The resume tells you what the candidate has done. The first ten minutes tell you who’s actually sitting in front of you. Most principals spend that window asking instead of listening — and miss the whole interview.
In my last post, I made the case that most AEC firms run senior interviews as a one-way test when the candidate is making a two-way decision. That post was about approach — how you set up the conversation before it starts.
This one is about what you do once you’re in the room. Specifically, the first ten minutes — because they tell you almost everything, and almost nobody pays attention to them.
The first ten minutes of an interview aren’t filler. They’re the most diagnostic part of the conversation, before the candidate has settled into rehearsed answers and before you’ve asked the questions you came prepared to ask. What gets said in that window — and how — tells you more about a senior architect, engineer, or estimator than the rest of the hour combined.
Most principals spend it talking. The strong ones spend it listening.
What you’re actually listening for
The point isn’t to grade them on small talk. It’s to pick up the signals that the rest of the interview either confirms or doesn’t. There are a few signals worth tuning your ear to, and they show up early because the candidate hasn’t shifted into interview mode yet.
How they describe their current situation.
This is the single most diagnostic thing in the first ten minutes, and it’s almost always the first thing you’ll hear, because it’s how a senior candidate opens. Some version of “tell me about where you are now” gets asked, and the answer is everything.
The trigger is the simplest possible open: “Tell me a bit about where you are right now,” or even more open, “What’s the day-to-day look like for you these days?” Notice the difference between asking what they do and asking what their day looks like. The first invites a recitation of the resume. The second invites texture, complaints, small joys — the real stuff. If you want even more, “what’s been keeping you busiest lately?” gets people talking about what’s actually on their plate. That’s where the most useful signal usually shows up.
Listen for the texture of how they talk about their current firm. Not the words — the texture. A candidate who says “I’ve enjoyed my time there, and I think I’m ready for the next step” is telling you they’re moving toward something. A candidate who spends the first three minutes cataloging grievances — the principal who won’t delegate, the projects they’re tired of, the colleague they can’t stand — is telling you they’re running from something. Both can become hires. But they’re not the same hire, and the conversations you need to have with each are completely different. The mover wants you to show them the upside. The runner wants you to convince them you’re not the same trap.
You can’t tell which one you’ve got from a resume. You can tell in about ninety seconds of how they answer that first question.
What they bring up unprompted.
The trigger here is not a question. It’s restraint. The unprompted material only surfaces if you give them room. So ask one open question — “how have things been going?” is enough — and then let them keep going. Don’t redirect when they wander. Don’t move to your next prepared question after their first sentence. Wander is the whole point. The thing they circle back to twice, the topic they bring up that you didn’t ask about, the detail they linger on — that’s the material.
A senior estimator who mentions her mentoring of younger staff three times in the first ten minutes — when you only asked about her current role — is telling you something. A project architect who keeps circling back to a specific kind of work he’s done less of lately is telling you what he wants to do more of. A highway engineer who, before you’ve asked, brings up the long commute he’s currently doing is naming the thing that will eventually push him to make a move for a shorter drive time.
The unprompted material is the candidate’s actual agenda surfacing through the small talk. It’s the thing they came in wanting to make sure you understood about them. If you miss it in the first ten minutes because you were too busy walking through your prepared list, you’ll miss it for the whole interview.
How they handle a question they don’t expect.
Most senior candidates have answers ready for the obvious questions. The first ten minutes are when you can ask something that isn’t on their rehearsed list — and watch how they think in real time.
It doesn’t need to be a tricky question. It can be as simple as “what’s something you’d change about how your firm runs projects, if you had a free hand?” or “what’s the part of the work that still surprises you?” Other ones that work: “what’s a project you wish you’d handled differently?”, “what kind of work do you find yourself drawn to lately, even if it’s not what you’re paid to do?”, or my own favorite, “what’s something that’s true about your job that you don’t think outsiders understand?” None of these are hard questions. They’re just questions a candidate hasn’t pre-cooked an answer to, which is why it works.
The point isn’t the answer itself. It’s whether you watch a person think — pause, consider, give you something honest — or whether you watch a person reach for the closest pre-packaged answer they have on the shelf.
Senior people who think in real time, especially under mild pressure, tend to be the ones who navigate ambiguity well in actual work. The ones who reach for talking points tend to be the ones who default to scripts when the work gets messy. That’s not a hard rule, but as a signal in the first ten minutes, it’s a reliable one.
What they do when you give them room to ask.
This last signal is one that works best if you set it up, which most principals don’t think to do. The conventional interview format — principal asks, candidate answers, questions at the end — is so deeply trained that a senior candidate won’t volunteer questions in the first ten minutes unless you explicitly invite them to.
