were better prepared, they might have gotten jobs that (in reality) they didn’t.
Of those avoidable rejections, the most common failure mode is something companies usually describe as “not excited enough” or “didn’t seem interested in <company>”. About half of avoidable rejections (~20% of the total) are of this type, and it’s easy to avoid - if you know what they actually mean by “excited”.
"Excitement" doesn't mean what you think
“Interest” and “excitement” are the words employers use in these rejections, but that doesn’t quite capture what they actually mean. After all (as numerous candidates have frustratedly told me after a rejection), you’re taking the time to interview! Doesn’t that imply you’re necessarily interested in the job? Plus, many (legitimate and honest) reasons for excitement increase the chances of this sort of rejection if presented the wrong way.
No, when employers talk about excitement, they’re dropping an adverb and a prepositional phrase. They want candidates who are uniquely excited about their business in particular. The more that they feel that your interest in their company is fungible with any other job, the less interested they’ll be in you.
Why? Because employers believe that uniquely-interested employees:
…are less inclined to leave for other jobs, because other jobs won’t excite them as much.
…are more likely to tolerate changes in the company’s success or direction, making the company more tolerant to disruption.
…aren’t desperate from being rejected by many other jobs, because there might be a reason they’re getting rejected everywhere else.
…will work harder, because they can’t get the same things anywhere else, and
…are smarter, because they recognize the obvious greatness of that company’s approach! (They don’t say this part out loud, but it is absolutely true, especially of many founders.)
All of these beliefs are dependent on the interest being unique. If you just want a job, or are otherwise non-uniquely excited, you might leave if a higher-paying job comes along, are more likely to object to changes in company direction, might not engage with their problem space, etc. They don’t care how excited you are in absolute terms - they care how much more excited you are about them.
I want to be very clear that I’m not making a judgement about the accuracy or ethics of employers’ approach. I’m telling you what they do want, not what they should want, which is what you should care about if getting a job is your primary goal.
But in the interest of explaining (rather than justifying) their mindset, I offer a real-world analogy that might help. The title of this post comes from the fact that, in this context and many others, hiring markets and dating "markets" have a lot in common.
Imagine going out with a prospective romantic partner and a few friends. Halfway through, you hear your date talking to a friend: “oh, I’m not that interested in them in particular. I’m just tired of being alone and wanted a boyfriend/girlfriend, and they seemed to check my boxes and have money.”
Not exactly an aphrodisiac, is it? Maybe it’s fine for a fling or a casual first date, but are you buying a house with a partner like that? Would you trust them to support you if you got sick, or not to move on if someone more exciting comes along? Probably not unless you were very desperate. That’s still true even though, in practice, a lot of relationships start with precisely that mindset!
Basically, if you would still love me if I were a worm, you:
…are less likely to leave me for someone else, because even worm-me is more desirable.
…are more likely to tolerate changes in my success or direction, making our relationship more tolerant to disruption.
…probably aren’t desperate enough to just date anyone.
…will work harder to maintain the relationship, because you can’t get the same things somewhere else.
(The missing fifth bullet point is left as an exercise for the reader.)
You can, of course, just lie, both in job hunting and in relationships. That’s common advice, admittedly not usually in so few words. But I never found that advice useful. I don’t want to lie, I just wanted to stop hanging myself with the truth - and that's what I'd like to talk about here.
Let’s look at a couple of strategies for how to avoid the lack-of-excitement rejection that you can apply honestly. With a little bit of work, you can dramatically reduce the chances of this kind of rejection, and therefore dramatically increase your odds of getting a job you want.
Plan A: get excited about the work
Employers usually don’t ask about excitement directly. At most, they might ask “why do you want to work here?” - but remember, the real question is “are you uniquely excited about this job for reasons that sound good to us?” That is a question they are evaluating throughout the interview, and one they'll never ask in so many words.
That means that you need to identify something you can project throughout the interview. Ideally, it can’t just be an answer to why-do-you-want-to-work-here - it should be embedded in the questions you ask and the way you talk about the role, too.
So plan A is simple: be excited about the work. If necessary, make yourself excited, even if you wouldn’t be by default, as a conscious step in interview prep.
Personal story: about six months before I decided to found Otherbranch, I interviewed for a role with a company called AirGarage. AirGarage’s entire business is managing parking, mostly in parking garages but also in e.g. parking near stadiums or paid parking in downtown areas.
I’m not sure I could imagine a problem that sounds less intrinsically interesting than paying for parking. It sounds like a joke job from a Mike Judge satire. But like all businesses, there are interesting problems just below the surface.
If you’re looking for a job right now, pause for a minute and treat this as an exercise. Imagine that you're trying to get a job there. What interesting or technical problems might they be working on? Can you think of something that (actually) excites you that you'd want to know more about?
Here are a few I can think of:
Parking check-in and check-out are real-time processes where delays of more than a few seconds are noticed. What effect does tolerating 1000 ms delays, but being very concerned with 10000 ms delays, have on your system architecture? (For that matter, should you tolerate 1000 ms delays?)
They work with mechanical devices (e.g. entrance gates). How do they handle hardware problems? Are there technical solutions to them? If not, are there technical solutions to making hardware failures less of a problem?
Users pay by an app. Does the app work underground, where cell signals may be spotty? Do they need their own networking? Does the app save a payment and process it later?
