Stop Auditioning

You walked out of an interview and felt good. You were honest. You were yourself. And then you got the rejection email that said you were "too passionate."

That is not feedback. That is information. And there is a difference.

In this episode, Sarah shares the interview that broke her open: a role she wanted badly, a hiring manager who seemed aligned, and a rejection that came with a verdict she didn't ask for. She was too passionate. Too much. Not the right fit. For years she believed that meant she needed to become someone else. She was wrong.

What she actually needed was to stop auditioning and start investigating.

If you have been treating every interview like a courtroom where you are waiting for a verdict, this episode is about rewiring that completely. Strategic interviewing is not performing. It is translating your value into language the room can actually receive. That is a skill. Nobody taught it to you. And you are not broken for not having it yet.

Sarah walks through the mindset shift from audition to investigation, the AB testing framework she used when she was in an active job search, the three anchor questions that tell you whether a rejection is feedback about you or information about them, and why power dynamics in your next job start at the first interview, not at the offer stage.

If you are in a survival job right now, this episode does not skip past you. There is a section specifically for you.

Three practical shifts to try this week:

• Before your next interview, write down three things you genuinely need to find out about whether this is a room worth walking into
• After your next interview, run three questions before you do anything else: Was I respectful? Was I curious? Was I kind?
• Audit one recent conversation where you were in audition mode instead of investigation mode, and notice what you gave up

Next week, Episode 6 goes deeper into reading the room once you are in it: how to assess authority in real time, how to use the room colors framework in a live interview, and a negotiation story where Sarah had every reason to accept less. She didn't.

You are not there to be chosen. You are there to choose.

Follow The Career Strategist wherever you listen. If someone in your life is in the middle of a job search and treating every rejection like a verdict about who they are, send them this episode.

