How to prepare for an interview in a week

A week is enough. It is not enough to become a different candidate, and any plan that assumes you have four free evenings is written for someone else. This one assumes you have about an hour a day and one longer session at the weekend.

Day 1 — Read the job description properly

Not skim. Read it and mark it up.

Most descriptions contain four or five things the team actually cares about, buried in a list of twelve. You can usually tell which: they appear twice, in different words, or they are unusually specific. "Experience with high-volume data pipelines" in a list of generic bullets is a real requirement. "Excellent communication skills" is filler.

Write down the four. Everything else this week points at them.

Day 2 — Inventory what you have done

Twenty minutes, a blank page. List every project, incident, migration, disagreement and launch you can remember from the last two or three years. Two lines each. Do not polish anything.

You are not writing answers yet. You are finding out what raw material exists, and most people are surprised by how much they had forgotten.

Day 3 — Match material to the four things

Against each of the four requirements from Day 1, put two items from your list.

Gaps are the point of this exercise. If you cannot find anything for one of the four, you have found the question you are most likely to fumble — and you have four days to think about how to handle it honestly. "I haven't done exactly that, but the closest thing is..." is a perfectly good answer, delivered calmly. It is only fatal when it surprises you.

Day 4 — Say three answers out loud

Out loud. Not in your head, not typed.

The gap between an answer that reads well and an answer that sounds good is larger than anyone expects, and you only find it by speaking. You will discover that your setup takes far too long, that you say "basically" eleven times, and that you have no ending.

Three answers is enough to find the pattern. The pattern applies to all of them.

Day 5 — Write your questions for them

Not "what's the culture like". Questions you actually want answered, because you are also deciding.

The good ones tend to come from the job description: if it mentions a migration, ask how far through it they are. If the team is new, ask what existed before. These are impossible to prepare generically and they are obviously genuine, which is the whole effect.

Three is plenty. You will get through two.

Weekend — One full run

Sit down and do a complete pass: the opening question, four or five behavioural questions, your questions at the end. Without stopping to fix things as you go.

The point is stamina and recovery. Interviews go wrong in small ways constantly — you lose a thread, you pick the wrong example halfway through. A full run is where you practise carrying on, which is the skill that actually matters on the day.

The day before

Do almost nothing. Re-read your four requirements and your questions. Check the joining link, and check your microphone.

Cramming new material the night before does not add answers, it adds noise. The candidate who has slept is better than the candidate who has read more.

What is not worth your week

• Memorising answers word for word. They come out flat and collapse on the first follow-up.
• Rehearsing questions you have never been asked. Prepare the four things the role cares about; the rest is a lottery.
• Researching the company's entire history. Know what they do, who their customers are, and something recent. That is the whole requirement.
• Rewriting your CV. They already have it. It got you the interview.

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The single highest-return hour in this plan is Day 4, because speaking is where the problems are. Rehearse against the actual role rather than reading your notes again.