How to prepare for an interview, step by step

Most interview advice is a list of tips. What people actually struggle with is the order: what to do first, how much is enough, and what to leave until the night before. Here is how they put it:

“I have an interview and have no idea how to prepare”

Reddit, r/managers

“How to REALLY prep for an interview”

Reddit, r/interviews

This guide is a plan with dates on it. It assumes you have about two weeks. If you have less, squeeze the early stages together rather than skipping them, and if the interview is tomorrow, use the interview tomorrow guide, which is built for that.

What should an interview prep plan look like?

Think of the two weeks in five stages. The early ones are about knowing what you will be asked, the later ones about saying it well. Plan for at least as much speaking as reading.

Two weeks out

• Ask the recruiter about the process. “How many rounds are there, who will I meet, and what format is each one?” Also ask whether the role is new or a replacement. A new role can mean they are still working out what they want; a replacement usually means they have a clear picture of what the last person did well or badly.
• Print the job description and mark it up, as described below.
• Start your story list. Just titles at this stage, one line each: “the billing migration”, “the angry client in March”.
• For technical roles, start daily practice now. A short session every day does more than a weekend of cramming. Our coding interview plan covers what to practise.
• Book a mock interview with a friend, a former colleague or your college placement cell for about three days before the real one. A date in the diary gives your practice a deadline.

One week out

• Research the company and the people you will meet.
• Turn your story titles into short notes, four lines each, and check they cover the themes the job description points to.
• Do your first practice session out loud and record it on your phone. It will sound worse than you expected. That is the point of doing it now.
• Prepare your opening answer (see how to answer “Tell me about yourself”) and the questions you will ask them.

Three days out

• Do the mock interview. Afterwards, pick the two answers that went worst and rework only those.
• Prepare the awkward answers: why you are leaving, any gap on your CV, and your salary expectation. For salary, look up the range on Glassdoor or LinkedIn, or AmbitionBox in India, and decide your number before anyone asks.
• For an online interview, run a full test of your setup on the same laptop, in the same room, at the same time of day.

The day before

Stop learning new material by early evening. Read your story sheet once, out loud, then put it away. Sort the practical things: the address and how long it really takes to get there, or the meeting link opened once to check it works; your clothes; a charged laptop and phone; the name and phone number of the person you are meeting.

The morning of

Eat something. Read your story titles and your questions for them, and leave new material alone. Say the first sentence of your introduction out loud a couple of times so your voice is warmed up. Plan to arrive ten to fifteen minutes early in person, or to be at your desk, set up, fifteen minutes before an online call. If you have half an hour spare, our 30 minute prep routine is a good way to spend it.

How do I research the company and the people interviewing me?

You are not trying to become an expert on the company. You are trying to answer three questions well: what the company does and how it makes money, why this role exists right now, and why you would be good at it.

The company

• Its own words. The homepage, the careers page and, for a listed company, the latest annual report or results summary. Note who the customers are and what they pay for.
• The last six months of news. A product launch, a funding round, a new market, layoffs. Something recent gives you a natural question to ask and shows you looked past the homepage.
• Its stated values. Some companies turn these straight into interview questions. Amazon is one example: its own interview guide says every hiring decision rests on its 16 Leadership Principles, and that candidates should prepare specific examples for each one. If a company publishes its values, expect some questions to touch on them.
• What past candidates were asked. Interview reviews on Glassdoor, and on AmbitionBox for Indian companies, often list questions past candidates remember being asked. Use them as a hint about topics, not as a script, since they may be out of date.
• The product itself. If you can use it, use it before the interview and come with one honest observation.

The interviewers

If the invite does not name them, ask the recruiter. Then look each person up on LinkedIn and note three things: their role, how long they have been at the company, and where they worked before. A hiring manager who came from a small start-up may ask how you work without much process. Someone who has been at the company ten years may care more about how you fit with the way things are done. Keep personal details out of the conversation. Mentioning someone’s holiday photos is unsettling; mentioning a talk they gave on the team’s work is fine.

Finish by writing three sentences, one for each question above. If you can say them without looking, you have done enough.

How do I work out what they will ask me?

The job description is the best clue you have. Some employers set their questions per role in advance. Google, for example, has written that it uses structured interviews, meaning the same questions and the same scoring scale for everyone applying to the same job. Questions written for a role tend to test what the role needs, and the job description is the public record of that.

Go through it with a pen and do four things:

1. Split the requirements into must-haves and nice-to-haves. Prepare for a question on every must-have.
2. Circle words that repeat. If “stakeholders” appears four times, it is probably what the hiring manager worries about most.
3. Turn each responsibility into a question. It is the most useful of the four.
4. Mark your gaps, the lines you cannot honestly claim, and prepare for those too.

Some examples of the third step:

• “Work with sales and product teams to prioritise the roadmap” becomes “Tell me about a time two teams wanted different things from you. What did you do?”
• “Own the month-end close” becomes “Walk me through how you run a close. What usually goes wrong?”
• “Comfortable with ambiguity” becomes “Tell me about a time you had to start without clear requirements.”
• “Experience with SQL and Tableau” becomes a practical question or a short test. Be ready to write a query, not just talk about one.
• “Mentor junior team members” becomes “Tell me about someone you helped improve. How did you know it worked?”