Transcript

The Dream Role

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The role was in a company related to learning and development. It was leadership development, really. And I remember reading the job description and thinking, this is it. This is the one. Not just because I was qualified, not just because the hiring manager happened to be someone I'd connected with in a Slack community, someone I'd had a real conversation with before any of this started, but because the work itself felt like an extension of who I already was. I want you to understand where I was at this point. I'd been searching for over a year. The market was brutal, like it still is. This was about three and a half years ago. And it was not kind to me, like I'm sure many of you have felt as you've navigated the job market. And it's not because we're not good enough. For me, I know that my struggles had a lot to do with the fact that I hadn't yet figured out how to package what I knew. I was overqualified for the role on paper, but I needed it. I needed something to work. So I walked into that interview metaphorically, it was a video call. And I wasn't stressed. That should have been my first clue. The problem wasn't that I was nervous. The problem was that I wasn't. Because I had just reached a breaking point at my current company. Something had shifted. They had been difficult for a long time and I had absorbed it. I was good at that. But recently it had started affecting my team, the people I'd fought for, the people I woke up every morning trying to protect. And I could not get them the salary increases they deserved. No matter how I framed it, no matter who I went to, it kept getting blocked. No one would really explain why. No one would even let me see my own budget. So I walked into that interview completely consumed by one thought. I need to find a place that lets me treat my team the way that they deserve. And the hiring manager started asking me questions, normal interview questions, and I answered every single one of them by looping back to leadership, to employee experience, to my values that I hadn't defined yet. These are all things that I cared deeply about, but I had not learned how to name them. I was on a roll. I was pouring everything I had into his mental inbox because I didn't know what would matter. So I made sure he had all of it. Every piece of context, every conviction, every feeling I'd been swallowing for months. I wasn't lying. I wasn't performing. I was being completely unfiltered and myself. I didn't make it to the next round. I reached out after, and he was gracious about it. He told me he could tell I was very passionate, but that I wasn't the right fit. That was the first time I heard passion used as a bad thing. And this is episode five of the Career Strategist. The message sat with me for a long time. First, I was angry. Passion. That's a bad thing? I thought passion was the whole point. I thought people wanted to hire someone who actually cared. I had watched colleagues coast through careers on charm and indifference. I was out here bleeding on the table, and somehow passion was the problem? Then I started noticing a pattern. I was making it to the final rounds consistently, or at least pretty darn close to it. I was doing well enough to get close, and then nothing. Same result. And I started to wonder if the pattern was me. Not who I was, but how I was showing up in those rooms. And then I got angry at myself, which is a different kind of angry. It's a quieter angry. But here is what I want you to hear, because I needed someone to say this to me back then. You were not wrong for being yourself. You were unpackaged. There is a difference, a profound one. And most people, especially people who have done real work on themselves, people who have built real conviction about what they stand for, most people collapse that distinction. They get rejected and they assume they need to become someone else. They start performing. They start shrinking. They take all the messy, alive, hard-won parts of themselves and they compress them into something they think the room wants to see. And that is exactly backwards. Strategic interviewing is not performing. It's not a costume. It's not making yourself palatable. It is translating your value into language the room can actually receive. The ideas are yours. The values are yours. The track record, the instincts, the hard-earned clarity, all of it is yours. What changes is the packaging. And the packaging is not a compromise. It's a skill. One that nobody taught you. And one that I had to learn the long, painful way. Here's the mindset shift that changed so much for me. I stopped auditioning and I started investigating. When you're auditioning, the interview is a performance. You're trying to land the part. You are managing how you come across, you are monitoring their face for signs of approval and calibrating in real time. You arrive wanting to be chosen. And that wanting, it leaks. They can feel it. You can feel it too. You know the difference between a conversation and an audition. They do too. When you're investigating, the interview is a data collection exercise. You are there to understand whether this role, this manager, this company, this room, whether any of it actually fits what you've been building. You are assessing the opportunity as much as they are assessing you. You come in with questions that matter to you, not just questions that make you look interested. This is not a subtle difference. It rewires the entire dynamic. And here's what I discovered when I made this shift. When you walk in as someone investigating rather than auditioning, you stop giving away power at the door. Think back to what we talked about in episode two, how power dynamics get established early and hold that first conversation with a potential employer is when the dynamic gets set. If you walk in performing, if you're grateful and eager and trying to earn that seat, you have already taught them how to manage you. They will manage you as someone who should stay grateful, someone who stretches to fit the role, instead of someone who redefines it. If you walk in investigating, curious, clear, genuinely evaluating, the dynamic is different from the first exchange. You are a peer in the conversation. You are someone they have to impress too. That's a completely different relationship to step into on day one. I want to tell you what happened when I actually started doing this. After that interview, after that passion comment, after all that anger, I did something that I'd never done before. I started treating every interview as an A-B test. I've been doing the foundation work, the work from the first three episodes. I was starting to have language for what I valued, even if I hadn't yet achieved the precision that I have now. I understood the power dynamics I'd been moving through. I was starting to recognize the flattening that had been happening to me for years, but I still had a job market problem. I still needed to figure out how to translate what I knew into something a room could receive. So I started paying attention differently. I went into interviews and I noticed what landed. Where did the energy shift? When I described something, did the interviewer lean in or check their notes? When I asked a question, did it open the conversation or did it close it? I was tracking what I said, how I said it, and what happened after I said it. I was treating the interview as a lab, not a courtroom. And this did something that I wasn't expecting. It took the edge off the stakes. Because when you're running an experiment, failure is just data. If I got rejected, I didn't walk away thinking I wasn't enough. I walked away thinking, what did I test? What did I learn? What would I try differently? And the more I showed up this way, the more deliberate, the more curious, the more genuinely investigative I got, something started changing. I started progressing. I started getting callbacks where I'd been getting silence. And the people I interviewed with started treating me differently. More like a colleague. More like someone they had to convince. When I was unapologetic, strategic, and clear about what I was there to understand, they spoke to me like the authority that I already was. The interview hadn't changed. The room hadn't changed. But what I was doing in it had. Now let me give you something practical to hold on to. After every interview, I run three questions. Just three. You may have heard me say these before. Was I respectful? Was I curious? Was I kind? If the answer to all three is yes, their reaction is information about them. Not feedback about me. I want you to sit with that for a second. Because I know what you do after a rejection. I know because I did it too. You replay