Interview preparation

Greg Wyatt • June 5, 2024

I see a lot of advice on how to perform well at interview.

Typically it relates to STAR (situation task action results), CARL (context action results learning) or another derivation of this storytelling framework.

However, this advice typically stands on its own and can set you adrift if you don’t have the right anchor:

Preparation.

Before we get into prep, it’s helpful to start from first principles. Bear with me, as I go into:

The what and why of interviews
The goals of interviewers
The real reason you interview
How you can prepare with these in mind

Next week is about the interview itself, and the following final part will be on what happens after the 1st interview.

The what and why of interviews

The goal of any interview process is to

understand how a candidate will perform in a role,
what they will be like to work with
how likely they are to stick around long enough for the employer to see a suitable return on investment
assess these points against other candidates being interviewed

Every employer has different priorities in assessing the points, different ways of conducting interviews and different strategies for how the process is run.

The problem is that, from the outside in, it’s hard to tell what to expect, when initial communications are broadly similar.

Transparency helps and is a great way to build trust, yet few employers do this.

If you were to know in advance that you are one of 25 people being screened by a panel on Teams, how would that affect your preparation compared to being one of 3?

Like a lot of things in recruitment, gaining insight into the what and why of any interview process should inform your strategy.

Typically employers won’t include agency interviews as part of their interview process, though I’m sure you might.

Indeed an employer might feel they only do a 2-stage process that is quite efficient, yet how would you feel if you encountered:

Application to agency advert
Registration with agency
Agency screening
Qualification call with TA Advisor at employer
Numerical and verbal reasoning test
1st interview with hiring manager
2nd interview stage comprising 4 separate calls with stakeholders around the world
Psychometrics
Quick chat with the CEO
Debrief with the hiring manager?

That’s off the top of my head. The worst I’ve heard was a 17-stage interview process!

One of my former clients (who shut up shop in the UK a few years back) regularly used to run 7 or 8 interview stages, yet they are a great company to work for.

I wouldn’t assume employers are necessarily ‘bad’ if this information isn’t available, or if their process is as bloated as this article.

The goals of interviewers

The goal of any interview process is to select the best suitable candidate.

However that isn’t necessarily the goal of any individual interview or interviewer.

Goals can be dictated by a number of elements, such as number of candidates or differing views of stakeholders.

These goals can be anything from:

Checking broad suitability before progressing to decision makers
Looking for reasons to discount candidates from a volume process
Wanting to look credible to higher-ups in who is presented
Assessing cultural fit or technical capability
Investigating concerns or doubts
Confirming a decision

Interviews can also move from ‘recruitment and selection’ to ‘recruitment and elimination’ the closer you get to the end of a process.

This is particularly the case if candidates are very close in overall capability - if you can’t find a clear reason to say yes, are there any reasons you can discount a candidate?

This is one reason why ‘industry knowledge’ can become a problem at final stage, when it wasn’t earlier.

Sometimes there may even be unsavoury behaviour, such as asking you to provide a business plan in a presentation, when they have no intent to hire - free consulting!

Or it might be they want another young white male Arsenal-loving face to fit with their culture.

However, if you are in an interview process, you should assume they have good intent, while the decisions made on you are out of your control.

All you can do is influence their view through your approach.

Given there is such a huge variety in interview philosophy, purpose, strategy, process and execution it can be tempting to second guess everything and overcomplicate your part in it.

However, I’d go the other way and simplify it to what you can control.

Interviews are your opportunity to show the employer why you are interested in them, how you will contribute, how you will solve their problems, and what you are like in a professional setting.

Unless you are clearly told what to expect, it doesn’t matter so much what tricks employers will have up their sleeves.

Because if you’ve put your best foot forward, in a way that is professionally authentic, that’s the best way to maximise your odds.

The real reason you interview

Interviews can and should be a two-way process that gives you transparent information and enables an objective decision about whether this vacancy is the right move.

Interviews aren’t always though are they?

You might think that getting the job is your goal.

The real reason to interview is to establish as early as possible every non-negotiable reason why you shouldn’t take the job.

