Career

How to prepare for an interview

The interview is mostly decided before you walk in. This is what the week beforehand should look like.

1. Know their last six months.

   Funding, launches, leadership changes, layoffs, the last thing they shipped. Ten minutes of reading, and it puts you ahead of most of the shortlist.

2. Write your five stories.

   A hard problem you solved. A time you were wrong. Something you shipped alone. Something you shipped with people who disagreed with you. A thing you’re still proud of. Almost every behavioural question is one of these five wearing a hat.

3. Use STAR, don’t announce it.

   Situation, task, action, result -- it’s a good skeleton and a terrible script. Say “so the problem was”, not “the situation was”. Nobody wants to hear the framework working.

4. Have your numbers ready.

   Team size, budget, percentage moved, time saved, users reached. Vague scale reads as borrowed credit. One real number ends the question.

5. Answer “why us” and “why now” before you’re asked.

   These two get asked in every process and answered badly in most. Write them out in full. Say them out loud until they sound like you not like a paragraph.

6. Know your own CV cold.

   Every date, every gap, every claim. If you can’t explain a line on your own CV, take it off.

7. Write three questions you want answered.

   Not questions designed to look clever. What would make this role a failure in year one? What does the team argue about? Real questions get real answers, and the answers help you decide.

8. Rehearse out loud.

   Not in your head -- in your head everything is fluent. Out loud you find the sentence that doesn’t end. Once through your five stories is enough.

9. Sort the logistics the day before.

   Route, building, floor, name of the person meeting you. For video: camera height, light in front of you not behind, and the link tested on the actual machine.

10. Then stop.

    Preparation past a point turns into anxiety wearing a productive costume. Close the laptop and sleep -- being rested is worth more than the eleventh rehearsal.