Is it ever worth turning a job interview into a consulting pitch?

Yes, and for the right profile it can be a genuinely powerful strategy. If you go into an interview having already identified specific problems, done real research, and can show — not just describe — what you'd do in the first 90 days, it signals a fundamentally different kind of candidate. Some members have built small prototype tools or research decks and shared them with a thank-you email, which opened conversations that otherwise wouldn't have happened. This works especially well with smaller companies that have a specific, concrete problem they're trying to solve. If the interview doesn't result in a full-time offer, it can become the basis for a contract or consulting engagement instead — which can later convert to full-time. This is harder to pull off at large enterprises, but for Series A through Series C companies, it's a real path.