Interview Preparation That Transfers

Interview preparation has a real bottleneck: there is nobody available to ask you difficult questions repeatedly and without sympathy. That is the gap a model fills well.

Used badly, it produces polished answers you deliver from memory and cannot defend the moment someone asks 'what would you do differently?'

Prepare stories, not answers

A memorised answer covers one question. A well-understood story covers a dozen, because the interviewer's actual question is usually a variation you did not anticipate.

Six to eight real situations from your working life, each with a result, will cover almost any behavioural interview. Know them properly rather than scripting them.

• Something that went wrong and what you did about it
• A disagreement with a colleague or a manager, and how it ended
• Something you shipped or delivered under a real constraint
• A time you changed your mind because of evidence
• Something you taught, explained or handed over
• A decision you would make differently now, and why

Running a useful mock interview

The key instruction is to ask one question at a time and to follow up. A list of ten questions with model answers is not practice; it is reading.

Act as the hiring manager for this role. Interview me.

[paste the job posting]

Rules:
- One question at a time. Wait for my answer
- After each answer, ask one probing follow-up — the kind a
  sceptical interviewer asks: "what was your specific part in
  that?", "what would you do differently?", "what did it cost?"
- Do not compliment me. After the follow-up, give one line on
  what was weak in my answer, then move on
- Mix behavioural and role-specific questions
- Ten questions total, then a summary of my three weakest areas

Start with the first question.

The follow-up is the whole exercise

Most people can deliver a prepared answer. Far fewer can handle 'and what was the actual outcome six months later?' Practising the second layer is what makes the difference in the room, and it is exactly the part solo preparation normally misses.

Technical and task-based rounds

• Explain your reasoning aloud as you work — interviewers assess how you think more than whether you arrive
• Practise the format you will face: a live coding round, a case, a take-home. They fail for different reasons
• For take-homes, ask a model to review your submission adversarially before you send it, the same way you would review generated code
• Be honest about what you used. Several companies now ask directly, and 'I used AI for the boilerplate and wrote the logic myself' is a fine answer; a discovered lie is not

Your questions at the end

Ask about the work, not the perks: what the first three months look like, what makes someone struggle in this role, what the team is worried about. Use a model to generate candidates, then choose the two you genuinely want answered — asking a question you do not care about is visible.