Prepare for an interview at one company

Prepare me for this specific interview. Not a list of common questions.

The role and the advert: [PASTE]
Stage and format: [SCREEN, HIRING MANAGER, PANEL, TECHNICAL, FINAL — AND HOW LONG]
Who I am meeting, if I know: [NAME, ROLE, ANYTHING PUBLIC ABOUT THEM]
What I know about the company: [PRODUCT, SIZE, STAGE, RECENT NEWS — OR "VERY LITTLE"]
My relevant experience: [SUMMARY]
The part I am least confident about: [BE HONEST]

Produce five sections.

1. WHAT THIS STAGE IS FOR — what this specific conversation is deciding, and what it is not. A recruiter screen and a panel are different meetings with different failure modes.

2. THE EIGHT QUESTIONS MOST LIKELY TO COME UP — derived from this advert and this stage, not generic. For each, one line on what they are checking.

3. WHAT I CANNOT CURRENTLY ANSWER — go through section two against the experience I described and name the questions where my material is thin or missing. This is the section I am actually paying for. Be blunt.

4. MY WEAK POINT — take the thing I said I am least confident about and give me an honest way to handle it: what to say, what not to say, and whether to raise it myself or wait to be asked.

5. WHAT TO RESEARCH BEFORE THE DAY — specific and findable. Not "read about the company" but what to look for and where.

Do not tell me to be confident and be myself. If my experience looks like a poor match for this stage, say so.

Interview preparation defaults to breadth: fifty common questions, a page of company facts, some advice about eye contact. Breadth is the wrong shape, because you will be asked eight questions and about three of them will decide it. What you need is depth on the small number that apply to this role, this stage, and this gap in your experience.

Section three is the point of the whole thing. It takes the likely questions and checks them against what you have actually described, then names the ones where you have nothing prepared. Those are the questions you would have discovered in the room. Finding them the night before is not the same as answering them well, but it is the entire difference between a gap you have thought about and a gap you meet live.

Section one matters more than it looks. A recruiter screen is deciding whether you are plausible and affordable; a panel is deciding whether people want to work with you. Preparing for the wrong one produces a candidate who is over-prepared and still wrong.

1. Name the stage and the format precisely

   Thirty minutes with a recruiter and a two-hour panel need almost nothing in common. Getting this wrong is the fastest way to waste the preparation.

2. Be honest about your weak point

   Section four is built entirely from it, and a sanitised answer here produces reassurance instead of a plan. The interviewer will find it regardless.

3. Work section three, not section two

   The questions you can already answer need no rehearsal. The two or three you cannot are the whole evening's work.

4. Do the research yourself

   Section five tells you what to look for. Anything the model states as fact about the company may be invented or out of date — the funding round, the product, the leadership — and repeating a wrong fact in the room is worse than knowing nothing.

• Anything it tells you about the companyFunding, headcount, product, who runs it — all of this ages badly in training data and some of it will be confidently wrong. Use section five as a research list and verify every fact you plan to say out loud.
• When you do not know the formatAsk the recruiter. They will tell you, it is a normal question, and the whole preparation is shaped by the answer.
• Regulated and structured hiringWhere interviews are scored against a fixed framework, the predicted questions may be close to irrelevant. Ask whether a framework applies and prepare against that instead.

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