So invite them. In the first minute, before you launch into anything: “Before we get into the formal part of this, I’d rather just have a conversation for the first stretch. Ask me anything you’re curious about as we go — you don’t have to wait until the end.”
That sentence is doing real work. It signals you’re not running a one-way screen. It treats them as a peer. And it converts the next ten minutes from interview-mode into something more diagnostic, because now you can watch what they do with the permission.
A candidate who relaxes into it and starts asking — about the team, about how you ended up here, about the work — is showing you they’re a peer-level thinker who wants to understand the room they’re in. A candidate who thanks you for the offer and then waits to be asked questions anyway is showing you they default to structure even when the structure is loosened. Neither is automatically wrong. But what you see in that moment tells you something the resume can’t: whether they engage like a senior collaborator or like someone being processed.
What you should not be doing in the first ten minutes
Almost everything firms typically do in this window is the wrong thing.
Don’t run a script. The first ten minutes is your one chance to hear how the candidate talks when they haven’t been prompted into a particular topic yet. The minute you start working through your prepared question list, you’ve handed them the structure and lost the diagnostic value.
Don’t fill silence. New interviewers — and even experienced ones who are nervous — talk to cover gaps. A two-second pause feels longer than it is. But silence is where the candidate volunteers things, and the most useful first-ten-minutes material almost always shows up in the moments you didn’t fill.
Don’t oversell the firm. Not yet. The selling can come later in the hour — and post 2 in this series argued that you do, eventually, need to sell honestly. But not at minute four. At minute four, you’re listening, not pitching. A principal who spends the first ten minutes describing the firm’s history and pipeline has learned almost nothing about the person sitting across from them, and the candidate has learned almost nothing useful either.
What to do with what you hear
The reason the first ten minutes matter so much is that they tell you which interview to actually run.
If you’ve heard a mover — someone heading toward something — the rest of the hour should be about painting where they’re heading and whether your firm is on the path. If you’ve heard a runner, the rest of the hour is about whether your firm solves the specific thing they’re running from, not what new shiny problems it has. If you’ve heard someone who keeps circling a specific kind of work, the rest of the hour is about whether you can offer them more of that. If you’ve heard someone who needed prompting for every sentence even after you opened the door, spend the rest of the hour finding out whether they warm up — and whether the role suits someone more reserved.
This is what it means to actually interview a senior candidate in this market, rather than process one. The first ten minutes tell you who’s in front of you. The next fifty are for finding out whether what they need and what you have can meet in the middle. Skip the first ten and you spend the next fifty in the dark.
And worth saying, since it ties the whole series together: while you’re listening in those ten minutes, the candidate is listening to you, too. They’re picking up the same kinds of signals — what you talk about, what you don’t, how you handle a question you didn’t expect, what you ask about them. The diagnostic runs both ways. The principal who knows that is already several rungs above the one who doesn’t.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the first ten minutes of an interview so important?
Because they happen before the candidate has shifted into rehearsed-answer mode and before the interviewer has anchored the conversation to a script. The signals a senior candidate gives in that window — how they describe their current situation, what they volunteer unprompted, how they handle an unexpected question, what they ask back — tell you more about them than the rest of the hour, which tends to be more performed on both sides.
What’s the single most useful thing to listen for early?
How the candidate talks about their current firm. The difference between someone moving toward a next step and someone running from a current situation is usually clear within ninety seconds of how they answer the opening question. Both can become good hires, but they need completely different interview conversations after that.
What kind of opening question should I ask?
The simplest possible one. “Tell me about where you are right now” or “what’s the day-to-day look like for you these days” outperform anything more structured, because they invite texture rather than a resume recitation. The less scripted the opening, the more diagnostic the answer.
Should I let the candidate ask me questions in the first ten minutes?
Yes — but you have to invite them to. The convention that candidate questions belong at the end is so deeply trained that most senior candidates won’t volunteer questions early unless you explicitly open the door. A sentence in the first minute (“ask me anything you’re curious about as we go — you don’t have to wait until the end”) reshapes the dynamic and gives you a diagnostic you can’t get any other way.
What if I’m not a natural conversationalist? Doesn’t this favor extroverts?
The opposite, usually. The first ten minutes reward listening, not performing. A principal who’s comfortable with a beat of silence, who doesn’t feel the need to fill every pause, and who asks one good open question instead of five small ones will pick up more in that window than a charismatic talker who fills the space.
How does this fit with running a structured interview process?
It doesn’t replace structure — it precedes it. Reserve the first ten minutes for an open, unscripted opening, then move into your prepared questions. The unscripted window tells you what to emphasize more heavily in the structured part.
Lynn writes about hiring, careers, and the talent market in Western New York’s architecture, engineering, and construction community. More at nordstromwilliams.com.
Next, and final in this series: the difference between hiring for skills and hiring for judgment — and why the strongest senior hires are always made on the second.