Interview prep is mainly busywork

Interview prep advice is so incoherent and unwieldy it almost seems like its real aim is to make you feel less guilty about putting off a deeply unpleasant task, with only a secondary nod to actually helping.

And because interviews are, let’s not sugar coat this, utterly dreadful, this kind of prep often doesn’t even get you over the line. It also gives basically zero thought to your sanity or stress levels along the way.

Here’s how it usually goes. You have a job interview. So you search for common interview questions, because the more questions you can practise, the better you feel. You’ve been busy after all, so the dread feels marginally further away. Seems sensible.

Except there’s a big ugly problem hiding in there.

There are an almost infinite number of questions they might throw at you. And no amount of practising fifty of them protects you from the fifty-first (the one that actually gets asked).

So suddenly you’ve got fifty-one questions to prepare for, plus several bloated answer frameworks, none of them, of course, remotely scientifically validated, plus opinions (nonsense) about confidence, eye contact, body language, STAR answers, ah, the joys of “wait, was that the situation or the task I just answered?”, selling yourself, being yourself (pls stop, my sides) company research, questions to ask them, etc.

And on top of all that, no way of knowing how to start, or even when you’ve done enough to stop.

It’s a mess.

And somewhere under this entire pile of “I spent x hours practising so I must be prepared now, right?” busywork, the single most useful thing you actually have hasn’t been mentioned once.

For anxious, overthinking, autistic, or neurodivergent candidates, this turns into a nightmare, fast. Prep becomes a strange memory test crossed with acting practice. You don’t actually get any clearer, because you’ve never worked out what they’re likely to assess you on in the first place.

The truth though: most interviews aren’t asking you to prepare for everything. They’re usually asking something fairly simple. It’s just hidden behind the uncertainty of what they could ask, so you end up trying to prepare for all of it just in case.

What they’re actually looking for is this:

Can this person show evidence that they meet the specific criteria for this role?

And the criteria (this is the important bit) are, in theory, what the interview is being scored on. The criteria are a handful of predetermined factors only. So the better starting point isn’t a giant list of possible questions. It’s your evidence for those specific criteria.

A better starting point: your evidence

What are the strongest examples from your actual experience?

Not the fanciest ones or the ones that sound most generally impressive. The examples where something happened, you did something about it, and there was some kind of tangible result. And it worked out well.

That’s basically the structure of a good interview story:

Problem. Action. Result.

Forget STAR. It’s painfully unwieldy. PAR does the same job in three parts instead of four, and it’s much easier to hold in your head and adapt under pressure.

Once you’ve got that, the job advert itself (that often ignored useful thing) becomes a targeting tool. The goal here is to work out what kind of evidence they actually care about. Hints of what their scoring criteria might be.

If the advert keeps mentioning community engagement, event planning, teamwork, organisation, and communication, then those are the themes you need a few strong examples for.

A more reasoned way to prepare

So a more reasoned prep process looks something like this:

1. Go through your CV or work history and find three to five strong examples.
2. For each one, write down the problem, what you did, and what happened as a result. The more evidenced the result, the better.
3. Read the job advert and underline the themes that keep coming up.
4. Work out which of your examples could prove those themes.
5. Practise those examples flexibly, so one story can answer several different questions.
6. Stop once you’ve got enough evidence to cover the role.

Way more useful than trying to memorise twenty separate answers that a LinkedIn mystic “thought leader” prophesised. Most of the time you need a handful of good stories, aimed properly, and the ability to use them for different questions.

The bit I don’t do by hand

That method above is the point of this post. You don’t need anything else to use it. Grab a job advert, grab your CV or notes, and work through the steps. It will already be way better than starting and finishing with a list of random interview questions.

That said, I’ll be honest: I don’t do this by hand.

It isn’t that much work. But it is exactly the kind of dull, repetitive, working-memory-heavy stuff that feels yuck at 11pm, three days before an interview you don’t really want to go to, while your brain is rehearsing all the ways it can go wrong.

So I made something to take most of the sting out of the prep.

Interview Decoded lets you paste in the job advert and your CV or notes, then does the sorting for you. It finds what the role seems to be testing, pulls out your strongest examples, turns them into stories, suggests likely questions, and points out the obvious gaps without making the whole thing feel bigger than it needs to be.

It’s a paid tool, because I do need to keep the thing running. But the method isn’t paywalled inside it. It’s explained above and works perfectly well with a notepad. The tool just makes the boring bit faster and less horrible.

One more thing: if you’re out of work and the price is genuinely the blocker, email me at support@interviewdecoded.com and I’ll sort you out. No interrogation or proof needed. I’m not trying to squeeze money out of someone who is already having a bad year.