Transcript:
- Hello, and welcome to the "What's Career Got to Do With It?" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages the listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way.

- Today, we discuss an answer, or many, to the question, "How scripted is too scripted?" Good job.

- Yes! Welcome.

- Who gave us technology?

- We don't have a script.

- George Washington.

- Clearly.

- What? Oh.

- Ooh.

- Welcome to an afternoon recording of "What's Career Got to Do With It?" folks.

- We've got the giggles.

- Oh yeah, it's three o'clock. It is.

- So talking about scripts, as I read from our script, yes, we do write stuff here, but that's, what you just heard was the sum of it. That's all. We have nothing else planned.

- The introduction, that's it.

- So we're just gonna talk about being scripted in life and in interviews, mainly about interviews though. So how often do we meet with students that come in and they are gazing at their screens while they do a practice interview with us and they read, read, read, and then they look at us and they're like, "How was it?" And you're like, no. It was okay. Yeah.

- Often.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I'd say pretty often too. I'd say you can, it's always the down and the up too. Like, you can tell they're reading from something as well, so I think that makes it a little more awkward as well.

- Yeah.

- Yeah and sometimes I pause 'em 'cause sometimes it's just, it's too intense and I have to remind them, like, "Hey, this is just a conversation. Like, you're just talking. Just breathe."

- Yeah.

- Please. And then, you know, just start over a little bit, 'cause they get so amped up.

- Yeah. Or I'll get the people that have the questions they want you to ask them and they're like, "Hey, here are the 10 questions that I've already written out answers to. Can you ask me these questions?" And then they read from that sheet. That gets me every time.

- Yeah. I once had a student that had some software program on their computer that directed their eyes back to the screen every single time. So they never broke eye contact with me.

- Oh my.

- Oh.

- But I don't know what they were reading from I'm, so-

- And it was a big interview?

- Well, they, no, no, this was in a mock interview and they asked me if it looked weird. I didn't wanna use word weird. It was a little weird but-

- Off putting, perhaps.

- Yeah. Given this was for a military interview setting. And so-

- Yeah.

- There was probably a need to have a little bit more eye contact than normal. But at the end of the day, I think what we're getting at here is this should mirror life. This should mirror who you are as a person. And it takes a little bit to get there because this is not just an interview thing, it's a, when you go in and meet somebody, you're not gonna have a script with you. When you're doing an informational interview, you may have some questions, but you're not always gonna be able to read from that. I don't know. What's y'all's take on scripts? How to prepare 'em, when to use them, when to to prepare a little bit, when to prepare too much, or how to prepare too much, what does that look like? I don't know, I'm just kind of rambling.

- I think scripting takes away from everything that we've discussed within this podcast over the past four seasons. And that's being your authentic self. I know we can tip into that world of AI where folks are using ChatGPT and all the other ones that are around now to kind of create cover letters and even, you know, tell me about myself. But what I found is in the last couple of conferences I've been to, employers are like, there is a huge disconnect between what you presented me on paper and how you are presenting yourself now when I'm interviewing you. So I think you can almost make it harder for