I was sitting second chair on an interview for a program management role that would spend about 20% of its time supporting our design org. The candidate had strong credentials, relevant experience at scale, and a genuine curiosity about design culture that came through without prompting. By every traditional measure, the interview was going well.
And every answer was about 40% longer than it needed to be.
This is a pattern I have learned to pay close attention to, because it sits in a tricky evaluative space. Verbosity in an interview can mean several different things, and the difference between them matters for your hiring decision. It can be nerves, especially for someone who mentioned early on that they dislike talking about themselves. It can be a communication style that defaults to building context before landing the point. Or it can be a sign that someone processes their thinking out loud and needs the act of speaking to find the thread.
In this case, I noticed both patterns operating simultaneously. Some of the tangents, like a brief aside about a family interruption during a remote work story, read clearly as anxiety. But the structural pattern of building extensive context before arriving at the headline felt consistent enough across multiple answers that it was probably how this person communicates under normal conditions too.
Why the distinction matters
The reason I care about this is not because brevity is inherently better than depth. It is because different operating environments have different tolerance for it. In a 1:1 interview, a long answer is manageable. You have time, you are listening closely, and you can extract the signal. In a cross-functional stakeholder meeting where you need to hold a room, or in front of a CPO who operates at a fast tempo, that same pattern has real cost. The substance gets buried. The audience disengages before the point lands.
The question I asked myself was whether this was a disqualifier or a coaching need. And I landed on coaching need, with a caveat. The candidate’s role would be primarily operational, building internal systems and working with a program management team. In that context, verbosity is a smaller risk. If the role required regular executive-facing presentations or representing design ops work upward, it would weigh more heavily.
How I framed it
In my scorecard notes and in my debrief with the hiring manager, I wrote it plainly: strong content, communication style will need calibration for executive-facing work. I framed it as a development area rather than a red flag, something like: in our environment, the ability to land the headline first and fill in context on request is a skill we would need to develop together.
I also noted what the verbosity told me that was positive. This was someone who thought carefully, who wanted to give complete answers, and who was clearly invested in making a good impression. Those are not bad instincts. They just need shaping for the environment they would be entering.
Your job in those interviews is not just to fill out the scorecard. It is to give your hiring partner a usable, honest read that helps them make a better decision.
That means naming the pattern, naming what it might cost, and naming what it might mean for development, all in language that protects the candidate from being unfairly reduced to a single observation.