How I prepare for interviews

This week, I had a few interviews scheduled, so I thought I'd share my interview preparation process. I have a background in public speaking, and when people ask me how I combat nervousness, my answer is always "preparation." It's hard to be (as) nervous when you have spent dozens of hours preparing.

Read and review answers to common interview questions

First, over the last month, I've been using LinkedIn's Interview prep to read and review skilled answers to common interview questions. If you have a Premium LinkedIn membership, you have access to LinkedIn interview prep. It showed me 26 common interview questions, and I would choose two or three each day to review before formulating my own.

Prepare my own answers in the STAR format

I formulated my responses using the STAR method: Situation, Task, Action, and Result. For example, Tell me about a time you created a goal and achieved it.

• Situation: When I was at AWS Marketplace and managing the social media program, our engagement rate was growing, but the clickthrough rate (CTR) was flat at around 1.5%.
• Task: Figure out how to increase the CTR and meet the goal.
• Action: I did a deep dive into the data to determine what types of contents and formats drove a higher CTR. When I broke down metrics by channel, a root cause revealed itself: while video and animated posts did drive clickthroughs on Twitter, they did not on LinkedIn. In fact, the only posts on LinkedIn with zero to .1% CTRs were the posts using video rather than a static image. I also discovered that, while video/animation did drive up the CTR on Twitter, using 100% video reduced the CTR. However, keeping the ratio of video to static images at 4:1 kept the CTR high. I instituted that change and removed 90% of video on LinkedIn.
• Result: The CTR nearly doubled to 2.7%.

Get feedback

While LinkedIn does have a feature that will provide #AI feedback if you record a video of your interview answer, it wasn't working at the time of this post's publishing.

However, there is a feature where you can share your written answers with select friends in your network and ask for their feedback. I haven't used this feature yet, but I surely will when I apply to positions where certain friends work!

This time around, I published several of my responses to Facebook and asked for and received feedback.

Customizing to the position

Now ready for 20 or so common interview questions, when I got an interview, I would go through the job description and formulate key requirements as questions. For example, these are the questions I pulled from a recent job description I interviewed for this week:

• Tell me about your management experience.
• How do you handle difficult employees?
• Tell me about your experience with annual performance reviews and goal setting for direct reports.
• Have you overseen monthly performance reports?
• Tell me about your experience working with client partners.
• Tell me about your experience developing new editorial processes.
• How are you at educating stakeholders?
• What is your experience maintaining an editorial calendar?
• Tell me about your experience presenting to internal stakeholders, making recommendations to improve content, and delivering KPI results.

I then formulated STAR responses for each of these questions. In the actual interview, interestingly, they only asked me one of these--how I handled difficult employees.

Having my own questions at the ready

I often spent so much time prepping my responses that I would often forget to formulate questions for my interviewers. Asking questions about the position and culture shows an interest in the position and shows that you are thinking deeply about what it would be like on a daily basis. And that is something I definitely wanted to signal to my interviewers!

For the interview I had today I asked the following:

1. We've talked about my background in X, Y, and Z, and it seems like I'm a good skill fit. What are you looking for in a cultural fit?
2. You and [phone screen interviewer] have all asked about working with difficult people and handling personality conflicts. I expect it's more appropriate to ask this when we decide I'm a fit, but I'm curious what personality types this position will be handling.

From the response to both questions, it was a good idea to address that elephant in the room--difficult people--because they were happy to give me a much better idea of the types of challenges I'd be dealing with. I appreciated the honesty and emphasized I was ready for the challenge!

Got interview prep tips? Share them below!