every answer. You find the moment it went wrong. You wonder what you should have said instead. You make their opinion of you evidence of something wrong with you. And sometimes that instinct is useful. Sometimes there really is something to adjust. The A B testing is real. You should be learning and iterating. But there is a difference between refinement and self-erasure. There's a difference between I should have answered that differently, and I should be a different person. The three questions are your anger. They're my anger. They give me a place to stand after that rejection would come. If you were respectful, you treated the interviewer in the process with care. If you were curious, you came in genuinely wanting to understand them, not just wanting to perform. And if you were kind to them and to yourself and to the process, then you're in a good spot. Because if all three of those are true, then the rejection tells you something about the fit, about timing, about what they were looking for versus what you're building towards. It does not tell you that you were wrong for showing up as yourself. This is the reframe that took me the longest to actually internalize, because I'd spent so many years treating other people's assessments of me as the most reliable data that I had. That's what flattening does. It trains you to outsource your own judgment. The three questions, that anchor, that's how you take it back. I want to pause and talk about the power layer here. Because this is not just a mindset issue. That's a structure issue. When you position yourself as someone grateful for the opportunity, when you are performing, when you are auditioning, you are handing them leverage before the negotiation even starts. And the negotiation starts at that first interview. People think salary negotiation happens when the offer comes, but it doesn't. It starts the moment you signal what kind of player you are. If you've spent three rounds making yourself easy, pliable, eager, you've already shaped the offer that you're going to get. You've already told them how much you need this. And people in hiring positions are not immune to that information. They use it. When I started interviewing as an investigator, I wasn't negotiating from external leverage. I still had limited options. The job market was still very hard. I wasn't sitting on competing offers, but I was negotiating from internal clarity. I knew what I was looking for. I knew what I wouldn't compromise on. I knew what questions needed answers before I would say yes to anything. And that clarity, that internal leverage, changed the dynamic even when my external options had not changed. The room reads that. It only becomes a trap if you let it redefine you. The thing I want you to hold on to if you're working in a job that does not fit, that's not where you're headed, that you are doing because you need to pay your bills and keep the lights on, you are not stuck there. You are there temporarily by your own decision, not theirs. That framing matters because the moment you start thinking of it as something that happened to you, you stop interviewing, you stop looking. You tell yourself this is just how it is for now, and for now stretches into three years. Keep interviewing. Even if you just landed that survival job, keep interviewing. Keep running the experiments. You don't owe any company your permanence, especially not one that was never your destination. And please, do not feel guilty for leaving when the right thing comes along. The guilt is a trap too. You fulfilled the agreement. The guilt is just what happens when you've spent too long treating their comfort as your responsibility. Alright, here are three practices for this week. Three shifts that you can start doing tomorrow. Shift one. Before your next interview, or if you don't have one scheduled before your next significant professional conversation, write down three things you are genuinely trying to find out. Not questions that make you look smarter, not things that signal enthusiasm, three things you actually need to know to understand whether this is a room worth walking into. If you can't come up with three, and truly, I mean real ones, not performative ones, that's important information. It might mean that you haven't yet done enough of the values work from episode three to know what you're optimizing for. Go back to that. Keep thinking about that. The investigating posture requires knowing what you're investigating for. Even if you're just starting at the very beginning of this journey, take that information, lean into that information. Even if your values right now sound like those words that you saw in the break room of a company and no one ever talked about it again because they were covered in so much dust you could barely read it. Who cares? That's a start of something. Lean into that something. After your next interview or after your next big professional conversation, run those anchor questions before you do anything else. Before you text anyone, before you replay it in your head, before you go to Chat GPT and brain dump everything. Was I respectful? Was I curious? Was I kind? Write down the answer to each one and what the evidence is. You're building a new habit of evaluating yourself by your own standards first, not theirs. Shift number three. Audit one conversation you've had in the last month where you were in an audition mindset rather than an investigation mindset. And it doesn't necessarily have to be an interview. It could be a meeting with leadership, conversation with a potential client, any situation where you were performing instead of evaluating. What were you afraid of? What were you trying to earn? What would you have done differently if you'd walked in as someone investigating rather than someone auditioning? This one is harder than it sounds. But that's the point. The audition reflex is deeply wired. I mean, especially for people in the customer experience industry. To raise our hands if we were theater kids, we know an audition very, very well. You've been trained since school, not even school plays, just in general at school, that the right answer earns the grade. And the grade is how they decide what you're worth. Noticing when you're still running that program is the first step to running a different one. Here's what I want to leave you with today. The interview I told you about at the top of the episode, the one where the hiring manager said that I was too passionate, I used to be embarrassed by that story. I thought it was evidence of a flaw that I needed to fix. Now, I look back at that version of myself and I am genuinely proud of her. She had stopped playing a role. She was done with the cardigan, done with making herself small, done with flattening herself into something easier to approve of. She walked into that interview as a full, unedited person for the first time in a very long time. And yes, she word-vomited. She is very good at word-vomiting. Yes, she overwhelmed him with everything she cared about because she didn't yet have the language to distill it. Yes, she failed to read what he actually needed from the conversation. But she was not wrong for who she was. She was just not yet packaged. The packaging came. It came through the work from episodes one through four. The language, the frameworks, the ability to name what I stand for in a sentence instead of a thesis. And I do still fail at that sometimes. Don't think for a second that I don't. But it came through treating interviews as experiments instead of verdicts. It came through learning to ask different questions and actually listen to the answers. And it came through understanding something I want you to carry into every room you walk into from here. You are not there to be chosen. You are there to choose and to let them make their case. They have to earn your yes too. Next week. We're going deeper into that room. Now that you've stopped auditioning, we're going to talk about what you actually do once you're in there. How to test whether the authority in the room is real or just a title. How to read the environment in real time, how to gather the intelligence you need to make a clear eyed decision. And I'm going to tell you a story of a negotiation where I had every reason to accept less. I didn't. And you'll see what happened instead. That's episode six. And after today, after this week of working through those three shifts, those three practices, you will be ready for it. I'm Sarah Camonetti. This is the Career Strategist. You are not too much. You never were. Thank you for listening. I'm so happy that you're here. Please follow wherever you get your podcasts. And if someone in your life needs to hear this, you probably already know who they are. Send it to them. Can't wait to see you next week.