Parking is highly dependent on the local environment. The local stadium probably has an API of some kind, but what about if there’s a major protest occupying a few nearby blocks, or a major traffic problem keeping lots of people in the city who would normally leave? How do they ingest and use information about these things?
Can you do some sort of complicated algorithmic redirection of would-be parkers to produce a better experience for all of them? Something like “go to the next garage over and we’ll give you a discount” to avoid congestion?
Are there other things you can do with an app that you couldn’t do with a physical ticket stand? If so, what are they?
These are not boring questions (at least, not to me). They’re “meaty” technical and product challenges, and I bet they’ve had a bunch of long meetings about at least one of them. In fact, this is their CEO during the writing of this article:
Do I inherently care about parking? No, not at all. Nobody does. I don't think that guy does, and he owns a parking company! Similarly, I don't inherently care about technical hiring - I'm just embedded enough in it as a domain that I'm deeply acquainted with its challenges.
If I had ended up with that job, I’d have meaningful problems to work on. That sounds exciting, at least to me, even though parking does not. If you aren’t excited by the domain, but are excited by problem-solving, this hack can get you something to talk about for almost any job.
Plan B: choose the right excitement to emphasize
But OK, let’s say you can’t get excited for the work. In that case, you need to think about what things you can get excited about. This is decidedly plan B, but plan B is better than nothing.
Since earnestness and energy are important (and since we’re not giving advice that boils down to “just lie”), you won’t always be able to give the best on-paper answers. Instead, you should sit down and list out the things you are genuinely excited about, then select from that list. The best options are unique to that company, aligned with their sense of identity, and relate to the job itself (rather than to your own priorities).
Here’s a few common examples: the ✅ generally good, the 😐 ok-but-risky, and the ❌ bad ideas.
✅ If you’re excited about something the job posting specifically calls out as a reason to work there, that’s usually a safe bet. They wouldn’t have put it in the posting if they didn’t think it was important. There’s some danger of sounding like you’re just cynically parroting the posting, so energy - and the sense that it’s personally important to you - are especially important, but this is almost always safe.
✅ If you use their product (or are in their potential user/customer base), you should almost always talk about that. It’s unique, aligned, communicates that you’re intrinsically interested in what they do, and suggests that you either have or can quickly ramp up on subject-matter knowledge.
✅ If you’re excited about the people you’d work with, try to nail down some specific, ideally rare, traits that excite you about them. Speaking positively of the current team is almost always a plus, but it runs the risk of being too generic if it’s just “X was really nice”. The narrower the better: you really enjoyed talking with Alice about multithreading or learned something interesting from Bob about generic types. The smaller the team and the closer the relationship between the team and your interviewer, the better.
😐 If you’re excited about the mission, ask yourself whether that’s an answer they hear a lot. In industries like healthcare, where the mission is a major motivation for working in the field, mission is often a dangerous answer. They have lots of people who want the “feel-good” part of the work, but fewer who want to deal with the practical realities of running a business (especially when those realities don’t feel good at all). In general, the less generic the mission is - and the more it has to do with running a functioning business - the better.
😐 If the work is aligned with where you want your career to go, think about how it aligns with the company’s own incentives. This is a good thing to talk about if it can be read by the employer as “oh, this person really wants to work hard here for a few years” (and not otherwise). Something like “I really want to learn more about <field>” or “I want to work for a startup for a while so I can found a company later” works well, something like “I want to get a few years of experience so I can get a senior job” usually does not.
😐 Trajectory or potential success can work - if you’re business-minded enough to actually get excited about TAM. The danger here is that success is non-unique and just wanting success is generic, so ambition needs to be a huge part of the company’s cultural DNA. Be careful not to frame it as “I want a piece of the success you already have,” though. Frame it as “I want to be a part of getting to greater success.”
❌ If you’re thrilled about tech stack (say, they work with Rust and you really like it) - well, sadly, you probably shouldn’t say so. Why? Because it’s fungible: you’d like another job with the same stack just as much. This is only a good answer in cases where the stack is a core part of the team’s identity, either directly or indirectly (e.g. strong typing -> concern for reliability), and is probably something you should only raise when talking to someone technical.
❌ And finally, remote work, or pay and stability, are almost never right to focus on. They’re non-unique and they’re crystal-clear signals to the interviewer that your interest in the job is purely transactional. Yes, getting paid is the primary reason you want a job, and employers are less rational about that than they should be. But the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain unemployed. If getting paid is really the only reason you can think of to get excited…well, tough luck. Sometimes the honest answer is a bad one.
Wrap-up
To summarize:
Employers care a lot about unique, non-fungible interest in their job as opposed to others.
Treat them like an insecure date: they need to know you want them and aren’t just settling.
They’re evaluating this throughout the interview, not just when they explicitly ask why you want to work for them.
You probably have concrete reasons that you want to work there. Before the interview, list them out.
Before going into an interview, list out your reasons. Pick a couple of good ones, and actively try to talk about them during the interview.
Doing this effectively takes maybe fifteen minutes of prep, and it ~halves your chances of a nontechnical rejection. If that sounds like a pain, well: it’s way less than the amount of work you’d spend to get another good interview.
Like almost everything else in the world, the bar is really, really low. Even a little bit of prep can set you apart from a large majority of your fellow job-seekers. And if you’re headed into a job interview, it’s the best bang-for-your-buck advice I can give.