This means you do what you can to be the candidate of choice, for the right reasons, and if there are no non-negotiable no’s at the end of the process, you can accept the offer put forward.

That might sound like a strange contortion of the goal of getting the job.

The nuance is this:

You want to be able to be the person who says no, if you have to, rather than have them say no for you.

And because many parts of the interview process are out of your control, such as their decisions, you have to play the game to maximise your odds of winning.

How you can prepare with these in mind

There are broadly six types of preparation you can do for an interview:

i) Ensure you portray yourself in a way that has meaning to the interviewer

ii) Keeping abreast of general industry and professional news related to your work

iii) The company, its people, its offering, its industry and its market

iv) Give the interview what it needs

v) How you can deliver on the role requirements

vi) Why you want the job, or at least to work at the company

The first two are ongoing preparations that serve every interview process.

The rest are mainly application-specific.

4.i) Ensure you portray yourself in a way that has meaning to the interviewer

One of the key pitfalls in recruitment, whether you are a job seeker or employer, is the valuable information you have trapped in your head that will help the other see you as a viable candidate.

Don’t forget we aren’t mind readers, so how can you give meaning to why you are a great candidate?

I’m going to cheat a little here and recommend you read through Principles of a Good CV.

Not because you should repeat your CV verbatim, but because it’s a distillation of your candidacy written for the reader. And a reminder of how you can help.

You should be an expert on yourself, who can draw on your achievements readily.

Get a friend to ask you questions on your CV, someone who isn’t an expert in your domain, and see how they react to your answers.

While you might hope interviewers have technical insight in your areas of specialism, you will inevitably come across people who in the process who aren’t.

For example an HR practitioner may be involved as a steward for their culture, and to ensure you are interviewed fairly - should you expect them to understand jargon? And how might that work against you?

If you are fortunate enough to get interviews regularly, you can treat these as practice and the real thing. Watch how interviewers respond to what you say, and reflect on it afterwards. How can you give better meaning?

Unfortunately, interviewing is a skill, so it’s likely one you will have to learn by going through the mill if it isn’t natural to your personality.

Fortunately, it’s the same journey for most, so over time your skill will develop past newer jobseekers.

The mistake many people assume is that this is a sales skill and needs to project confidence, but unless the role involves sales, the requirement is actually only to be your best professional self, and show what you are like to work with.

Given that’s what you are like at work on a good day, it’s an achievable goal.

This is prep you should do before any interview and is both an anchor to your candidacy and a reminder of why you can be great at what you do.

4.ii) Keeping abreast of general industry and professional news related to your work

For anyone interested in continuous professional development this should be a natural endeavour.

Yet it’s easy to fall into the trap of not doing so, when you are between jobs, or busy with other priorities.

Given what’s going on in the near-outside world of your profession impacts your profession, I’d recommend you take a bit of time every week to keep updated.

It may even help with interviewing, showing the currency of your expertise.

4.iii) The company, its people, its offering, its industry and its market

I wrote a series, recently, on negotiation in recruitment, comparing notes with the excellent ‘Never Split the Difference’ by Chris Voss.

One of the pillars of good negotiation is to gain as full an understanding of the situation as possible.

If you want to negotiate a successful interview, one where you’re seen as the right candidate, doing so is an advantage.

There are many resources available:

Their website
Their other vacancies
Their industry news
Media relations
Youtube
Endole / TechCrunch
Local resources like Cambridge Network and Business Weekly (you can guess what this is local for!)
LinkedIn to get a feel for their organisational structure
LinkedIn for information on the interviewers (why not connect and say hi)
LinkedIn for their content, which might give hidden insight to their attitudes
LinkedIn for past employees (what can they tell you?)
Glass door / indeed / trustpilot / google reviews - what does this say about customer and candidate experiences?

I’d recommend reading Never Split the Difference - while it’s geared towards commercial negotiations and hostage-taking, Voss’ view is that everything is a negotiation, and I found it insightful comparing my own experiences.

You can also read my articles on gregwyatt.substack.com/archive. The first one is called Rule of Three.

