Remote Interview Tips to Keep Conversations Natural (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: You can tell in the first 30 seconds whether or not a remote interview is going to be painful. You know, the fake smile, the delay, the weird talking over each other thing, and somehow even very intelligent people just sounding completely unnatural. Which is weird because remote interviews are everywhere nowadays. You know, we have podcasts, webinars, customer interviews, YouTube shows, and yet most of them still feel like meetings, not conversations. So today we're going to break down why this happens and then practical tips that you can use to turn your interviews into genuine conversations. Let's dive in. Now the first thing to recognize when having conversations online is that they don't work in the same way that in-person conversations do. Now it's kind of obvious, but even the slightest delay in video and audio can dramatically change how people react to each other.

[00:00:52] Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like I'm just like nodding my head probably like, yeah, I probably agree with that. I don't know.

[00:00:58] Speaker 1: In real life, you have instant reactions, you have body language and interruptions, but online every single one of those changes. You talk over each other constantly and eye contact is basically broken. So you're either looking at the person or at the camera, which of course means you can't have both without a teleprompter-like system that supports it. So people oftentimes without even fully realizing it will be a lot more careful and somewhat robotic with their speech, leading to interviews feeling less engaging and interactive, even when there's a great story with interesting people. So honestly, this is where most remote interviews already fall apart completely. People prepare for them like meetings, not recordings. Now there are two key aspects that we're going to talk about with this, the technical and the creative, but we're going to focus mostly on the creative and the interactions with people, but we'll start with the technical because it's a lot easier to fix and it's where the process ultimately starts. And also audiences are way less forgiving of you than the person that you're talking to. Now when it comes to your setup, you don't need anything crazy to fix this and have something presentable. And coming from someone who loves cameras, I can say with certainty that good audio is more important than good video. You can have the highest quality camera setup in the world, but if your audio is bad, nobody's going to be able to listen. Now going into full setups is a topic for another video, comment below on specifically what you would like to see for that, but some basic tips that you can easily implement now would be stuff like using headphones, have decent mic positioning, be sure to have good proximity from you and your mic, use a quiet dampened room, basically avoid rooms with hard surfaces, keep your camera at eye level and turn off notifications. These tips alone will make a massive difference. Now on the creative side, the pre-production or pre-interview stage is critical. Whenever possible, schedule some time either right before the interview or on a different day where you can have a conversation with the person and that way you can get to know them a little bit better and understand their story better. And a quick tip, this might be a good time to do a test recording in case you get the most natural and key aspects of the interview that you might be able to use later. But while you're in this pre-interview, this is also a good time to tell people what the conversation is going to feel like, how long it's expected to take, ensuring them that their mistakes don't matter because it's all going to be edited anyways, and then letting them know the game plan for what the conversations will be about, but that you also leave room for flexibility. These expectations can help set the interviewee's mind at ease and remove the tension so that you can both focus on having a genuine conversation and chat. There are certain interview questions that instantly kill momentum. Tell me about yourself is definitely one of them. People hear that question and immediately switch into LinkedIn mode. You can literally hear it happen. Oftentimes you get the best interviews when you start off with the easy passion topics, meaning discussing the topics the interviewee wants to touch on the most, because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what order you record things in or ask the questions in, it's all going to be edited anyways. And so this is why I usually suggest starting your recording earlier as well, sometimes without even telling the person, because then you can have that dialogue and get the most crucial content you need. And the interviewee is already in a much more comfortable and confident position. And I've even recorded the introduction as the last thing to record for that purpose. Now, in terms of types of questions to ask, one type to avoid, if possible, are yes or no questions. And the reason being is because they typically limit the scope of the answer. And it's not that you can't ever ask them, but they're usually not the best way to get good sound bites or conversation pieces. For example, if they just answer with yes, it doesn't really push the story forward, but you can use them in ways to get more information that you can then use in a follow-up question. So they're not always bad, but good questions to ask usually involve something more opinionated, such as what's something your industry gets completely wrong, or