Just finished a book called The Oligarch's Daughter by Joseph Finder.
Without getting too deep into it — there's a Russian billionaire named Arkady. Combined Manhattan townhouses. Security teams. Hedge fund. The kind of rich where you stop counting because the number doesn't matter anymore.
By the end of the book, he's living on a US military base.
No empire. No townhouses. No security detail. Just a guy on a cot, protected by the same government he'd been playing chess with for decades.
All that power. All those credentials. All that authority.
Gone.
Just a man in a room.
And here's where my brain went:
That interviewer sitting across from you. The one behind the desk. The title on the door. The laptop open. The serious look on their face.
You're treating them like Arkady in the Manhattan townhouse.
They're probably closer to Arkady on the cot.
I run a staffing agency. I've been on the other side of the table for over 10,000 interviews. And I can tell you something that might make you uncomfortable:
About 90% of the interviewers you'll face have no idea what they're doing.
They Googled "best interview questions" twenty minutes before you walked in. They're running a checklist someone in HR handed them. They're asking "what's your greatest weakness?" because it was on the list, not because they know what to do with your answer.
They're not experts. They're people with a title and a desk.
Same as the oligarch was just a man with a townhouse and a hedge fund.
And here's the kicker:
Once you realize this, everything changes. The power dynamic you've been terrified of your whole career — the one where they hold all the cards and you sit there fidgeting — it's not real.
It never was.
The best candidates I've ever watched don't perform FOR the interviewer. They carry them. They take a lazy checklist question and turn it into an actual conversation. They do the work of making the interview interesting because the person across the table can't.
That's lemonade from lemons. And it's one of the most important chapters in my book 10,000 Interviews — the one most people don't see coming.
https://unfaircareers.com/10000-interviews/
Kyle Mau