Emem Adjah: How to Get Hired at Top Companies and What Hiring Managers Really Look For

“Hey, sorry to bother you. I have an interview tomorrow. Any advice?”

For nearly twenty years, I have received various versions of that message, and what continues to move me is the source, which is people I would least expect. It comes from brilliant individuals who have successfully executed flawless launches, marketers who have achieved impressive results, and professionals who excel at their work, yet feel unprepared when entering an interview. Being great at a job and being adept at interviewing for one are two very different abilities, and very few people teach the latter.

I know this because I have sat on both sides of that table.

I have lived in five countries and worked across more than forty. For fifteen years, I built the commercial engines of some of the most recognisable technology companies in the world, including a seat on Google’s hiring committee, the room where decisions about who gets hired are actually made.

That experience taught me something I have never been able to unsee. The people who got filtered out were rarely the least capable. Often they were the most. They simply didn’t have anyone in their corner to explain how the process actually works, what the room is really listening for, or how to tell the story of their own work so it lands. Talent, I came to believe, is evenly distributed. Access is not.

I think about this most when I think about people who look like me, and people who come from where my family comes from. So much brilliance never makes it into these rooms, not for lack of ability, but for lack of a map. Nobody hands you the map. I certainly was not handed one. I learned it the way most of us do, by getting more no’s than yeses, by making my mistakes in real rooms, and slowly, by paying attention to what the yeses had in common. But the good thing is, when someone has the map, they can show others too.

However, the ground has begun shifting again. Artificial intelligence has rewritten how hiring works. AI drafts resumes, screens them, and sends them in volumes nobody imagined five years ago. First interviews are increasingly run, or scored, by machines. The rules changed, but the guidance most people were given did not. Which means the gap I have spent my life watching, the gap between the capable and the connected, is not closing. If anything, it is widening, and it falls hardest on the people who were already most likely to be overlooked: early-career talent, first-generation professionals, and so many of the young people I meet who have everything it takes except someone to show them how the machine actually works.

I never intended to become the person people text the night before an interview. It happened one message at a time. However, at some point, I realised that the most valuable asset I possess is not a title, but rather the perspective I have from the other side of the table—and my willingness to share it.

I want to express what often goes unsaid: a job description is essentially a set of questions in disguise. You are allowed to apply even if you only meet half of the requirements; rejecting yourself before the company has the chance to consider you only does their least pleasant task for them, and you shouldn’t do that for free. Remember that the interview is not a test of who you are, but rather an opportunity to showcase what you have already accomplished.

There is a bigger reason I care so much about the beginning of the search, and not only the offer at the end of it. We spend roughly a third of our waking lives at work, on the order of ninety thousand hours across a career. Where we spend those hours is one of the largest decisions any of us will ever make, and we make it more than once. Whether someone ends up happy in their work usually traces back to small, quiet decisions made at the very start: which roles they let themselves consider, what they told themselves they needed, what they quietly decided to settle for.

So this is what I would tell the person typing that message at night, and what I would tell anyone who has ever felt like the room was not meant for them. You don’t need permission to belong; you need a map, and that map can be learned. In my experience, those who approach their search systematically, who know what they want, keep records of their efforts, prepare like athletes, and evaluate the companies they target, achieve success at a rate that far surpasses other applicants. This isn’t just motivational talk; it’s a pattern I have observed repeatedly over two decades. The rooms may still be difficult to enter, but the pathway is knowable.

By the way, once you understand it, the next step is to reach back and share that map with someone else.