Your own question history
Every question from every session you have run, practice and real, in one list. After two interviews the pattern in it is more useful than any generic list of “top 50 questions”.
Interview practice
Practice only counts when something changes.
Reading your CV again is not practice. Nor is one long session the night before. What works is short, out loud, aimed at the answers that are weakest, with one thing fixed at a time — and a record of the attempts, so you can tell whether it worked.
The loop
Five steps, twenty minutes, repeated
Nothing here is specific to a tool. It is the structure that makes practice compound instead of filling an evening.
Pick four questions
From the job description, or from what you were actually asked last time. Four is what fits in twenty minutes with thinking time.
Answer out loud, once
No second attempt yet, no notes in front of you. This is the measurement, and a tidied-up version measures nothing.
Find the one fault
Vague, too long, no result, wrong question answered. One per answer — the biggest.
Fix it and repeat that one
Immediately, while you can still hear the first version. This is where the improvement actually happens.
Keep both attempts
So next week you are comparing rather than guessing. Progress you cannot see is progress you will not trust.
What to listen for
Six faults, and what each one actually needs
They sound similar when you hear yourself back, and the fixes are completely different.
| What you hear | What it is | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Thirty seconds of preamble | No opening sentence | Decide the first line before you start. State the answer, then explain it. |
| No numbers anywhere | A claim, not an answer | One figure: a duration, a percentage, a team size, a cost. Look it up once and keep it. |
| Trailing off | No ending | End on the result. “So the ward went from four agency shifts a week to none” is an ending. |
| “We” throughout | Your part is invisible | Say what the team did, then what you did. An interviewer is hiring one of you, not the team. |
| Answering the easier question | Drift | Repeat the question back to yourself before answering. Most drift happens in the first five seconds. |
| Three minutes long | No editing | Cut the setup, not the result. Ninety seconds is plenty for all but system design. |
What to practise against
Use the questions you were actually asked
Invented practice questions drift towards what you can already answer. Real ones do not.
Questions from the real description
Generated from the posting rather than the job title, so they land where this role lands. From job description to questions →
The notes from your last call
What was thin, what the interviewer pressed on, what to read. Written when the session ends, which is the only time anyone remembers it accurately.
A fortnight out
What two weeks of this looks like
Not a plan to follow exactly — a sense of the shape, and of how little time it actually takes.
Week one: material
Four stories written out with numbers in them. Two short sessions on the behavioural questions, two on the technical ground the description leans on. Find the gaps; do not fill them yet.
Week two: delivery
Same questions, out loud, timed. Repeat only what scored badly. By the end, the opening sentence of each story should arrive without thinking about it.
Two days before
One full run at the pace of a real round, no pausing, no notes. This is the rehearsal that catches the things short sessions hide.
The last hour
The job description, your CV, your four openings, and then stop. Nothing learned in the last hour is available under pressure.
Questions
About practising
How often should I practise?
Twenty minutes a day beats three hours on Sunday, for the same reason it does in every other skill: the gains come from the number of attempts, and a long session is mostly one attempt with a lot of thinking around it. Five sessions of four answers will move you further than one session of twenty.
What should I practise first?
The answers you score worst on, which are almost never the ones you think. Most people practise their strongest story because it feels good to tell, and arrive at the interview with one excellent answer and six vague ones.
How do I know if I am improving?
Only by comparison, which is why the attempts have to be kept. Same question, two attempts a week apart, read side by side: either the second one is shorter and more specific or the practice did nothing. A feeling of improvement is not evidence of it.
Should I write answers out or just say them?
Write the first version of the four stories you will reuse, because writing is how you find out there is no number in it. After that, say everything. A written answer memorised comes out as a written answer recited, and that is audible.
How many questions should I prepare for?
Think in stories, not questions. Four well-prepared stories with numbers in them cover most behavioural questions asked in most rounds; a list of forty rehearsed answers is forty things to half-remember under pressure. Prepare the material, not the script.
Does practising stop me sounding natural?
Over-rehearsing a script does. Practising the material does the opposite: the reason unprepared answers sound stilted is that you are assembling facts and sentences at the same time. Know the facts cold and the sentences come out like speech.
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Four questions, out loud, tonight.
Pick the job you are actually going for, and find out which answers are not ready.
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