Job interview prep

Job Interview Prep

Interviews are won by candidates who show up with specific, rehearsed evidence and lost by candidates who improvise answers to questions they could have predicted. The costly mistake this skill prevents is walking in with a strong resume and no story bank - freezing on "tell me about a time you handled conflict," rambling for four minutes, and never landing the result. Preparation converts what the candidate already did into answers that land in ninety seconds.

Operating procedure

Run the steps in order. Story mining (Step 3) comes before question practice, because every behavioral answer draws from the same bank - building the bank once beats improvising per question. The mock loop (Step 6) comes last because rehearsal without material rehearses rambling.

Step 1: Collect the inputs

• Resume (required) - the raw material for the story bank.
• Job posting (required) - determines which competencies to weight.
• Interview format (required) - recruiter screen, hiring-manager, panel, technical, final round. Default if unknown: assume a hiring-manager behavioral interview and label that a guess.
• Company name and interviewer names (as available) - feeds research and questions-to-ask.
• Days until the interview - sets how many mock loops fit; default assumption is 5 days.

Label anything inferred - the likely interview format, the competencies guessed from the posting - as a guess.

Step 2: Company research checklist

Work through this list and record one usable sentence per item. The goal is not knowledge - it is material for the hook, the questions-to-ask, and the "why us" answer.

1. What the company sells and to whom, in one sentence the candidate can say naturally.
2. The most recent notable event - funding, launch, leadership change, layoff. (A layoff or down round changes the "why is this role open" answer.)
3. How the company makes money, and whether this role is near the revenue or far from it.
4. The interviewer(s): role, tenure, anything public they have written or said - one genuine reference beats five facts.
5. Two competitors and the one-line difference - this powers the best question in the questions bank.
6. The stated values or engineering/sales culture claims - used to select which stories to lead with, not to parrot back.

Step 3: Mine the STAR story bank - 6 to 8 stories

Go through the resume line by line and extract 6 to 8 stories, each written in STAR shape: Situation (one sentence), Task (one sentence), Action (two to three sentences - what the candidate personally did, "I" not "we"), Result (one sentence with a number wherever one exists). Map each story to the competencies it can answer, because one strong story typically covers two or three questions.

Cover these eight competencies, which account for the large majority of behavioral questions; a bank that maps at least one story to each is ready:

Competency	Typical question
Conflict / disagreement	"Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague or manager"
Failure / mistake	"Tell me about a time you failed"
Leadership / influence without authority	"Tell me about a time you led without being the manager"
Ambiguity / initiative	"Tell me about a time you had to figure it out yourself"
Delivery under pressure	"Tell me about a tight deadline"
Cross-functional work	"Tell me about working with another team"
Biggest accomplishment	"What are you most proud of"
Learning / growth	"Tell me about a skill you had to learn fast"

Rules for the bank: every Result gets a number or a named concrete outcome; the failure story ends with what changed afterward, never with blame; no story exceeds 90 seconds spoken (roughly 200 words written).

Step 4: Build the questions-to-ask bank

Prepare 6 questions; the candidate will use 3 to 4. Order them best-first because interviews run out of time.

1. One question that proves the research - built on Step 2 item 5 ("You compete with X mostly on Y - how does this role move that?").
2. One about the role's success criteria ("What would the person in this role have done in six months for you to call the hire a win?").
3. One about the team's current hardest problem.
4. One about the interviewer personally ("What has kept you here N years?") - use only with a warm interviewer.
5. One about how the team works day to day (rituals, tools, decision-making).
6. Reserve: "What hesitations do you have about my fit?" - high risk, high information; use only in a final round with rapport.

Never ask anything answerable from the website, and never ask about salary, vacation, or remote policy in early rounds - those belong to the offer stage and salary-negotiation.

Step 5: Prepare the salary-question deflection

If asked "what are your salary expectations" before an offer exists, the candidate should deflect once, politely, because the first number anchored usually favors whoever did not say it. Rehearse this line until it sounds natural:

"I'd rather make sure we're a strong fit first - I'm confident that if we
get there, we can land on a number that works for both of us. Can you share
the range budgeted for the role?"

If pressed a second time, give a researched range (not a point), anchored to the top of market data for the role and location, and say it is negotiable based on the full package. Do not deflect a third time - repeated dodging burns goodwill. Everything after an offer letter exists belongs to salary-negotiation.

Step 6: Run the mock-interview loop

Run at least 2 loops before the interview; 3 to 4 if there are 5 or more days. Each loop:

1. The agent asks 5 questions - 3 behavioral (drawn from the Step 3 competency table, weighted toward the posting's top requirements), 1 "walk me through your resume," 1 curveball ("why are you leaving," "why us," or the salary question).
2. The candidate answers out loud, not in writing - spoken rambling is the failure mode being trained out.
3. Score each answer against three checks: under 90 seconds; Result stated with a number; Action told in "I" statements.
4. Feedback names the single biggest fix per answer, not a list. One fix per loop per answer is what actually changes behavior.
5. Repeat weak questions in the next loop until they pass all three checks twice in a row.

Concrete thresholds

• Story bank: 6 to 8 stories, all 8 competencies covered, every Result carries a number or named outcome.
• Answer length: 90 seconds maximum spoken (~200 words); "walk me through your resume" gets 2 minutes maximum.
• Questions bank: 6 prepared, 3 to 4 used.
• Salary deflection: deflect at most twice, then give a range anchored to top-of-market data.
• Mock loops: minimum 2; an answer is "ready" after passing all three checks twice consecutively.

Deliverable

A prep packet the candidate walks in with: the completed research checklist (one sentence per item), the 6-8 story STAR bank with competency mapping, the 6-question ask bank in priority order, the rehearsed salary deflection line, and a mock-loop scorecard showing which answers pass and which need one more rep.

Do NOT

• Do NOT let the candidate memorize scripts word-for-word. Memorized answers collapse under one follow-up question; rehearse the story beats, not the sentences.
• Do NOT build stories in "we" voice. Interviewers are hiring the candidate, not their former team; "we shipped it" earns the follow-up "what did you do," and having no answer is disqualifying.
• Do NOT skip the failure story. "I can't think of a failure" reads as low self-awareness, which many interviewers treat as a hard no.
• Do NOT give a salary point-number when pressed. A range preserves room; a point concedes it.
• Do NOT run mock loops in writing. Written answers hide the rambling that spoken answers expose.

Quality bar

• Every competency in the table maps to at least one story; every story Result has a number or concrete named outcome.
• Each rehearsed answer passes the three checks (≤90s, quantified result, "I" voice) twice in a row.
• The candidate can state the company's business, its most recent notable event, and one interviewer-specific fact without notes.
• The salary deflection has been said aloud at least three times.
• At least 3 questions in the ask bank could not be answered from the company website.

Escalation and neighbors

Once an offer exists, stop deflecting and route to salary-negotiation - the anchoring rules invert when the leverage does. If mock loops keep failing because the resume material itself is thin or unquantified, route to resume-reviewer. For rehearsing high-stakes spoken delivery beyond interviews - presentations, panel talks - route to pitch-practice-coach.