5 Tips to Succeed at Panel Interviews for CTOs

Captured from 100s of Successful/Not So Successful Panel Sessions

I’m going to give you my full recipe for acing your next panel interview because they can be particularly tough for even the most seasoned technology execs.

These are 5 of the most important factors in my view, and if you get them right it will let you build a solid foundation for a successful panel session.

Let’s get right into it.

Practice the Pressure Test

One the key reasons companies run a panel interview is to pressure-test you. How will you hold up in front of a group of stakeholders peppering you with questions? Companies might not explicitly state this as part of the evaluation criteria, but it’s always there in the back of their minds. They want to know they have a tech exec who can handle themselves in difficult and unfair situations.

In fact, “unfair” is a key part of the test. Don’t go in assuming that a panel is an even playing field meant for you to succeed. The process of hiring a senior tech executive is meant to weed people out, NOT make things easy for them.

The best way to prepare for the pressure of a panel is to run your own MOCK panel session. Have 2 or 3 non-tech people (hat you trust get on a Zoom call and ask you difficult tech & non-tech questions. You should give them the questions in advance. The point here is not to test your actual knowledge, but your ability to smoothly handle each question and transition from one interviewr to the next with ease.

The difficult part of a panel is making your audience feel good. Meaning, you not only have to answer their questions well, but you have to make the interviewers feel important & heard so they leave with a good impression of you. This isn’t easy. It requires a great deal of diplomacy & tact. And this is where tech execs can really lose out because that’s not always natural to us.

So, what do you do if you don’t have diplomacy & tact? The fastest way out of this hole is to memorize competency triggers (phrases) that can help you respond to questions & smoothly jump from one to another. For example: “That’s a great question Tom and I think it connects with one of Nancy’s comments earlier.”

If you’re a tech leader who needs help with managing conversations in large groups then you need at least 10 to 15 of these comptency triggers memorized & in your back pocket.

Know the Personalities in the Room

You have to do your research on the interviewers to such a degree that they feel like old colleagues — or at least as close to that as possible. Far too many technology leaders jump into a panel without any background or context on the people in the room. This is a critical error to avoid because it makes you 3x to 5x less effective in having conversation. Imagine having Thanksgiving dinner with 5 close friends vs. a group of strangers — what would be easier?

LinkedIn is your ally & here’s what you need to find out on each person, at least at a basic level:

• Their name and how its pronounced

• What their role is

• How long have they’ve been with the company

• Their interests (through reading their posts)

• Where they live (regional/cultural differences matter)

• What they did before joining the company

You can make a very good guess about what questions each interviewer is going to ask by knowing this information. For example, the head of sales might focus on topics like “How can you contribute to the growth of this company?” Knowing the presonalities also tells you a lot about how to present to the group. If it’s all tech people obviously that’s a very different presentation than if its all business stakeholders.

Panel interviews are about how you manage a group of people, so I can’t overstate how important it is to understand the cultural background of each person. You don’t want to talk like a New Yorker to someone in Alabama. It won’t help your cause. You want to tailor your communication.

Get to the Point

In a panel interview, technology leaders with long, boring, overly technical presentations generally don’t get a positive reception. A lot of the interviewers will be business stakeholders with limited time and they really don’t care about the technical details or ANY details for that matter that don’t get to the point quickly. This issue is probably one of the biggest challenges for technology leaders during a panel.

You MUST find a sweet spot for your presentation that is at least 20%, if not 50% less content than you are typically used to presenting. You might be worried about doing this at first because you need to say so many things. But trust me on this — whatever the assignment or topic is can be said in fewer words than you think. And this WILL make you look better than the other candidates.

When you say fewer words you get the following benefits:

• There are fewer places you can make mistakes

• You leave room for actual conversation (i.e. talking WITH people, not AT them)

• The words you DO say have more weight

Technology leaders should also be warned to limit the technical jargon. You’re applying for a leadership position not for an individual developer role.

Timing is an interesting thing in panel interviews. Go too long and interviewers tune you out. Keep it too short and you don’t deliver on the assignment. You really have to develop the shortest presentation possible that still gets your main points across. You should practice beforehand & make sure your test audience understands the takeaways you intend in a short period of time.

In general, panel interviewers LOVE when you give them time back in their day as busy execs. But allow the conversation & their quetions to flow naturally. If time extends its on them and they’ll happily do it if the back and forth is interesting & useful.

Present a Set of Thoughtful Options

You’re most likely not going to know a lot about the company when you do a panel. Maybe in the interviews preceeding and your research you’ll learn something. But not enough to do a world-class presentation like you’re typically used to. And that’s part of the point of a panel interview — to show people how you think when you don’t have enough information/data.

The right approach to a panel presentation when you don’t have a lot of data is to bring options to the table & present them in a thoughtful way. For example, lets say the assignment is “How would you handle our cloud migration?” Don’t say “the answer is AWS.” Instead, provide different options and the pro’s & con’s of various paths to get there.

Showing that you have the ability to consider many possibilities and their impact on the business is what the panel interviewers are looking for. This is not the time to hunker down and go with just 1 approach that you’re married to. This is the time to show the interviewers that like any good executive you’re able to navigate a complex set of variables.

A word of warning: don’t go too far with options. You don’t want to present 40 potential answers, just 2 or 3 is fine. Remember, you still have to get to the point quickly.

Don’t Push Back

During panel interviews you don’t want to give a lot of pushback. A lot of very smart technology leaders get this wrong. Panel interviews are not about being right! They are about communicating high value ideas to an audience without being condescending.

For technology leaders this issue can be difficult to address. In most rooms we’re used to being the top experts where we’re conditioned to being right. In panel interviews however, where there are business stakeholders & a job involved, it’s making OTHER people feel right.

The answer lies in impulse control. In the panel, you’re not the CTO (yet) of the company. Think of yourself more as an “advisor” suggesting strategies, ideas and options for the interviewers to consider. With this framing there is no reason you HAVE to be “right” — its really up to the “client.”

By the end of the panel you want the interviewers leaving feeling uplifted & excited about your candidacy. You should aim for a 100% positive conversation. Don’t even try and sneak in negative points or too much contrarian viewpoints. This is a job interview and you want to leave the best impression possible by making people feel good.