I Am Terrible at Job Interviews. But I Am Getting Better.

I am very good at marketing. I am not naturally good at interviewing for marketing jobs.

These are two entirely different skills, which feels a little unfair.

In my career, I have built marketing strategies, launched products, managed budgets, repositioned companies, improved acquisition, reduced costs, done massive marketing events, and helped businesses figure out what they were really selling. Put me in a working session with a real business problem, and I know what to do.

Ask me to summarize decades of experience in a polished two-minute answer while strangers evaluate me, and apparently, we have discovered my weakness.

A long career gives you more stories to tell, but it does not necessarily make it easier to tell the right one at the right moment. You can know that you have done the work and still struggle to package it into a concise interview answer.

I have been using resources, AI, and practice to get better. These three things help me most.

1. Create Your Own Elevator Pitch

"Tell me about yourself" sounds casual. It is not.

It is an invitation to position yourself, and it is surprisingly easy to answer badly. I have made the mistake of walking someone chronologically through my career, as if the interviewer requested the audiobook version of my résumé.

Your elevator pitch should not include everything. It should explain the thread connecting your experience and why that thread matters for this particular role.

Mine centers on building demand, clarifying what a company is selling, connecting marketing to measurable growth, and staying close enough to execution to make sure the strategy works.

The exact wording may change based on the opportunity, but the central story should not. Writing it down and practicing it has helped me stop searching for the beginning of my answer five minutes in and feeling awkward AF.

2. Use AI to Research the Business, Then Do Your Own Thinking

AI is excellent for interview prep.

It can summarize the company, explain the market, identify competitors, analyze the job description, and suggest questions you may be asked. It can also help you understand an unfamiliar product or industry much faster than starting from scratch.

But do not stop there.

Read the company's website yourself. Look at its latest announcements, leadership commentary, customer stories, product launches, and social content. Pay attention to how the company describes its priorities and whether that matches what it is doing.

Then form an opinion.

What appears to be the company's biggest marketing opportunity? Where is the positioning unclear? What would you want to understand before developing a plan? What seems to be working?

You do not need to walk into the interview and announce everything the company is doing wrong. Way to be NOT charming. But you should be able to discuss the business as someone who has thought about it, not simply researched it.

AI can help gather the information. Your point of view is what makes the preparation valuable.

3. Build Examples From the Job Description

Experienced candidates often have too many examples, not too few.

Before an interview, I now go through the job description and identify the specific capabilities the company appears to value most. Then I match each one to a relevant example from my career.

If the role requires demand generation, I prepare a story about building or improving a demand engine. If it mentions positioning, I choose an example of clarifying or changing what a company took to market. If the company needs someone who can work across sales, product, and leadership, I prepare a story that shows how I have done that.

For each example, I want to explain the problem, what I did, why I made those choices, and the results.

This prevents me from giving a perfectly good answer that has very little to do with the question.

It also helps me translate a long career into relevant evidence.

Practice Is Not Pretending

I used to worry that rehearsing would make me sound rehearsed. Not preparing made me sound more authentic. It took me too long to get there.

Practice is not about memorizing a script or becoming someone else. It is about making it easier to communicate what you know.

I may never love interviewing. Correction. I will never love interviewing. I would still prefer that someone hand me a marketing problem and let me show them how I think.

Until that becomes the standard hiring process, I will keep practicing.