The Most Important Job Interview

4/30/25

The Most Important Interview - by Eddy DelSignore

I want to take you through a personal story. If you don’t know what I do for a living and how I got to this place, I’m here to walk you through it. I’m a lawyer.

When I graduated law school, after years of hard work, I had to take the Bar Exam, which I passed. I got good grades, did good on my Bar Exam, but, admittedly, was given more positive attention than my skills probably warranted. I was charismatic

Then, I had exactly 32 potential employers that could theoretically hire me. Of those 32 employers, 26 of them already had better, more experienced lawyers in my position, and they were compensated significantly more than me, which tied them to their respective positions. Now, I was down to only six (6) potential employers that could hire me for their respective firms.

All six of those employers brought me in for interviews. During these interviews, the firms ask me about my background, my skills, what I could bring to their practice, and then put me through some “white board” type exercises where I have to put my skills on display. Honestly, I felt like I was too qualified for these positions in my own head. Admittedly, I big-timed many of these interviews, dogged the white-board exercises, and let my feelings of being too good for the positions bleed heavily into how I responded.

In the meantime, the headhunter/recruiter that I was using to help me get hired told four of the six remaining employer that even if I was offered a job at their respective firms, I would not work there. Now, my employer pool was down to two employers…with whom I had interviewed terribly. They took the data they had on me—my slightly above-average academics, my above-average tools, and my unprofessional interviews…and suddenly the attractive candidate that I thought I was in my own head may not have matched the candidate that I was in reality.

Those two employers did not offer me a position for a high-profile attorney at the Firm. Instead, I was offered only a paralegal position for minimum wage—basically, a backup lawyer at a mid-level firm in case the starting lawyer decided to change firms, or had to take leave for any reason. Law pundits are outraged — they cannot believe that my pre-hiring projections of being a top lawyer at a top firm weren’t met. Law pundits and those in the law media start to throw out accusations of collusion — that teams were punishing an outspoken confident lawyer for no reason…despite my average skills and horrible interviews.

Here’s the truth about this story: my name isn’t Eddy D., it’s Shedeur Sanders…and that’s how Shedeur Sanders would have handled his law career. If anyone objective looks at his entire situation that led to his precipitous drop in the draft to pick 144, what is surprising? An only above-average player, with above-average tools, who handled all of his pre-draft interviews in the most horrible way possible, told the majority of his few available positions that he did not want to play quarterback for their teams, and then bombed every screening process…wasn’t successful in getting hired for a job?

And please save me the narrative that somehow the NFL is racist. The last three NUMBER ONE draft picks have been African American quarterbacks. The vast majority of the league, in its entirety, is African American. There have been too many examples to even start to list that if the talent is there, nothing else matters. Remember recently when an African American quarterback with over 30 sexual assault allegations was given a $230 million fully-guaranteed contract? Now we think that the NFL is a racist employer? I’m not sure there’s ANY evidence to support that claim.

Somehow, sports media is just too biased to admit something — Shedeur Sanders bombed the most important hiring cycle process of his life. Without elite talent to back anything up, Shedeur acted like he was too good for most teams. He was horrible in interviews. Unprofessional. Entitled. Disinterested. And, somehow, if any “normal person” went through a hiring cycle like Shedeur did, and then got negative results, no one would question the process at all.

Objectivity, please.