What separates a forgettable podcast interview from one that listeners will replay, clip, and share? It’s not a clever list of questions, nor is it having the right microphone. It’s craft: one built on presence, preparation, and a genuine curiosity that creates an environment of safety that lets guests be their authentic selves.
The tricky thing about interviewing is that it looks easy from the outside. The host asks a question, the guest answers, and the conversation goes from there. But conducting a great interview is the result of deliberate work happening before you start recording and while the interview is taking place. If you want to create a podcast interview that doesn’t suck, then you can’t simply treat it like a call-and-response format.
Let’s break down what actually makes an interview land, drawing inspiration from some of the best interviewers today. Whether you’re hosting your first episode or your hundredth, these principles will help you conduct better interviews that will draw listeners in and keep them captivated. If you’re looking for an expert team to help you build your show from the ground up, contact us about our podcast consulting services and subscribe to our newsletter for more tips like this.
How do you prepare for an interview?
Preparation begins long before you start asking your guest questions. When a host has done the work ahead of time, it not only comes through in the interview, but it helps your guest feel like they’re in good hands. And as a host, you can let go of your notes and actually listen instead of waiting to ask the next question.
If you’re pitching a guest to appear on your podcast, a thoughtful pitch that references their specific work will let them know whether the conversation will be worth their time. Guests who feel seen and appreciated before they meet with a host tend to open up more quickly once you’ve started recording.
Once your guest is booked, that’s when the research begins. This means going beyond a guest’s bio and actually understanding their body of work. If the guest has done podcast interviews before, review those interviews so you don’t fall into the trap of asking repetitive questions. Use that knowledge to determine what they haven’t been asked yet in order to shape a distinct perspective for your interview. The strongest interviewers don’t focus on a single topic or a guest’s latest project. They look for the throughline that connects their body of work.
Preparation also means building a flexible outline for your interview rather than a rigid script. For example, identifying three or four core areas you want to explore with a guest is a lot easier to maneuver in conversation than a finite list of specific questions that you want to ask in a particular order. That can fight the natural rhythm of conversation. Even if you have a couple of well-researched questions you want to ask, you can weave those into conversation across those core areas rather than making a hard pivot into them. Everything else should be left open enough to follow where the guest actually wants to go.
Hosts today have a number of tools available for researching guests, generating questions, and identifying patterns across a guest’s past interviews. Our breakdown of AI tools for podcast production covers several worth testing if you haven’t built these into your workflow yet. Be careful not to lean too heavily on AI tools. They may give you generic questions built from patterns instead of genuine interest or curiosity, and guests will pick up on that. Use these tools to widen your research or surface angles you might have missed, but any follow-up questions you ask should happen in the moment with your guest. No AI tool can replace a host who’s actually listening.
What makes an interview question actually work?
Most interview questions fail for one of two reasons: they’re either too broad or they’re really just a statement in disguise. Here’s one we’ve probably all heard: “tell me about your career.” It might sound like a good starting point for an interview, but chances are the guest has answered it a hundred times before, so you’re likely to get a rehearsed answer. It also signals to the guest that the host didn’t do their homework, even if the goal is to introduce the guest to a new audience.
Specificity is the key to an interview question that gets a guest to go somewhere they haven’t gone before. Instead of asking someone about their career, ask them about a precise moment, like a meeting, a failure, or a conversation that changed their direction or perspective. Specific questions like this signal genuine curiosity, and that is what makes guests stop performing, start thinking, and give thoughtful responses.
It also helps to ask questions that have real stakes for the guest. People remember and talk about moments when something was genuinely on the line, not an easy or safe moment. Don’t be afraid of asking a question that makes a guest pause before answering, because that’s often where the most interesting answers come from.
In terms of safety, restraint is just as important as candor. You don’t want to ask a guest something that could offend them in order to generate a gotcha moment for your interview, and you don’t want to pepper them with non-stop questions like they’re being interrogated by law enforcement. Practicing restraint while interviewing is a key differentiator between amateur and professional interviews, and the best interviewers ask fewer questions to leave room for follow-ups. When you’re doing this properly, a guest’s response shapes your next question and allows for a smooth flow of conversation.
