You have a podcast, you’ve decided you want to speak with different people, and you have booked great guests. Congrats! Now you just have to do the damn thing and interview someone you don’t know.
Interviewing a podcast guest can be very rewarding. You’re talking to someone you respect about topics you care about. For the same reason, it can be intimidating. There are ways to prepare for the interview to overcome the intimidation and to ensure that the guest, you, and your audience all enjoy participating in the conversation, making it a success.
Here are items for you to consider when preparing for a podcast interview, based on what I’ve learned conducting podcast (and non-podcast) interviews over the years, and from listening to a lot of podcasts. This advice is mostly geared towards interview or conversational interviews, rather than say reporting for documentary podcasts.
Before the Interview – Setting the Table
As we discussed on our booking great guests blog, you should do your research before you reach out to someone. That research will help you get the guest on board, but it will also prepare you well for the interview itself. Once they agree to join, I’d suggest listening to or reading any interviews the guest has done, or reading any of their work. Listening is great because you can get a sense of how they handle questions and how they come off, but any of this research will give you an idea of what else they have talked about online. It’s not great to start your interview with the same question that the guest has heard and answered on three other podcasts. Focus on how you can add value to the conversation for your guest as well as your listeners.
Follow up with your guest after you confirm a time and share what your audience is like – both size, if you’d like, and especially the type of people who listen (or who you want to listen) – and what your planned conversation is meant to cover.
You may consider sending the guest a set of questions beforehand as well. The benefit is that the guest can get a full idea of what the scope of your conversation will be. Some guests also don’t want to be surprised. The downside is that they may come to the podcast a little more rehearsed than you want. It really depends on what type of conversation you are aiming to have.
One last thing for those of you recording podcasts with a co-host (or more). You can decide whether or not to collaborate on preparing the questions, but you should definitely discuss how you plan to handle the interview itself with your co-host(s). Do you each ask the questions you came up with, or is someone taking lead on a conversation? You want to have your dance steps worked out with your co-host beforehand so you don’t step on one another’s feet.
On The Call – Pre Start
The time has come and you and your guest are on the call, whether a video call on Zoom or an all audio call on Zoom or Zencastr or similar. Whether this is your first time meeting the guest or you’ve talked before, you want to achieve a few things before starting the recording.
- Check to make sure their sound and their connection is good. If there’s any issues with the connection, they may need to reconnect or experiment on their end. With the sound, just make sure it’s natural, clear, and not choppy. If they have a professional mic, great, but if not a phone or laptop mic, when paired with your full sound, will be good enough. You should suggest they wear headphones to prevent any noise canceling from blotting out sound, unless you plan to use the video and don’t want that in the visual.
- Check once more to see how much time they have to speak. Maybe something has changed since you emailed previously, and you want to make sure you tailor the conversation appropriately to their needs, time-wise.
- Ask if the guest has any questions or concerns about the topic at hand or the recording or anything else.
- Give the guest a heads up on how you expect the conversation to go (more thoughts on which in the next section). You want them to feel as comfortable as possible about the recording and everything else, so that the focus is on the conversation.
- And amidst all this, don’t rush the warm-up chitchat. It’s good to get a feel for the guest’s rhythm and to establish some rapport. If they don’t care and just want to start, or if time is short, you just start recording asap, but if not, it’s valuable to spend some time with the guest before formally starting.
I’ve found that when speaking with someone for the first time, there’s a 10-15 minute period of warming up before the conversation flows. If you can spend those 10-15 minutes before the recording starts, your listeners will get more of the good stuff.
Recording and Directing The Interview
When you’re actually speaking with the guest, you want to keep two goals in mind. One is to conduct a fun, enjoyable, informative interview. This is the most important goal. The other is to direct the recording – make sure you cover what you want to cover, that you don’t abuse your guest’s time, that the sound remains high fidelity.
I’ll start with the directing aspects. For the sound, don’t be shy to interrupt if something is going wrong. Maybe they’re fidgeting too much, maybe the connection gets bad, whatever – jump in and let them know, and ask them to repeat. Editing will allow you to clean this up after the fact, but it’s much harder to turn bad sound into good sound. (I confess – I don’t do this enough! It’s not easy to interrupt or derail a conversation. But it’s often worth it).
