An Absolute Must-Have for Any Interviewer
If you’ve tried to interview someone unprepared, be prepared for the worst. I’ve made the mistake of interviewing a celebrity for a magazine in a freelance capacity. Since I don’t write quickly, I ended up losing the choice information that could’ve led to an entertaining yet accurate profile of my interviewee.
This won’t be another how to interview article; lot’s of people have provided sound advice on the topic. Instead, I’ll focus on an absolute must have for any interviewer.
Always bring a recorder of some sort to the interview. It’s that simple. Even if you’re not good at holding interviews, nothing beats having an accurate record of the discussion. You may ask challenging, friendly, or even blatantly hostile questions, but unless you possess elephant-like memory (and even then), you must have something to record everything. Some answers will never be uttered again, so you usually have one chance to save it for posterity.
Most people worth interviewing probably know how to be effective interviewees, providing great content that you can feature verbatim, or use as a foundation for a memorable article. So it’s all on you to make sure that you’re ready to conduct the interview. And the best you can do to get ready is to have a recorder at hand.
If you find yourself in an interview without any way to record it, here’s an alternative: some mid-range to high-end phones can record audio or video. The quality doesn’t have to be the best around; it only has to be good enough to be understood when you play it back later.
Image courtesy of newscom.com
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POSTED IN: Freelance Gadgets, Interviews
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