How to Prepare for a Job Interview (After Your CV Lands It)

How to allocate your prep time

Before any specific prep, set the budget. Most candidates have somewhere between 2 hours (got called yesterday) and 2 weeks (booked it ahead). The mistake is the same regardless of total time: spending 80% on the company and 20% on yourself. Flip that.

A useful split for a 4-hour prep block:

• 90 minutes — rehearsing your own stories (the work you did, the results you got, the things that didn't go as planned)
• 45 minutes — re-reading the job description and your own CV until you can talk fluently about both
• 45 minutes — company research, but specifically the four items below — not deep dives
• 30 minutes — researching the interviewers on LinkedIn
• 30 minutes — preparing questions to ask
• Reserve the last 30 minutes for nothing — calm down, eat, walk. Cramming at the door hurts more than it helps

The fundamental shift: an interview is mostly you talking about your own work, not the interviewer quizzing you on theirs. The candidate who can talk fluently and specifically about their own background — with concrete numbers and concrete failures — outperforms the one who memorised the company's product line.

Re-read the job description and pick the 3-4 priorities

Re-read the job description carefully and write down — bullet form — the three or four skills or scopes the role most emphasises. Look for repetition. If „stakeholder management" appears in three different paragraphs, it's a top priority. If a specific tool is named, that's a priority. If a problem domain (e.g., „scaling early-stage marketplaces") is mentioned, that's a priority.

Those are the topics the interviewer will dig into. For each of those, prepare ONE concrete story from your background that demonstrates the skill in action.

• Quote the JD priorities back literally — interviewers wrote those words, they'll recognise them
• Map each priority to a specific past project, not an abstract claim
• If a JD priority doesn't map to your background, acknowledge the gap and prepare a story about how you've learned similar things quickly before

The candidate who tailored their CV to the role already did most of this exercise. If you skipped it then, do it now — the alignment between what they're asking for and what you say about yourself is the whole interview in compressed form.

Re-read your own CV (and prep failures, not just wins)

Sounds obvious, but candidates routinely forget specifics from roles four years ago and stumble when asked. For every role on your CV, you should be able to say in 30 seconds:

• What the company did and your scope within it
• One concrete project you owned
• One result with a number (revenue impact, time saved, users gained, cost reduced)
• One thing that didn't work and what you did about it
• Why you left (or why you'd leave the current role)

The „didn't work" example is the one most candidates skip and most interviewers love — it demonstrates self-awareness and the ability to learn. Every senior interviewer is wary of candidates who present a career of unbroken success; it reads as either dishonest or unreflective. Have at least two failure stories ready, both with clear lessons drawn.

Stories: the STAR framework and why result wins

STAR — Situation, Task, Action, Result — is the standard structure interviewers expect for behavioural questions. The mistake most candidates make is allocating equal time to each piece. Don't. The Result is what the interviewer cares about; the rest is just enough context to make the Result believable.

Rehearse each one out loud, alone in a room, once. The act of speaking the story aloud makes it 3× more fluent in the actual interview than just mentally walking through it. Don't memorise word-for-word — that reads stilted — but get the beats down so the words come without effort.

Company research — what to know, what to skip

Research the company, but selectively. Most candidates over-invest here because it feels productive and is the easiest thing to do. The reality: most interviewers don't quiz you on company facts. What they do is ask „why us?" and listen for whether your answer is specific or generic.

You need exactly four things:

• What they sell and to whom — one-sentence summary you could give to a friend
• Their stage and approximate size — early-stage / scale-up / mid-market / enterprise. Headcount within an order of magnitude
• Any recent significant news — a launch, a funding round, a key hire, a controversy, a pivot. Last 6 months
• One specific thing on their website, product, or blog that genuinely interests you and you can reference naturally in the interview

That's it. Four hours of company research past this is wasted. The candidate who can talk fluently about their own work outperforms the one who memorised the company's leadership team. The exception is if you're interviewing for a specialist role in a regulated industry (legal, biotech, finance) where domain knowledge is itself the qualification — then go deeper, but go deeper on the domain, not the company's history.

