Interview preparation
Interview preparation is a system you build once and reuse, not a script you memorise for each company.
Interview preparation fails for a structural reason rather than a motivational one. People prepare intensively for one interview, perform, and then throw the material away — so the next interview starts from a blank page again. Six interviews in, they have prepared six times and accumulated nothing.
The alternative is to treat it as two separate things. There is a durable asset — a written bank of stories from your own work, built once and added to over years — and there is a short per-interview routine of research, selection and rehearsal that draws on it. The asset is where the effort belongs, because it compounds; the routine is what makes each individual interview cheap.
This also changes what preparation feels like. Building an evidence bank is a calm activity you do on a Sunday with no deadline. Composing seven stories the night before an interview is not, and the difference shows in the room — not because you are better prepared, but because you are not trying to remember something you wrote four hours ago.
Key terms
- Evidence bank
- A written store of stories from your own work, one per entry, covering the themes behavioural interviews draw from. Built once and maintained, it is the difference between selecting an answer and inventing one under pressure.
- Probe
- The follow-up question after a story — what you would do differently, who disagreed, how you knew. Probes are where an interview is usually decided, because a rehearsed narrative survives the first question and a real memory survives the third.
- Structured interview
- An interview where every candidate is asked the same questions and scored against a written framework. Common in banking, consulting and graduate hiring, and the reason preparing against the framework rather than against the company is the higher-yield strategy.
- Closing questions
- The questions you ask at the end. They are part of the assessment in most structured processes, and they signal the level you are operating at more reliably than any answer you give, because they cannot be prepared from a generic list.
Frequently asked questions
How far in advance should I start preparing?
The evidence bank should exist before you start applying, because building it takes an unhurried afternoon and it is the part that cannot be rushed. Per-interview preparation is best done the day before, close enough that the research is fresh. Preparing a week out and not revisiting it is the worst of both — the effort is spent and the detail has faded.
What is the single highest-value thing to do?
Rehearse three stories out loud, timed, standing up. It is the step almost everyone skips and the one that most reliably changes the interview, because the failure mode is not forgetting your material — it is discovering that a story you can write in two minutes takes you four to say and loses its shape halfway through.
Should I research the individual interviewers?
Briefly, and only for what changes how you answer: their function, their seniority, how long they have been there. That tells you whether to pitch technically or commercially. Reading their full history and referencing it in the room reads as surveillance rather than diligence, and it makes people uncomfortable.
How do I prepare when I have no relevant experience?
The themes are about behaviour, not about the industry. A conflict you handled in a part-time job, a group project that went wrong, a society you organised — all of these answer the question genuinely. What fails is not the lack of a finance example; it is having no specific example at all, because a general statement about how you approach teamwork cannot be probed and therefore cannot be scored.