Interviewing Is A Conversation and a Skill

Interviews Aren’t Tests—They’re Conversations in a Foreign Language

I’ve been doing mock interviews for veterans through Candorful for a few years now, and I recently got a message from someone I coached that’s been sitting with me. It reminded me just how confusing the whole process can be when you’re transitioning out of the military. It often astounds me how quickly we forget that “wide-eyed stupid” feeling we live through in the first several months to year after we get out. The rose-colored glasses come off fast.

He said that what made the biggest difference wasn’t just the advice or the corrections. It was the way I prepared, listened, and took the time to help him see how his story sounded from the other side of the table.

And it made me realize something that ties directly into what I wrote about in my last post on Veteran Identity Transition. Interviews don’t feel strange to us because we’re underprepared. They feel strange because they ask us to operate in an entirely different world. One with different rules, different expectations, and a different language. Most of us have no idea we’re even code-switching.

The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves

Veterans love numbers. Myself included.

$247 million in equipment.
6,000 users.
84 missions.

I used to rattle those off like they were supposed to mean something.

Inside the military, they do mean something. Those numbers are shorthand for complexity, responsibility, operational scale. But when we bring them into interviews without context, they land flat. Or worse, they sound like fluff. On the other side of the table, they often feel so big that they stop being relatable. The weight of what they imply doesn’t carry across unless we explain why they mattered.

It’s like someone asking how your morning went, and you respond with:
"I ate 576 Frosted Flakes in 46 bites, chewing each one 7 times."

Cool. I guess… you psychopath. But what does that actually mean?

The real answer, the one that actually paints a picture, is:
"I overslept and had to scarf down breakfast in 4 minutes, so I’m a little frazzled."

Still quantified. But now it's human. Now there’s context.

Interviews Feel Like Tests. But They Aren’t.

Another pattern I see all the time: veterans approach interviews like we’re trying to pass a test.

We’re used to “tasks, conditions, standards.” We think there’s a best answer. A right way. A format that unlocks success. We look for universal maxims we can fall back on, a distinctly right answer that will definitively land us the job.

But interviews aren’t like that. There’s no answer key. No rubric. Just a person, trying to figure out if they trust your story and believe you’ll bring value to their team.

Now, let me be clear, they are most definitely evaluating you against the job description. But it’s not like a promotion board where the lack of a military school or certain billet will disqualify you. Job titles aren’t uniform across industries, companies, economic sectors, or any other bucket. So everything you talk about is based on your ability to contextualize your lived experience to the job description.

And that’s where a lot of us get tripped up. Not because we’re inexperienced, but because we’re wired to look for clarity in a space that runs on ambiguity.

The Problem With “Translating” Your Experience

You hear it all the time: “You just need to translate your military experience.”

I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s like being told you just need to do better, or a coach telling you that you just need to score more points next time to win the game. Cool. Killer drop-in.

“Translate” implies your original experience doesn’t carry over. That it has to be rewritten in a new language to be valid. But the truth is, most of what we’ve done does carry over. Leadership. Judgment. Risk management. Chaos-handling. Operational thinking. All of that applies.

The issue isn’t that our experience doesn’t belong. The issue is that we don’t always know which pieces to share or how to tell the story behind them in a way that makes sense to someone who hasn’t lived in our world.

And unless you speak both languages fluently, the language of military operations and the language of civilian business, trying to "translate" usually turns into something that feels off. Like running your resume through Google Translate circa 2006. Technically fine. But clunky. Flat. Emotionally disconnected.

You end up saying as many buzzwords as you can, as if saying the word “stakeholder” three times per answer will communicate your worth. Instead of explaining who those stakeholders are, which ones hated each other, and how you helped them navigate the challenges of a large project.

Telling Your Story Isn’t About Playing a Role

When someone says they struggle in interviews, it’s rarely because they’re underqualified. It’s almost always because they’re not used to telling their story.

We’re trained to do the work, not narrate it. But interviews aren’t about reliving your duty description. They’re about showing the judgment, creativity, and problem-solving that sat behind those duties.

That doesn’t mean you need to script some perfect corporate-friendly version of yourself. In fact, that usually backfires. What you need is a frame. A way to tell the truth of your experience in a way that lands with people who don’t share your frame of reference.

Spoiler alert: your answer should probably land somewhere between:

“So, no shit, there I was, calling indirect into a terrorist village because we suspected they had a bomb maker and my commander wanted that dude vaporized.”

and

“I was in charge of a project, assigned by the director of operations, to improve the delivery speed of our orders by 20 percent and I did that by working with stakeholders to create a timeline and make sure we met our key deliverables.”

The first option? Honestly, I’d love to hear it an interview, but it doesn’t mean you know how to budget. The second option? I hear it all the time, and I still don’t quite know what exactly the people who say it have done to get a project finished on time. Landing in the middle means you talk about real stuff, not gory stuff, and you do it in plain English (or whatever language you speak in that interview).

That takes practice, repetitions, and sometimes a few bad interviews before you realize what’s clicking and what isn’t. It takes intellectual honesty and a willingness to engage in that split between who you have been as a Service Member and who you are now as a veteran.

Final Thought: They’re Hiring the Story, Not the Numbers

No one hires the raw numbers on your resume. They hire the story behind those numbers. They hire how you made things happen, what judgment you showed, how you handled the hard stuff. They hire you for your ability to communicate the context of the content of your resume.

So don’t think of the interview as a test. Think of it as a conversation across cultures. Your job isn’t to ace the test. It’s to help the other person understand the value of what you’ve done by giving them enough context to see the picture clearly.

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being understood.

If I told you that you needed to go talk about yourself based on a document you spent hours writing, you should feel pretty confident that you’re the expert in that document and conversation.

Interviews are no different.