A confident introduction can make ordinary experience sound unusually complete.

Delivery is doing more than content in most first impressions. A steady voice, no hedging, a clean summary of what someone has done: the same three years of fairly standard work can arrive sounding like mastery or like getting by, depending entirely on the phrasing. Listeners are not being foolish when they are persuaded, since fluency is genuinely a signal of something, just not of depth. It takes a second meeting to tell the difference.

Discount the first five minutes a little, in both directions. Ask a specific question about how something was actually done, and notice whether the confidence survives the detail.