The Forty Seconds That Decides Your Next Interview
It is almost never the redundancy, the recall or the gap that costs you the role. It is the unrehearsed account of it.
Across senior MedTech conversations this year, the thing that most often costs a strong candidate a second interview is not what happened to them. It is the forty seconds they spend explaining it.
I want to be careful here, because this gets misread easily. I am not saying people are judged for being made redundant, recalled out of a business, or leaving somewhere that had become untenable.
Most of the people I speak to had very little say in any of it. The market has been volatile enough over the last two years that almost nobody senior has a completely uninterrupted run behind them.
What I am saying is narrower, and more useful. The event is fixed. The account of it is not. And the account is the only part anyone in a first interview actually assesses.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
The answer nobody had decided on
A senior commercial candidate, long experience, got in front of a company they genuinely wanted. Warm referral, strong internal advocate, the sort of introduction most people would take.
The first screening call was thirty minutes with a junior interviewer. There was a period in their history that needed explaining. They had not decided how to explain it. So when the question came, they did what almost everyone does under mild pressure, which is answer instinctively and then manage the consequences.
They skirted the awkward part. Then, challenged on the depth of their recent experience, they defended rather than answered. The facts were not wrong. The answer was accurate. It was just reactive, and it read as reactive.
Their own summary afterwards was that they had blown it in thirty minutes.
They had not blown it in thirty minutes. They had blown it in the weeks before, by never sitting down and deciding what the answer was. The interview only revealed that.
The same event, told two ways
This is the one that convinced me the tool was worth building.
I have spoken to people whose businesses ran into serious product trouble. Not of their making, not preventable from where they sat, and costly to them anyway.
One account of it went like this. The trouble wrecked the business, wrecked the numbers, wrecked the relationships they had been brought in to repair. All true. But every part of the account pointed backwards, and by the time it reached the present, there was no clear position on what came next.
An interviewer would have come away knowing exactly what had gone wrong and nothing at all about where this person was heading.
Another version of a similar situation ran about ninety seconds. The problem was named plainly and early.
They had known the business had issues when they joined, they said, and had taken that risk deliberately, and they were clear about why it had been worth it to them. Clear too about what had actually been run and decided in the role. Then straight on to the specific thing being built toward next, with a realistic timeframe attached.
Comparable events. Comparable lack of fault. Completely different position in an interview.
The difference was not confidence, and it was not spin. The second person had simply worked out, before anyone asked, which parts of the story were theirs and which were not.
That is a decision you make once, on your own, and then use for a year.
The referees who were ready before anyone asked
The last one is a smaller thing that almost nobody does.
Someone I have known for years came out of a long and demanding tenure. Before there was a single live process running, they had already spoken to two senior people from that period and confirmed those people would speak for them. Not a vague sense that they probably would. An actual conversation, and an agreement, in advance.
By the time a reference is requested, the hiring decision is usually most of the way made.
Having that arranged early does not change the outcome of a bad story. What it does is remove the gap between what you say and what someone else would say if asked, which is where a lot of otherwise fine candidacies quietly come apart.
What this actually is
If there is one line to take from this, it is that your exit story is a decision before it is a skill.
Most people treat it as a performance problem. They think they need to get better at delivering it. Almost always the real problem is upstream: they have never settled, in their own head, what the story is.
So every telling is slightly different, slightly defensive, slightly longer than it needs to be.
Interviewers do not consciously notice the inconsistency. They just come away with a vague sense that something is unresolved.
You cannot rehearse your way out of an answer you have not decided on.
Check where yours sits
I have built a short diagnostic that scores how clearly and credibly you can explain your most recent move.
It assesses five things: whether you can state what happened plainly
whether you give the right amount of detail
whether you balance what was yours against what was not
whether the account resolves forward
and whether your CV, LinkedIn and verbal version actually agree.
Twenty statements, about three minutes.
You get a score out of 100 and specific feedback on each area. It is private, there is no application, and nobody is marked down for the event itself.
About the author
I’m Richard Duke, founder of DukeMed, a specialist MedTech retained search and market intelligence practice in Australia. I’ve spent more than twenty years watching the ANZ MedTech market across orthopaedics, ophthalmology, surgical devices and commercial leadership.
Most of what I publish comes out of conversations like the ones above: candidate discussions, hiring briefs, and what people tell me when there’s nothing riding on the answer. Names and details are always changed.
DukeMed works on retained and exclusive search, one mandate at a time, alongside pre-search market intelligence for companies who want to understand the talent landscape before they commit to a hire.