One thing to think about with the directing is whether to read an introduction on air. An introduction is easy to record separately, especially if you are the sole host, and this will save time for your conversation. The trade-off is it flows less organically into the episode. I have transitioned to recording intros separately, as a rule.
Keep your questions handy and an eye on the clock and you should be able to keep the conversation moving. Pay attention to a chat if there is one available in your call system, in case the guest gets in touch with you that way to not interrupt the convo.
If you do have a co-host, it’s a good idea to have a chat channel of some sort – Slack, texts, whatever – open so you can coordinate as the discussion evolves.
And with the guest, you can do some signposting along the way – ‘one more question on this topic’, ‘now I want to talk about this’, ‘we’re almost done,’ etc. – but it’s worth saying that, and then pausing and jumping into the question so that you can cut out the stage directions in the editing process if you want.
Conducting the Interview
A good podcast is basically just a conversation, and you have plenty of practice talking with people. But because there is a third party in the room, so to speak – your eventual audience, there are a few adjustments you may want to make to your normal conversational style, both trivial and meaningful.
- Don’t feel a need to affirm the guest’s comments. Hmm, mmhmm, yes, whatever it is we often say to encourage a guest can be distracting on a recording. You will be able to edit these noises out to an extent, but it’s still good practice to listen silently.
- Similarly, when going from one question to the next, we can cut out some of our normal conversational cues. “I totally agree”, “No, but that’s totally normal”, etc., things that we say in conversation but that when you are listening, get in the way of the dialogue.
- Take pauses in between when one person speaks and the other does, and take your time with your speaking. Pauses and repetitions are easy to remove in editing, and will allow you room to get whatever it is you want to say right. It will also help you avoid stepping on your guest or co-host’s lines. And in a remote recording environment, where you have less (or perhaps no) body language to go on, pausing gives space to your guest.
- At the same time, figure out what your interruption style is. There are times where an interruption is natural and helpful. I would suggest interrupting rarely – the audience is usually there to listen to your guest – but being more forceful than you otherwise might be when you do interrupt. You need your guest to stop and recognize that you want to chime in, and interruptions should come when there’s a good reason to stop and dig deeper or change directions.
- Allow the conversation to flow. You have your questions and key topics to cover, but if something interesting comes up, pursue it. It’s easy as an interviewer to get locked in on what you want to ask, but don’t forget to listen. That’s what your audience will be doing in the end.
- Make note of whether there are any points the guest makes that need to be explained further. They might use abbreviations or they might say something about themselves that you know about but that listeners might not have context for. If it makes sense in the discussion, ask the guest to explain further, but if not, you can always add in an explanation after the fact.
Wrapping up the conversation
You’ve reached the end of the conversation, and it’s time to wrap. This should be straightforward. If you want, you can ask if the guest has anything else they want to add. It’s also a good idea to give them a chance to say where they are on social media, or what listeners can do if they want to hear more from the guest.
I usually thank the guest and do a formal ‘bye’ sign-off while recording, though it’s really up to you. Sometimes a conversation can just end on whatever the last point or question is.
It’s also worth letting the guest know before you start that they can stick around to de-brief after you stop the recording if they would like. It can be nice to say ‘that call went well,’ to thank them without the recording running, etc. But, some people like to just hang up and leave and that’s fine too.
Listen back and reflect
The last thing for interviewing guests on your podcast is to listen back to your interviews closely. If you edit your own podcasts, you’ll get a chance to listen that way, but even if you don’t it’s worth reviewing. Think about what you thought went well, whether you got to the questions you wanted to get to, and whether there is room for improvement. Chances are, your podcast will not be the type of production where you can ‘re-do’ whole interviews, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from each conversation.
Podcast interviewing is the art of performative listening. Listening is one of the most important skills a person can have, and podcast interviewing forces you to do that listening on a stage, albeit not live so you have a chance to clean things up. I hope these tips will help you feel confident going into an interview and pleased with the final product.
Any questions or anything we missed? Let me know at Daniel at shortmanstudios.com or comment below. And good luck!