I’ve interviewed more than a thousand people. I can’t tell you the middle of almost any answer I heard. What I can tell you, often months later, is how a candidate opened and how they landed.
That’s not a flaw in my memory. It’s how memory works. We don’t store experiences as continuous recordings — we keep the start, we keep the end, and we compress everything in between. Kahneman called the end-part of this the peak-end rule; the front-loaded half is just as real. First impressions are a cliché because they’re true. The part most people miss is the symmetry: the last impression matters every bit as much, and the messy middle barely registers.
Which means an interview answer is an episode, and the interviewer is encoding the bookends. The highest-leverage seconds in any answer are the first fifteen and the last fifteen. Your opening line sets the frame they’ll judge the rest against. Your closing line — the result, the lesson, the “so what” — is what survives to the debrief, when eight candidates have blurred into four sentences each.
Most candidates spend their prep on exactly the wrong part. They add detail, context, thoroughness — to the middle, the stretch that gets compressed away. They open with throat-clearing (“so, um, a little background…”) and trail off without a landing ("…and yeah, that was basically it"). That’s a brilliant middle wrapped in forgettable bookends. It loses to an average middle that opens sharp and ends sharper.
Scale it up and the same rule governs the whole interview, not just one answer. The first question and the last few minutes carry disproportionate weight in what the interviewer walks into the debrief believing. Open strong on “tell me about yourself.” Close strong — on the questions you ask, on the note you leave them with. The forty minutes in between need to be good. The edges need to be unforgettable.
So when you practice, stop polishing the middle. Get your first fifteen seconds and your last fifteen seconds so sharp they’d survive a week in someone else’s memory — because that’s exactly the test they have to pass.