what's a trend that people pretend to like but secretly hate, or even something like what's a belief you had five years ago that you would argue against now. Those questions create real responses. And the second someone stops sounding rehearsed or they just give a flat yes or no, then the interview gets a lot better. This one took me a while to learn, especially when I was doing on-the-fly interviews, which contain zero prep because you're literally talking to somebody you've never talked to before. And that's when you move on to the next question too quickly. And this is especially problematic when your interviewee says something genuinely interesting, but you never follow up on it. Now, admittedly, this is a skill that does take a decent amount of repetition to learn, but understanding it helps you practice it a lot better. So for example, it's always important to have an outline of your questions so you have a plan for the conversation, but this is a part of leaving flexibility that I mentioned earlier. So while I'm listening to a person speak, I'm always listening for a question that I could potentially follow up on. So let's take a hypothetical example here. Let's say you're interviewing a CEO, and he or she is answering a question about how the company got to where it is today and the steps they took to get there. And your next question has something to do with future growth. So let's say you're interviewing However, the interviewee says something about a challenge where the company nearly completely failed, something you didn't even know about or hear about in a pre-interview, but they didn't really elaborate on it. So this is a good chance to start asking questions like, what exactly happened and how did it start? And you can naturally start adapting questions like, what did you learn or how did you grow from it? Or how did that change how you view yourself and the company? Then once you feel like you got all the information you can out of that extra point, then you can craft that into the next planned segment or even skip it if you feel like it's not really relevant anymore. Again, these are skill sets that do take a while to develop, but once you start learning how to hear people's stories, they will come more naturally. That's where people stop performing and start thinking out loud. And that's the stuff that audiences actually remember. So now that we know a little bit more about how to conduct interviews, there's another aspect to this that can be subtle but can make all the difference. And that's your energy. And I don't mean in a way where you have to be charismatic and high energy all the time, classic YouTube energy. The kind of energy I'm actually talking about is being engaged. And again, this is a skill set that gets better with repetition, the more you feel out how it works. And it involves body language like smiling, nodding and eye contact. But what really helps us develop more naturally is always being curious about the person that you're talking to. Because your goal at the end of the day is to learn about them and soak up all the knowledge you can. So when you do this, not only are you creating the engagement, but you're also doing the other half, which is setting the tone. Part of what makes a great interviewer is knowing where the emotion of the interview is going and how to feed off of it and guide it. Because guests mirror energy. So when you show how much you care and your authenticity, they will naturally feed off of you and be more open, which always makes for a better story. This is why the inauthentic YouTube energy can be harder to watch or engage with, as well as the opposite extreme of being mundane or disinterested and only focusing on just getting through the questions. Again, we're not talking about being loud and fast, but authentic and curious. So hopefully we've given you some good tips and ways to think about interviewing. But there's one more thing we need to mention so that it's not something you have to think about during the interview, and that's the recording quality. Now, actually recording these sessions are where most people think remote interview quality is just limited by Internet connection. But the bigger issue is this. A lot of platforms are recording just the call itself, meaning you're just getting the compressed audio, compressed video, glitches, freezes and Internet artifacts. And that's why local recording has completely changed remote production. Instead of saving the live stream quality, platforms like Riverside record each person locally on their own device. So even if the call glitches for a second, the actual recording stays clean, which is why remote podcasts and interviews suddenly started looking and sounding a lot better over the last few years. The best remote interviews don't feel remote. They feel like you accidentally joined a really good conversation. And honestly, when you look back at some of the best interviews that you've ever watched or that you remember, it was never really about how it looked or what the setup was, but it was the story behind it that you truly engaged with. Having better prep, better pacing, better engagement and recording the right way are all just necessary steps to telling the best story possible. So if you're recording remote interviews, podcasts or webinars pretty regularly, check out Riverside. There's a thumb down below that people like to call the like button. That would be cool to press. And then the subscribe button is even cooler so that you can be notified when we post more practical content creation tips. Thank you so much for watching, and we can't wait to see what you create.