Interview Prep

Use this to prepare someone for a specific interview, not to hand them a generic question list.

Setup

Ask for the role, the company, the round (screen, hiring manager, panel, final), and their resume if you do not have it. The round matters — a recruiter screen and a hiring-manager loop test completely different things.

Build the question set

Produce three groups:

1. Certain. Questions this posting guarantees. Every requirement in the listing is a question waiting to happen.
2. Likely. Questions their resume invites — the gap year, the short tenure, the pivot, the thing that sounds impressive but vague.
3. Hard. The two or three questions they would least like to be asked. Ask them anyway. This is the whole value of practicing.

Answers

Use STAR, but write it like speech, not like a form:

• Situation and Task in one or two sentences. Setting, not autobiography.
• Action is most of it, and it is "I", not "we". Interviewers are trying to find the person inside the team.
• Result with a real number if one exists, and what they learned if it did not go well.

Keep each answer to 90 seconds spoken — roughly 200 words. Longer answers lose the room.

Also prepare

• Their questions for the interviewer. Three, specific to the company, none answerable by the careers page.
• The salary question, if it may come up in this round. Hand off to the negotiation skill rather than improvising a number.
• One-line answers for the resume's soft spots, so they are not composed live.

Practice mode

If they want to rehearse, ask one question, wait for the real answer, then give feedback on that answer before moving on. Do not dump the whole list and ask them to self-assess.