Why Interviews Are Like Icebergs

We’ve all seen the notification: “We’re hiring!” For many, that’s the starting gun. They polish the resume, hit apply, and hope a 60 minute interview performance is enough to beat out the crowd.

But as a hiring manager, I’m going to let you in on a secret: The interview is just the tip of the iceberg.

The 60 minutes you spend on a virtual meeting is the only part of the process “above the waterline.” It’s the visible 5%. But the decision to hire is almost always supported by the massive, invisible 95% lurking beneath the surface. The work you did months or years before the role was even a thought.

I recently had a role open on my team. Once the job post was published, several people reached out asking to interview. Interestingly, two had applied for a different role I was hiring for four months ago. At that time, I had to give them the tough news that they didn’t get the job.

In the four months between that process and this new position opening, I hadn’t heard from them once. No check ins, no updates. They didn’t put work into building a relationship or seeking further feedback. They only reappeared when they saw a new role was open.

When they asked for an interview, I had to tell them no. My candidate slate was already full of people who had been building their foundation for months, either with me personally or with other people in my network whom I trust and who highly recommended them.

The Myth of the Isolated Interview

In the corporate world, we like to think of interviews as objective, isolated snapshots of talent. We want to believe that the person who does the best in the specific interview process wins. They don’t.

Hiring is, at its core, an exercise in risk mitigation and trust. As a hiring manager, my reputation is on the line with every person I bring into the organization. The “above the water” interview is just a validation of the “below the water” trust.

You cannot build a foundation of deep professional trust in a one hour call with a stranger. That mass is built through the slow, steady work of visibility and relationship building. If you are starting from zero at the moment of the interview, you are trying to balance an entire career on a tiny sliver of ice. It’s unstable, and it rarely works.

My Three Year “Interview”

My current job didn’t start with a job posting. It started three years ago when I strategically approached my now boss to be my mentor.

For three years, I worked on the 95% of the iceberg that no one sees. I wasn’t asking for a job; I was positioning myself as the inevitable solution to a future problem. During those years, I was:

• Learning the Business: I didn’t just ask for career advice. I asked about his specific experience, business challenges and roadmap. I was learning the role long before the role existed.

• Building Visibility: I made an effort to meet his team and share my own insights on leadership. I wanted them to see me as a peer and a resource, not a candidate.

• Proving Consistency: By showing up as a dedicated mentee and a high performer in my own right, year after year, I removed the “risk” of hiring me.

I also took it a step further by activating my own network. I had my leadership reach out to the leadership of this new organization to endorse my work and make warm introductions. This provided a secondary layer of trust that existed entirely outside of the interview room.

When the role finally opened, the “tip of the iceberg” which was the interview was essentially a formality. I wasn’t a candidate to be screened; I was a known quantity who had already proven she could do the work.

The Power of the Sponsor

The deepest part of the iceberg, the part that provides the most stability, is Sponsorship.

There is a massive difference between a mentor (who talks to you) and a sponsor (who talks about you when you aren’t in the room). Your self advocacy in an interview will never carry as much weight as a phone call from a trusted leader saying:

“Jane, you would be a fool if you didn’t hire this person. They are the best on my team, and I’ll stake my own reputation on their success.”

As a hiring manager, that “table pounding” advocacy is the ultimate cheat code. It bypasses the uncertainty of the interview because the trust has already been established “below the water.” But that kind of sponsorship isn’t a gift; it’s a high stakes investment. When a sponsor vouches for you, they are risking their own political capital.

The Hard Truth: Audit Your Iceberg

If you want to move up, you have to stop looking at your career as a series of isolated job applications. You need to look at the unspoken landscape of your organization and be honest about the mass you’ve built below the surface.

Ask yourself these three hard questions:

1. Am I undeniably the best on my team? Performance is the foundation of forward progress.

2. Is my current boss willing to go to the mat for me? If the answer is “no” or “maybe,” you are floating on thin ice. You need to bridge the gap from “reliable worker” to “must hire talent” immediately.

3. Am I building for the long game? If you only reach out to your network when you see a job posting, you aren’t networking; you’re transacting. And transactions don’t build icebergs.

The interview is your opportunity to close the sale. The real work happens below the waterline in the months and years leading up to it. Stop waiting for the req to be posted. Start building your foundation today.

Challenge: Identify one leader you admire this week, someone whose team you’d love to be on in the future. Don’t ask for a job. Ask for fifteen minutes of their time to learn how they’re thinking about the business this year.