For each gap, prepare a short, honest bridge. Name what you have not done, then the closest thing you have done and what you are doing about it: “I haven’t used Tableau at work. I’ve used Power BI for two years, and last month I rebuilt one of my dashboards in Tableau to learn it.” It holds up better than a vague claim that one follow-up question can expose.

Our interview questions library has lists by company, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

How do you actually prepare answers for behavioural questions?

“How do you actually prepare answers for behavioral interview questions?”

Reddit, r/careerguidance

Do not prepare an answer for every possible question. There are hundreds of them, and trying to recall the right memorised answer under pressure is how people freeze. Prepare six to eight stories instead, and learn to bend each one to several questions.

This works because behavioural questions keep returning to the same handful of themes, just worded differently:

• a result you are proud of and drove yourself
• a mistake or failure, and what you changed afterwards
• a disagreement with a colleague or manager
• a tight deadline or too much work at once
• persuading people who did not report to you
• learning something new quickly
• a difficult customer, client or stakeholder
• taking the lead when nobody asked you to

Build a story grid

Draw a table with stories down the side and themes across the top. Tick every theme each story could answer. A good story usually covers two or three: the project where you missed a deadline, told your manager early and recovered most of it works for “failure”, “pressure” and “a difficult conversation”. Aim for at least two ticks under every theme. With several rounds, you will want a fresh story for a different interviewer rather than the same one twice.

Write each story as four short lines

Use STAR: situation, task, action, result. Amazon’s interview guide describes the same framework and asks for measurable outcomes and the lessons you took away. Keep the notes short so you can tell the story rather than recite it:

• Situation: one line of context.
• Task: what you, personally, had to do.
• Action: three or four concrete steps. This is where most of your time should go. Say “I”, not “we”, for the parts you did.
• Result: a number if you have one (“cut processing time from three days to one”), plus one line on what you learned.

Freshers can build the same grid from college projects, internships, part-time jobs, college fests and sports teams. The stakes are smaller, and interviewers know that. Our guide on interviewing as a fresher has more on this. For full worked answers, see the behavioural questions page.

How do I get better at interviewing when I’m good at the actual job?

“How do you get better at interviewing when you’re good at the actual job?”

Reddit, r/careerguidance

“I’m pretty sure I officially suck at job interviews. How do I practice?”

Reddit, r/jobsearchhacks

Doing the job and describing the job are two separate skills. At work you show what you can do over months. In an interview you have about two minutes per answer, out loud, to a stranger. Plenty of strong people interview badly because they have never practised that second skill. Like any skill, it improves with repetition. Practise in this order:

1. Alone, out loud, recorded

Answer five questions from your list into your phone, then listen back. Check four things. How long each answer ran (most behavioural answers should land between one and two minutes). Whether the result was clear, or the story just stopped. How often you said “we”. And how long it took to get to the point. Fix one thing at a time and record again.

2. With an AI playing the interviewer

Paste the job description into a chatbot, ask it to interview you for this role one question at a time, and to push back with a follow-up after each answer. Its feedback tends to be generic, so do not take its scores too seriously. Its use is volume, and the follow-ups are good training for the moment an interviewer says “why did you choose that?”

3. A mock interview with a person

This is the one that matters most, because a person makes you nervous in a way a recording or a chatbot does not. Ask someone who has hired people, or works in your field: a former manager, a senior friend, an alumnus, your college placement cell. Give them your question list but ask them to add two of their own that you have not seen. Afterwards, ask one specific question: “Where did you stop following me?”

4. Real interviews in the right order

If you have several applications going and some say over the dates, try to put the one you care about most later. A first interview after a long break is usually the rustiest, and it is better spent on a job you mind less about losing.

How do I prepare for each type of interview round?

Add preparation for the format of each round on top of the work above. Ask the recruiter which of these you will face.

HR or recruiter screen

Usually short and often by phone. Expect why you are looking, why this company, and the practical facts: notice period, salary expectation, location, start date. Know those facts exactly, so you are not working them out aloud. If the job may involve relocating, shift work or a service agreement, decide what you can accept before you are asked. Have an answer ready for “Why should we hire you?” as well.

Technical round

This means different things by field: a coding problem, a design discussion, accounting or legal questions, a portfolio review, a take home task. In any live exercise, think out loud, so the interviewer can follow your reasoning and not only the final answer. If anything is unclear, ask before you start. Practise in the same tool you will use on the day, whether that is a shared code editor, an online whiteboard or a spreadsheet. See our pages on technical interviews, coding interviews and system design.

Case interview

Standard in consulting and used for some product and strategy roles. You get a business problem and are expected to break it down, ask for the data you need, work through some numbers and give a recommendation. Ask the recruiter whether calculations are done without a calculator. Reading about cases only gets you so far, so practise full cases with a partner playing the interviewer, and practise mental arithmetic on its own. Check the firm’s careers site for sample cases. More on our case interview page.

