The Executive Interview: Turning Experience into a Reason to Hire You

An Interactive Working Session for Executives in Transition

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 6:00 PM ET via Zoom

The Executive Interview: Turning Experience into a Reason to Hire You

Your experience may be one of your greatest assets in a job search. It can demonstrate judgment, resilience, leadership, and the ability to produce results.

But experience alone is not a reason to hire you.

Many executives enter an interview prepared to explain their history. They walk through their résumé, describe the positions they have held, and provide details about everything they have done. The interviewer, however, is trying to answer a more immediate question: How will this person use that experience to solve the problem in front of us?

At the executive level, a strong interview is not a recital of your career. It is a business conversation. The organization is listening for evidence that you understand what it needs, have faced something comparable, can exercise sound judgment, and genuinely want this particular role.

During this meeting, we will work with realistic executive interview situations and discuss how to turn career history into a focused reason to hire you, including:

• How to open the interview without reciting your résumé
• How to identify the business need behind the position
• How to choose accomplishment stories that are relevant to the mandate
• How to respond to questions about departure, an extended search, age or overqualification, compensation, and industry fit
• How to ask questions that reveal what success will require
• How to close the conversation and reinforce the reason to hire you

This will not be a presentation about memorizing perfect answers. Scripted responses rarely sound convincing. The objective is to become more deliberate about what you say, what you leave out, and how you connect your experience to the needs of the organization.

Come prepared to participate. Bring one target job description or role profile and one accomplishment story you might use in an interview. We will compare approaches, work through responses, and give members an opportunity to make their answers more concise, credible, and relevant. No one will be put on the spot, but the more real material we bring into the conversation, the more useful the evening will be.

Whether you are actively interviewing, working to generate more interviews, considering a change, hiring talent, or helping another member prepare, this meeting will offer a practical way to strengthen one of the most important conversations in the job search.

Alumni members are especially encouraged to attend. Your experience on both sides of the interview table can provide valuable perspective to members navigating today's job market, and the relationships you strengthen may prove valuable to you as well.

Please join us and remember:

Your history is the evidence. Their business need is the point. Relevance gives them a reason to hire you.

P.S. Know a finance executive who is not yet a FENG member? Invite them to join us. This interactive meeting will be an excellent introduction to the practical value of the FENG community.

About Lew Bader

Lew Bader is Chair of both the Long Island Chapter of The FENG and The FENG Peer Resume Review Committee. At 60, after a 40-year career with Fortune 500 companies, Lew left Pearson and entered the job market for the first time. Over the next two years, he developed a practical job-search toolkit that ultimately led him to his current role as Chief Financial Officer of Counseling In Schools, a New York City-based nonprofit organization.

Lew has served as CFO of Counseling In Schools since joining the organization at age 62. He also takes pride in his long-standing relationship with Matt Bud, noting humorously that he was likely the last of Matt's friends to join The FENG in 2014, a connection dating back to 1980.