Every industry and company will have their own priorities in an interview - keep this in mind, particularly if you’re transitioning into a new domain.

Someone with only private sector experience might be quite surprised by the needs of a civil service recruitment process, but information is typically available to help you prepare.

4.iv) Give the interview what it needs

Every interview has its own priority, some of which will articulate specific needs.

If you want to stay in a legitimate interview process, give the employer what they ask for.

You may think presentations, on-site meetings, psychometrics, etc are worthless, but if they are non-negotiable for the employer, they are a requirement to fulfil.

You don’t have to play the game; if you choose to, play to win.

4.v) How you can deliver on the role requirements

I always come back to the notion that we have to help our stakeholders understand how we can help them.

It’s no different in an interview.

Analyse what you can of their role, and think about the achievements you have, the problems you’ve solved, and the outcomes you’ve reached - in reflection of their needs.

It’s worth qualifying this in the interview too - more on this next week - so you can tailor your answers.

While this is role-specific preparation it is also related to point i) above - the answers are within.

4.vi) Why you want the job, or at least to work at the company

I expect most people who’ve been out of work for a while simply want a way to make ends meet.

Yet I wouldn’t recommend using this as an answer at an interview.

Indeed, most employers have an inclination to candidates who have reason to want to work for them specifically.

Take time to understand your reasons that relate to the job or company. What about them appeals to you?

This is the answer to give.

If the only reason you’re applying is because it is a job, how can you truthfully frame your answer to make it about them?

“I really enjoy the role of a <job title> especially around <essential requirements>” with examples from their job description - might be crude, but it’s more effective than

“I need to buy dinner on Friday”, no matter how true that is.

It can be a deciding factor in a tight process.

Next week is about delivering the interview.

Tactical points to present your best self, how STAR/CARL are storytelling frameworks, why that’s more important than just answering the question, and how you can stand out from the crowd through strategic questions.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Greg

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Jump the shark. A Recruitment AiDE, pt 13

