One of the things that makes interviews stressful is their unpredictability, which is unfortunately also what makes them so hard to prepare for. In particular, it’s impossible to predict exactly what questions you will be asked. So, how do you get ready?
Scripting out answers for every possible question is a popular strategy but a losing battle. There are too many (maybe infinite?) possible questions and simply not enough time. In the end, you’ll spend all your time writing and you still won’t have answers to most of the questions you might face. And while it might make you feel briefly more confident, that confidence is unlikely to survive the stress and distress of the actual interview. You’ll be rigid rather than flexible, robotic rather than responsive.
This article outlines an interview-preparation strategy that is both easier and more effective than frantic answer scripting, one that will leave you able to answer just about any interview question smoothly.
Step 1: Themes
While you can’t know what questions you will get, you can pretty easily predict many of the topics your interviewers will be curious about. You can be pretty sure that an interviewer will be interested in talking about collaboration, for example, even if you can’t say for sure whether they’ll ask a standard question like “Tell us about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal” or something weirder like “What role do you usually play on a team?”
Your first step is to figure out the themes that their questions are most likely to touch on. Luckily, I can offer you a starter pack. Here are five topics that are likely to show up in an interview for just about any job, so it pays to prepare for them no matter what:
- Communication
- Collaboration (including conflict!)
- Time and project management
- Problem-solving and creativity
- Failures and setbacks
Step 2: Stories
The strongest interview answers are anchored by a specific story from your experience, which provides a tangible demonstration about how you think and what you can do. But it’s incredibly difficult to come up with a good, relevant example in the heat of an interview, let alone to tell it effectively in a short amount of time. For that, you need some preparation and some practice.
So for each of your themes, identify two to three relevant stories. Stories can be big (a whole project from beginning to end), or they can be small (a single interaction with a student). They can be hugely consequential (a decision you made that changed the course of your career), or they can be minor but meaningful (a small disagreement you handled well). What is most important is that the stories demonstrate your skills, experiences and attitudes clearly and compellingly.
The point is to have a lot of material to work with, so aim for at least 10 stories total, and preferably more. The same story can apply to multiple themes, but try not to let double-dipping limit the number of stories you end up with.
Then, for each of your stories, write an outline that gives just enough context to understand the situation, describes your actions and thinking, and says what happened at the end. Use the STAR method, if it’s useful for keeping your stories tight and focused. Shaping your stories and deciding what to say (and not say) will help your audience see your skills in action with minimal distractions. This is one of the most important parts of your prep, so take your time with it.
Step 3: Approaches
As important as stories are in interviewing, you usually can’t just respond to a question with a story without any framing or explanation. So you’ll want to develop language to describe some of your usual strategies, orientations or approaches to situations that fall into each of the themes. That language will help you easily link each question to one of your stories.
So for each theme, do a little brainstorming to identify your core messaging: “What do I usually do when faced with a situation related to [THEME]?” Then write a few bullet points. (You can also reverse engineer this from the stories: Read the stories linked to a particular theme, then look for patterns in your thinking or behavior.)
These bullet points give you what you need to form connective tissue between the specific question they ask and the story you want to tell. So if they ask, “Tell me about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal,” you can respond with a story and close out by describing how that illustrates a particular approach. Or if they ask, “What role do you usually play on a team?” you can start by describing how you think about collaboration and your role in it and then tell a story that illustrates that approach.
Though we are focusing on thematic questions here, make sure to also prepare bullet points for some of the most common general interview questions, like “Why do you want this job?” and “Tell us about yourself.”
Step 4: Bring It All Together
You really, really, really need to practice out loud before your interview. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the graduate students and postdocs I work with spend a lot of time thinking about how they might answer questions and not nearly enough time actually trying to answer them. And so they miss the opportunity to develop the kind of fluency and flexibility that helps one navigate the unpredictable environment of an interview.
Here’s how to use the prep you did in Steps 1-3 to practice:
- First, practice telling each of your 10-plus stories out loud, at least three times each. The goal here is to develop fluency in your storytelling, so you can keep things focused and flowing without needing to think about it.
- Second, for each of the bullet points you created in Step 3, practice explaining it (out loud!) a few times, ideally in a couple of different ways.
- Third, practice bringing it all together by answering some actual interview questions. Find a long list of interview questions (like this one), then pick questions at random to answer. The randomness is important, because the goal is to practice making smooth and effective connections between questions, stories and approaches. You need to figure out what to do when you run into a question that is challenging, unexpected or just confusing.
- And once you’ve done that, do it all again.
In the end, you’ve created a set of building blocks that you can arrange and rearrange as needed in the moment. And it’s a set you can keep adding to with more stories and more themes, keep practicing with new questions, and keep adapting for your next interview.
Inside Higher Education originally published A Better Way to Prepare for Job Interviews, where you can read more of Derek's advice for career and professional development.
Derek Attig is the Assistant Dean of Career Development & Professional Development for the Graduate College. After earning a PhD in History here at Illinois, Derek worked in nonprofit communications and instructional development before joining the Graduate College.