Researching the interviewers

Look up the people who will interview you on LinkedIn. Note their backgrounds, what they've worked on, how long they've been in the role, anything you have in common — a previous employer, a school, a side interest. Having this context does three things:

• Lets you calibrate the conversation — a CTO who came from infrastructure asks different questions than one who came from product
• Helps you ask better questions to them specifically („I noticed you spent five years at [previous company] — what made you switch?")
• Creates organic rapport — finding one shared reference point dramatically lowers the temperature of the room

Don't reference your research in a creepy way („I see you went to the same university as my cousin") — just let it inform tone and topic. The goal is to walk in knowing who you're talking to, not to recite their LinkedIn back at them.

Questions to ask the interviewer

Every interview ends with „do you have any questions for us?" The answer must be yes — saying no signals you don't care or didn't prepare. But the question quality matters as much as the question count. Generic questions („what's the team culture like?") get generic answers and signal generic interest. Specific questions earn specific information AND demonstrate you're thinking about the role seriously.

Prepare 4-5 questions, plan to ask 2-3 (you may not have time for more).

• Role-specific: „You mentioned this role splits between IC work and team coordination — what's the actual ratio in the first 6 months versus 12?"
• Context-specific: „I saw you launched [feature] last month — what's the biggest unknown going into the next quarter?"
• Team-specific: „Who would I work with most closely, and how is success measured for this team?"
• Honest-signal: „What's the hardest part of this role that isn't obvious from the JD?" — interviewers respect this question and the answer is often diagnostic
• About them: „What's something about working here that surprised you when you joined?" — humanises the conversation and gets real signal

Don't ask salary, benefits, or vacation in the first interview — those belong to the offer conversation. Don't ask anything answerable in 5 seconds on the company website. The questions you ask are the second most-remembered part of the interview, after your own stories.

Preparing by interview format

Generic prep gets you partway. The last hour should be format-specific.

Same total prep time, deployed differently per format. Knowing in advance which format you'll face is half the battle — if the recruiter didn't tell you, ask before the day.

Logistics — they matter more than you think

Glitchy tech and rushed arrivals cost you 5-10% of your performance because part of your brain is debugging instead of answering. Eliminate friction in advance.

The hour before — calm beats over-prep

The hour before the interview is for de-stressing, not learning. Do not re-cram. Last-minute rereading produces anxiety, not knowledge — you've already done the work.

• Do something physical — a 15-minute walk, stretching, push-ups. Lowers cortisol
• Eat something. An empty stomach affects your voice and energy
• Drink water but not so much you need a break mid-interview
• Listen to something familiar — music you know well, not new podcasts
• Re-read only the top of your prep notes: the 3-4 JD priorities and your stories. Not the whole document

Show up calm. Give yourself permission to not have a perfect answer to every question — the interviewer doesn't expect one. Remember the interviewer is also choosing whether they want to work with you. It's a two-way evaluation, not a test, and treating it as such relaxes both parties.

After the interview — the thank-you email and the self-debrief

Two things to do in the 24 hours after the interview.

If you advance to the next round, your prep is half-done — you already have notes from this conversation, you know the format, you've met some of the people. Build the next round's prep on top of this round's debrief; do not start from scratch.

The interview-day checklist

• Three or four JD priorities written down and a story for each
• Six STAR stories rehearsed out loud
• Two failure stories with lessons drawn
• Four company facts: what / to whom / stage / one recent thing
• Each interviewer LinkedIn-researched, one personal connection point noted
• Four or five prepared questions, plan to ask 2-3
• Format-specific prep done (mock case, practice problem, system design template, whatever applies)
• Logistics confirmed: address or meeting link, tech tested, what to bring or wear
• Hour-before calmer activity planned: walk, snack, music
• Thank-you email template drafted to send within 24 hours after

The candidate who walks in having done this list is in the top quartile of preparation — most have done maybe half of it. Preparation isn't what makes interviews fun; it's what makes them stop being terrifying. Once you've done the work, the interview becomes a conversation you're ready for, not a test you're hoping to survive.