This also sets the stage for building rapport with a guest.
How do you build a rapport with the person you’re interviewing?
Rapport is a lot more than a pre-interview or small talk before the real interview begins. It’s the foundation your entire interview rests on, signaling to your guest that they’re in a space to share themselves freely.
The fastest way to build trust with a guest is to demonstrate that you understand who they are and the work they do on its own terms, not through a general lens that could be applied to every guest. This goes back to preparation, but it also requires having emotional intelligence. Is the guest nervous? Guarded? Energized? Distracted? Getting a read on where your guest is during the interview lets you adjust your approach accordingly. Some of them may need a few minutes of warmup before they can relax. Others are pressed for time and ready to go immediately. Recognizing which is which, and reacting in real time, is a skill that great interviewers take time to develop.
Silence is also an underused tool for building rapport. We’ve all heard interviews where the host continually tries to find ways to fill empty space, often at the cost of interrupting their guest. Seasoned interviewers know that a brief pause after a guest finishes speaking invites them to add more thoughts, which can be the most interesting and revealing ones that are worth clipping and sharing. On the host’s end, comfort with silence signals confidence, and guests pick up on that confidence quickly.
Lastly, building rapport means being vulnerable with a guest, though it has to be earned rather than performed. A host who is willing to share a brief, relevant piece of their own perspective or experience during an interview creates a sense of understanding that allows the guest to open up more. This doesn’t mean turning the focus of the interview onto yourself, though. It’s about treating the conversation as a two-way exchange of trust where the guests feel like they’re talking with someone rather than being pumped for answers.
With these tools at your disposal, you’re equipped to start conducting better interviews. Now let’s look into how to measure their effectiveness.
How do you know if your interviews are getting better?
Most hosts judge an interview by how it felt during the conversation, but feeling and performance aren’t the same thing. The interviews that felt the most exciting to record aren’t always the ones listeners finish or share. This is where you can take a page from sports teams and watch the tape.
Listening back to your own episodes with a critical ear can reveal patterns that you don’t always pick up on in the moment of interviewing. You might hear where your questions ran long, where a guest’s energy dropped, or where you talked over a guest’s answer instead of letting it land. Pairing that self-review with actual listener behavior takes the guesswork out of whether your interviews are improving and resonating with your audience. If you want a structured way to do this, our article on how to edit smarter using analytics to shape your podcast walks through using retention curves and drop-off data to see exactly where your interviews lose or hold your audience.
Over time, this kind of review builds your instincts faster than just doing more interviews on autopilot. You will start to notice your own interview habits and crutches, and that awareness is what turns a host who’s done a hundred interviews into one who’s actually improved across all of them.
What does it take to improve your interviewing skills?
Interviewing is a craft that you’re constantly refining, so don’t expect to master it after a certain number of episodes. Your interviewing and hosting style will evolve the longer you do them, and that evolution comes from treating every interview as a chance to test something new. Maybe you approach a question differently, take a longer pause than usual, or follow a conversation tangent instead of redirecting the conversation back to your main topics. Each guest is different, and over time, you’ll gain the flexibility to adapt to each interview accordingly.
It also helps to study other interviewers in podcasting and beyond. Pay attention to how they handle a guest who’s guarded, how they recover from a question that falls flat, or how they make a familiar topic for a guest feel fresh and interesting. None of those instincts come from a checklist. It comes from genuine respect for the format and the people who sit down to be part of it.
Conclusion
Great interviews are not about asking the right questions in the right order. They are about creating an environment that earns you the freedom to listen, curiosity sharp enough to follow a guest somewhere new, and the discipline to keep getting better at all of it, episode after episode. The lesson never changes, and the craft is never finished, which is exactly what makes it worth doing well.
If you’re building or refining a show around interviews and getting stuck on your approach, that’s exactly the kind of help we can provide through podcast consulting and full-scale podcast production support. Have questions about building stronger interviews into your show? Reach out to The Podglomerate, and make sure to sign up for our free newsletter for more tips.