By Greg Wyatt • January 29, 2026

May 2023 You’ve heard the phrase, I take it – “jump the shark”? It’s the moment when one surprising or absurd experience can indicate a rapid descent into rubbishness and obscurity. When it’s time to get off the bus. Typically in media. Jumping the Shark comes from an episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz does a water ski jump over a shark. 👈 Aaaaay. 👉 A sign creators have run out of ideas, or can’t be bothered to come up with fresh ones. In movies, sequelitis is a good example of this – an unnecessary sequel done to make some cash, in the hope the audience doesn’t care about its quality. Sometimes they become dead horses to flog, such as the missteps that are any Terminator film after 2. It’s an issue that can lead to consumers abandoning what they were doing, with such a precipitous drop in engagement that the thing itself is then cancelled. Partly because of breaking trust in what was expected to happen next. And because it’s a sign that the disbelief that was temporarily suspended has come crashing down. If you don’t believe that your current poor experience will lead to further, better experiences, why would you bother? Once you’ve had your fingers burnt, how hard is it to find that trust in similar experiences? It doesn’t have to be a single vein of experience for all to be affected. Watch one dodgy superhero movie and how does it whet your appetite for the next? You didn’t see The Eternals? Lucky you. Or how about that time we had really bad service at Café Rouge, a sign of new management that didn’t care, and we never went again? Just me? Did they sauter par-dessus le requin? Here’s the rub – it matters less that these experiences have jumped the shark. It matters more what the experience means for expectation. So it is in candidate experience. It’s not just the experience you provide that tempers expectations – it’s the cumulated experience of other processes that creates an assumption of what might be expected of yours. If you’re starting from a low trust point, what will it take for your process to ‘jump the shark’ and lose, not just an engaged audience, but those brilliant candidates that might only have considered talking to you if their experience hadn’t been off-putting? Not fair, is it, that the experience provided by other poor recruitment processes might affect what people expect of yours? Their experiences aren’t in your control, the experience you provide is. Of my 700 or so calls with exec job seekers, since The Pandemic: Lockdown Pt 1, many described the candidate experience touchpoints that led to them deciding not to proceed with an application. These were calls that were purely about job search strategy, and not people I could place. However, one benefit for me is that they are the Gemba , and I get to hear their direct experiences outside of my recruitment processes. Experiences such as - ‘£Competitive salary’ in an advert or DM, which they know full well means a lowball offer every time, because it happened to them once or twice, or perhaps it was just a LinkedIn post they read. Maybe it isn’t your problem at all, maybe your £competitive is upper 1% - how does their experience inform their assumptions? Or when adverts lend ambiguity to generic words, what meaning do they find, no matter how far from the truth? How the arrogance of a one-sided interview process affects their interest. The apparent narcissism in many outreaches in recruitment (unamazing, isn’t it, that bad outreach can close doors, rather than open them). Those ATS ‘duplicate your CV’ data entry beasts? Fool me once… Instances that are the catalysts for them withdrawing. I’d find myself telling them to look past these experiences, because a poor process can hide a good job. It’s a common theme in my jobseeker posts, such as a recent one offering a counterpoint to the virality that is “COVER LETTERS DON’T M4TT£R agree?” Experiences that may not be meant by the employer, or even thought of as necessarily bad, yet are drivers for decisions and behaviour. I can only appeal to these job seekers through my posts and calls. What about those other jobseekers who I’m not aware of, who’ve only experienced nonsense advice? What about those people who aren’t jobseekers? What about those people who think they love their roles? What about all those great candidates who won’t put up with bad experiences? The more sceptical they are, and the further they are from the need for a new role, the less bullshit they’ll put up with. What happens when an otherwise acceptable process presents something unpalatable? Might this jumping the shark mean they go no further? Every time the experience you provide doesn’t put their needs front and centre or if it’s correlated to their bad experiences…. these can prevent otherwise willing candidates from progressing with your process, whether that’s an advert they don’t apply to, a job they don’t start, or everything in between. Decisions that may stem from false assumptions of what a bad experience will mean. Instead, look to these ‘bad experience’ touchpoints as opportunities to do better: instead of £competitive, either state a salary or a legitimate reason why you can’t disclose salary (e.g. “see below” if limited by a job board field and “we negotiate a fair salary based on the contribution of the successful candidate, and don’t want to limit compensation by a band”) instead of a 1-way interrogation… an interview instead of radio silence when there’s no news - an update to say there’s no update, and ‘How are things with you by the way?’ instead of Apply Now via our Applicant Torture Sadistificator, ‘drop me a line if you have any questions’ or ‘don’t worry if you don’t have an updated CV - we’ll sort that later’. Opportunity from adversity. And why you can look at bad experiences other processes provide as a chance to do better. With the benefit that, if you eliminate poor experience, you'll lose fewer candidates unnecessarily, including those ideal ones you never knew about. Bad experiences are the yin to good experience’s yang and both are key parts of the E that is Experience in the AIDE framework. The good is for next time. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg

