Job Interviewing

112 flashcards by MentisLibrary

Preparing from the job posting, STAR answers for behavioral questions, the standard questions and how to answer them, technical and case rounds, phone and video and panel formats, follow up, and the offer conversation.

What should you research about a company before an interview?
How it makes money, its main products and customers, news from the last six months, and the specific problems named in the job posting.
How do you turn a job posting into a prep list?
Pull out every stated requirement, rank them by how often the posting repeats or emphasizes them, and prepare one concrete example for each of the top five.
What is a story bank?
A written set of six to eight of your strongest work examples, each with the situation, your actions, the result, and a list of the competencies it can demonstrate.
How many prepared stories do you actually need?
Six to eight. Most behavioral questions collapse into a handful of themes, so each story should be usable for more than one.
What should you know cold about your own resume?
Every date, number, tool and specific contribution on the page, because anything you wrote is fair game.
How do you prepare when you have no directly relevant experience?
Map each required competency to evidence from another context: another industry, school, volunteering, or a self directed project.
Why should you rehearse answers out loud?
Silent rehearsal hides rambling, filler words and answers that run three minutes. Speaking reveals all three.
How do you get value from a mock interview?
Have someone ask your prepared questions in random order, interrupt you once, and give feedback on length and specificity rather than on content.
What should you confirm 24 hours before an interview?
Time and time zone, format, the interviewer names and titles, the meeting link or address, parking or building access, and who to contact if something goes wrong.
Why should you research the individual interviewers?
So you can ask each person a question only they can answer, and so you know whether you are speaking to a peer, a manager, or a skip level.
What should you bring to an in person interview?
Printed copies of your resume, a notebook and pen, your interviewers names, any portfolio or work sample, and photo identification if the building requires it.
How early should you arrive?
Be in the lobby or on the call five to ten minutes early. Earlier than fifteen minutes makes staff manage you before the interview starts.
What is a hiring loop?
The full sequence of interviews for one role, usually a recruiter screen, a hiring manager screen, a skills round, and a final panel or onsite.
What is a structured interview?
One where every candidate gets the same predefined questions, scored against a written rubric, rather than a free conversation.
What is the STAR method?
A four part structure for behavioral answers: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
In STAR, how long should the Situation be?
Two or three sentences. Enough context that the actions make sense, no more.
In STAR, what belongs in Action?
What you personally did, step by step, including the decisions you made and why. This is the part being scored.
In STAR, what makes a strong Result?
A concrete outcome with a number or a clear before and after, plus what you learned or changed afterwards.
When should you say I and when we?
Use we to describe the team situation and I for every action you personally took. If the whole answer is we, the interviewer cannot score you.
What are the CAR and SAO variants of STAR?
The same skeleton with fewer parts: Context, Action, Result and Situation, Action, Outcome. Both drop the separate Task step.
How long should a behavioral answer be?
About 90 seconds to two minutes. Long enough for structure, short enough to leave room for follow ups.
How do you answer a behavioral question when you have no example?
Say so, offer the closest real analogue, and then say specifically what you would do in the situation asked.
Tell me about a time you failed.
Choose a real failure you owned, describe what went wrong, take responsibility without excuses, and say concretely what you changed afterwards.
Tell me about a conflict with a coworker.
Describe a disagreement about substance, how you sought their reasoning, what you agreed, and the state of the working relationship afterwards.
Tell me about a time you influenced without authority.
Show how you built the case: who you needed, what they cared about, what evidence moved them, and the outcome.
Tell me about a time you missed a deadline.
Say what slipped, when you knew, who you told and how early, what you did to limit the damage, and what you changed in how you estimate.
Tell me about difficult feedback you received.
Name the actual feedback, resist defending yourself, describe what you did differently, and give evidence that it stuck.
Tell me about a decision you made with incomplete information.
State what you knew, what you could not know in time, the cost of waiting, the decision, and how you built in a way to correct it.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.
Describe a substantive disagreement, how you raised it privately with evidence, what happened, and how you behaved once the decision was made.
Tell me about a time you led a team.
Describe how you set direction, divided the work, handled the one person or problem that threatened it, and what the team delivered.