Interview Prep Skill

Generic interview prep ("tell me about a weakness") is nearly useless — interviews are won by being ready for this company's this round. This skill builds a tailored prep pack: the questions you're actually likely to get, STAR-structured answers drawn from your real experience, your best stories mapped to the role's competencies, and the gaps to address before you walk in.

Not quite this? Use informational-interview-prep when it is a career-advice conversation you asked for, not an assessment; use expert-interview-prep when you are interviewing an expert to learn from them; use source-interview-prep when you are a journalist interviewing a source.

Required Inputs

Ask for these only if they aren't already provided:

• Role & company (and the job description if you have it — pair with jd-decoder / company-brief).
• Round type — recruiter screen, behavioural, case/product sense, technical/analytical, execution, or panel/final.
• Your background — CV or a summary of your experience and your strongest stories.
• Known concerns — anything you're worried they'll probe (a gap, a pivot, a short tenure).

Output Format

Interview Prep: [role] at [company] — [round]

1. What this round tests — the 3–5 competencies this specific round screens for, and how they'll likely probe each.

2. Likely questions — the realistic questions for this role/round (behavioural, case, or technical as fits), ordered by likelihood — not a generic list.

3. Your answers (STAR) — for the top behavioural questions, draft answers from the candidate's real background using Situation · Task · Action · Result — concise, quantified, first-person. For case/product questions, give a structured approach + a worked example.

4. Story bank — your 4–6 strongest stories, each mapped to the competencies they cover, so you can flex one story across several questions.

5. Questions to ask them — sharp, role-specific questions (lean on company-brief) that show you've done the work.

6. Gaps & landmines — the weak spots (a tenure gap, a missing skill, a pivot) and how to address each honestly and confidently if it comes up.

Deeper Materials

• references/story-matrix.md — the 6-stories-cover-40-questions matrix and the first-sentences rehearsal method

Quality Checks

• [ ] Questions are tailored to the specific role and round, ordered by likelihood — not generic
• [ ] STAR answers use the candidate's real experience and quantify the result
• [ ] A reusable story bank maps stories to competencies (so prep scales across questions)
• [ ] Questions-to-ask are company-specific, not boilerplate
• [ ] Known gaps/landmines have an honest, confident handling plan

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not produce a generic question list — prep is only useful when it's for this round at this company
• [ ] Do not write fabricated achievements into STAR answers — build from the candidate's real stories
• [ ] Do not over-script — answers should be structured talking points, not memorised paragraphs that sound robotic
• [ ] Do not dodge the candidate's weak spots — rehearse an honest, confident response instead of hoping it won't come up
• [ ] Do not ignore the round type — a behavioural prep and a case prep are different documents

Based On

Structured interview preparation — STAR/behavioural method, competency-mapped story banks, role-and-round tailoring.

Example Trigger Phrases

• "Prep for an interview."
• "Prepare answers for a role."
• "Practice for a specific company's interview."
• "Get ready for a behavioural/case/PM round."