Panel interview

Several interviewers at once, sometimes each covering a different area. Write their names down in the order they sit, or the order of the video tiles, as soon as they introduce themselves. Answer the person who asked, then look round at the others as you finish. With several people waiting to ask questions, keep each answer tight.

Final round with a senior leader

Fewer detailed questions, more about judgement and motivation: what you want to achieve in the role, how you make trade-offs, how you would spend your first ninety days. Sketch a short answer to that last one even if nobody asks it directly. If nobody asks, turn it into a question of your own: “What would you want this person to have done in the first three months?”

Video interviews, live and recorded

For a live video interview, the setup section below applies. A one-way recorded interview is different: questions appear on screen and you record your answer against a timer, with nobody on the other end. Practise with a phone timer set to the limit they give you, look at the lens rather than your own face, and use any practice question the platform offers. Nobody will nod or cut in to tell you that you have said enough, so decide your last sentence before you start.

How do I set up for an online interview?

“I have a Teams interview this week is it acceptable to have detailed notes I’ve prepared off camera?”

Glassdoor Community

If the instructions do not rule them out, short notes are a reasonable aid. Detailed ones tempt you to read, and reading shows: your eyes drop and your voice goes flat. Keep notes to keywords, such as story titles, the numbers you want to mention and your questions for them. Put them near the camera so a glance does not pull your eyes far from the lens.

Audio first

Get the sound right first. A grainy picture is a small annoyance; an answer that cuts out is lost. Earphones or a headset keep your microphone from picking up the interviewer’s voice from your speakers. Zoom has a free test meeting that records a few seconds of your voice and plays it back, so you hear roughly what they will hear. Other meeting apps offer a preview of your camera and microphone before you join; use it.

Camera and light

Raise the laptop on a few books so the camera is at eye level. Sit facing a window or lamp, not with one behind you, or you become a silhouette. If you use background blur, check the preview while you move your hands. If they smear, a plain wall is the better choice.

The rest of the screen

Turn on Do Not Disturb, quit chat apps and close any tab you would not want seen if you are asked to share your screen. Install or update the meeting app before your test run, not five minutes before the call. If your connection drops, message the recruiter straight away and rejoin, or use your phone as a hotspot.

What should I bring, or have open on my screen?

For an interview in person:

• Printed copies of your CV, one per interviewer plus a spare.
• A notebook and pen, with your questions for them written in it.
• Any ID the building asks for at reception.
• The name and phone number of the person you are meeting.
• For design, writing or engineering roles, a portfolio or links you can show on your phone or laptop.

For an online interview, keep these open and close the rest:

• The exact CV you sent them, so you can see what they see.
• The job description, with your notes on it.
• Your story grid.
• Your questions for them.

Keep a glass of water nearby too.

How can PiriPiri AI help before and during the interview?

PiriPiri AI is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that listens to a live interview and drafts short answer prompts on a small overlay while the question is still being asked.

Before the interview

You add your CV and the job description and pick your role, the same material you used for your research and story grid. The drafts it writes are built from those, so they point back to your own experience and this particular job.

During the call

It hears both sides, your microphone and the interviewer’s audio from your computer, and transcribes both live. When a question comes, a short draft appears that you can glance at if you lose your thread. If you need more, a deep dive hotkey asks for a longer answer, and in a technical round the analyze screen hotkey reads a coding or written question off your screen. No meeting bot joins the call, and it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex and others. The overlay is excluded from screen capture by the operating system, so it does not appear when you share your screen or record. On a Mac, hearing the interviewer needs macOS 14.2 or later.

After the round

The transcript and notes are saved to your account, so the review described below starts from what was actually said, rather than what you remember of it, and you can prepare the next round around what they asked.

It cannot give you experience you do not have, and reading a draft word for word sounds rehearsed and is noticeable. Use it as a prompt to glance at when you are stuck, then answer in your own words. Some employers have rules about recording or AI help in interviews, so check those first. Our guide on whether interviewers can tell goes into that, and how to use PiriPiri AI shows the setup.

What should I do after each round?

The same day, while it is fresh, write down every question you can remember, which answers went well, and where you stumbled. Later rounds can return to topics an earlier interviewer raised, so this list shows you what to brush up on. If a story fell flat, rework it or swap it out of your grid.

A short thank-you email the same day is a common courtesy. Two or three lines are enough, and mentioning one specific thing you discussed keeps it from reading like a template. If you were not told the next steps, ask the recruiter when you can expect to hear.

Questions people ask

Where to go next

If you are most afraid of losing your train of thought, read what to do when your mind goes blank. If English is not your first language, see our page on interviewing in a second language. Before paying for any tool, read whether a copilot is worth it.

PiriPiri AI costs about $2.50 an interview, paid with one-time packs that never expire, with no subscription required. Every new account gets 3 free sessions of 10 minutes each, enough to try it on a mock interview first. Full details are on the pricing page.