How To Network For A Job - Jobseeker Basics XIV

By Greg Wyatt • January 26, 2026

The following is Chapter 42 in A Career Breakdown Kit (2026) . In a sense it's a microcosm of how any commercial activity can see a better return - which is to put the needs of the person you are appealing to above your own. It feels counterintuitive, especially when you have a burning need, but you can see the problem of NOT doing this simply by looking at 99% of job adverts: We are. We need. We want. What you'll do for us. What you might get in return. Capped off by the classic "don't call us, we'll call you." If you didn't need a job, how would you respond to that kind of advert? In the same vein, if you want networking to pay off, how will your contact's life improve by your contact? What's in it for them? 42 - How to network for a job Who are the two types of people you remember at networking events? For me two types stand out. One will be the instant pitch networker. This might work if you happen to be in need right now of what they have to offer or if mutual selling is your goal. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this but it’s a selling activity pretending to be networking. If you want to sell, go and overtly sell rather than disguise it with subterfuge. Lest we mark your face and avoid you where possible in future. The second is the one who gets to know you, shows interest and tries to add to your experience. You share ideas, and there’s no push to buy something. They believe that through building the relationship when you have a problem they can solve, you’ll think to go to them. It’s a relationship built on reciprocity. One where if you always build something together there is reason to keep in touch. And where the outcome is what you need if the right elements come together: right person, right time, right message, right place, right offering, right price. Job search networking is no different. The purpose of networking in a job search is to build a network where you are seen as a go-to solution should a suitable problem come up. In this case the problem you solve is a vacancy. Either because your active network is recruiting, or because they advocate for you when someone they know is recruiting. It is always a two-way conversation you both benefit from. Knowledge sharing, sounding board, see how you’re doing - because of what the relationship brings to you both. It is not contacting someone only to ask for a job or a recommendation. A one-way conversation that relies on lucky timing. That second approach can be effective as a type of direct sales rather than networking. If you get it wrong it may even work against you. How would you feel if someone asked to network with you, when it became clear they want you to do something for them? You might get lucky and network with someone who is recruiting now - more likely is that you nurture that relationship over time. If your goal is only to ask for help each networking opportunity will have a low chance of success. While if your goal is to nurture a relationship that may produce a lead, you’ll only have constructive outcomes. This makes it sensible to start by building a network with people that already know you: Former direct colleagues and company colleagues Industry leaders and peers Recruiters you have employed or applied through Don’t forget the friends you aren’t in regular touch with - there is no shame in being out of work and it would be a shame if they didn’t think of you when aware of a suitable opening. These people are a priority because they know you, your capability and your approach and trust has already been built. Whereas networking with people you don't know requires helping them come to know and trust you. Networking with people you know is the most overlooked tactic by the exec job seekers I talk to (followed by personal branding). These are the same people who see the hidden jobs market as where their next role is, yet overlook what’s in front of them. If you are looking for a new role on the quiet - networking is a go-to approach that invites proactive contact to you. Networking with people who know people you know, then people in a similar domain, then people outside of this domain - these are in decreasing order of priority. Let's not forget the other type of networking. Talking to fellow job seekers is a great way to share your pain, take a load off your shoulders, bounce ideas off each other, and hold each other accountable. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to find the right people if you haven't kept in touch directly. Whatever you think of LinkedIn, you shouldn’t overlook its nature as a conduit to conversation. It isn’t the conversation itself. Speaking in real life is where networking shines because while you might build a facsimile of a relationship in text, it's no replacement for a fluid conversation. Whether by phone and video calls, real life meetups, business events, seminars, conferences, expos, or in my case - on dog walks and waiting outside of the school gates. Both these last two have led to friends and business for me though the latter hasn’t been available since 2021. Networking isn’t 'What can I get out of it?' Instead, ‘What’s in it for them?’ The difference is the same as those ransom list job adverts compared to the rare one that speaks to you personally. How can you build on this relationship by keeping in touch? Networking is systematic, periodic and iterative: Map out your real life career network. Revisit anyone you’ve ever worked with and where Find them on LinkedIn Get in touch ‘I was thinking about our time at xxx. Perhaps we could reconnect - would be great to catch up’ If they don’t reply, because life can be busy, diarise a follow up What could be of interest to them? A LinkedIn post might be a reason to catch up When you look up your contact’s profile look at the companies they’ve worked at. They worked there for a reason, which may be because of a common capability to you Research these companies. Are there people in relevant roles worth introducing yourself to? Maybe the company looks a fit with your aspirations - worth getting in touch with someone who may be a hiring manager or relevant recruiter? Maybe they aren’t recruiting now. Someone to keep in touch with because of mutual interests. Click on Job on their company page, then "I'm interested" - this helps for many reasons, including flagging your interest as a potential employee Keep iterating your network and find new companies as you look at new contacts. This is one way we map the market in recruitment to headhunt candidates - you can mirror this with your networking The more proactive networking you build into your job search, the luckier you might get. While you might need to nurture a sizeable network and there are no guarantees, think about the other virtues of networking - how does that compare to endless unreplied applications? I often hear from job seekers who found their next role through networking. This includes those who got the job because of their network even though hundreds of applicants were vying for it. While this may be unfair on the applicants sometimes you can make unfair work for you. It can be effective at any level.