Reading the invitation
The email usually gives the format away. Twenty minutes with someone from talent acquisition is a screen. Ninety minutes with three names attached is a panel. “Exercise” or “presentation” means you will be producing something live, and “joining instructions to follow” almost always means an assessment centre. Identify the format first, because it decides which preparation earns anything.
When the invitation is vague, reply and ask. Who attends, how long it runs, whether there is a task - recruiters answer these questions readily, and asking reads as organised rather than nervous. Build your practice sessions around the reply, not around a guess.
1. 電話スクリーニング
The first filter, normally run by a recruiter rather than the hiring manager. In 15 to 30 minutes they confirm that your background fits the advert, that your salary sits inside the band, and that talking to you is easy. Candidates rarely fail a screen for lack of ability. They fail it for vagueness.
Keep the advert and your CV open in front of you. Have a 60-second career summary ready, and settle your salary figure before the phone rings rather than while it is ringing. Stand up while you speak - the voice carries better. One spoken rehearsal beforehand means the opening answer is not your first attempt of the day.
2. The live video interview
The standard first and second round. Everything from the phone screen still applies, and the camera adds a channel: light, background, eye line and audio all register before your first sentence lands. Check the platform a day ahead, because video software saves its updates for the worst possible moment.
Camera at eye height, light source in front of you, and the lens - not the screen - for the key line of each answer. Our guide to confident body language on camera covers the rest. A camera-on session in Sharp AI Interview also cures the habit of watching your own thumbnail while you talk.
3. The one-way recorded interview
Platforms such as HireVue and Willo display a question, give around 30 seconds of thinking time, then record you for two or three minutes. The discomfort is the silence: no nodding, no reaction, sometimes no second take. Employers use it to reduce hundreds of applicants to a shortlist, so the bar is clarity, not brilliance.
Approach it as a short performance. Lean in slightly, open with a smile, slow down a fraction, and put the direct answer in your first sentence. Hold each response near 90 seconds - long enough to say something, short enough never to be cut off. Rehearsing aloud to a webcam gives you the repetitions the platform will not.
4. The competency or behavioural interview
Structured questions beginning “tell me about a time when…”, scored against a published set of behaviours: teamwork, ownership, conflict, delivery under pressure. The public sector, banking and graduate schemes use it most heavily. If the advert names six behaviours, plan for six questions - the mapping takes ten minutes and predicts most of the hour.
Build six to eight true stories and structure each with the STAR interview technique, ending every one on a figure: nine days down to four, churn held through a price rise, six starters trained in a fortnight. Then say them aloud, ideally into Sharp AI Interview, because a story that reads at ninety seconds routinely speaks at four minutes on the first attempt.
5. The technical or task-based interview
Anything where you are observed doing the job: live coding, a case study, a written exercise, a portfolio review, a take-home brief. The medium varies by profession; the target never does. They want to watch you reason, and reasoning kept silent scores nothing.
Live problem solving
Say your assumptions, name your chosen approach, explain what you ruled out. When you get stuck, describe the next thing you would try. The only unrecoverable state is silence, because an assessor cannot mark thinking they never heard.
Take-home exercises
Ask what time budget they intend and stay inside it. Turning a four-hour brief into a twenty-hour project signals poor judgement, not commitment.
Presentations and portfolio reviews
Two full spoken run-throughs, timed. Ten slides in fifteen minutes leaves ninety seconds per slide, and nearly everyone overruns the first attempt. Expect interruptions - senior audiences ask as they go - and rehearse recovering the thread after one.
6. The panel interview
Two to five interviewers with different agendas: the manager tests capability, HR listens for values, the senior leader estimates your ceiling. They often mark the same sheet independently, so an answer pitched at one seat and lost on the others still averages down. Prepare a likely question from each chair - a rehearsal partner that can switch persona makes this quick work.
Direct your answer to whoever asked, then bring the rest of the room in with your eyes as you close. If a question sits in someone else's territory, say you will return to it and actually return to it. A redirection rehearsed twice sounds deliberate; improvised, it sounds evasive.
7. The group interview
Several candidates, one discussion task, assessors at the edge of the room - common in retail, hospitality and graduate hiring. It measures behaviour, not answers, and the trap has two doors: dominating loses as many marks as disappearing. Invite a quieter person in, summarise where the group stands, and keep one eye on the clock. That register is the first thing pressure erases, so practise it before the day rather than trusting yourself to remember.
8. The assessment centre
A half or full day: group exercise, presentation, psychometric tests, a competency interview, and a lunch that is less informal than it looks. Endurance matters as much as skill - most candidates are sharp at nine and blunt by three. The full guide to assessment centre days takes the timetable apart piece by piece.
Rehearse the transitions as well as the exercises, because moving from a group task to a solo presentation with ten minutes' notice is its own discipline. Assume observation from the front door to the goodbye. Two timed practice rounds in the preceding week keep answers short when fatigue starts stretching them.
9. The informal chat
“Just a coffee” with a founder or a department head. The tone is relaxed; the evaluation is not. Every anecdote is still evidence and notes still get written afterwards. Prepare as if it were formal, then match the register they set. The loose structure is precisely what pulls people into stories without endings, so a warm-up run earns its time here.
Bring three genuine questions about the work, the team or the year ahead - curiosity reads as motivation more convincingly than any rehearsed line about passion. And if the coffee quietly turns into an interview, follow it without changing gear.
10. The final-stage interview
Thirty minutes with a director or founder, after the difficult rounds are already behind you. It is a judgement of motivation and trajectory: why this company, what you want next, whether you will still be here in two years. Few questions, heavy weighting. A 90-second version of your own story, rehearsed aloud, is worth more here than any amount of company reading.
Ask one question only a leader could answer - what would make this hire obviously worth it in a year. Then close plainly: say you want the job, and why. Almost nobody says it out loud, and a practice session is a low-stakes place to make the sentence sound like yours.
The constants underneath every format
Remove the staging and four questions remain: can you do the work, will you fit the team, do you want this job, and can you explain yourself under mild pressure. The fourth is where equally qualified candidates separate. Reading sharpens understanding; only speaking sharpens performance - the premise Sharp AI Interview is built on.
Nerves widen the gap by shortening breath and lengthening sentences, so handle them mechanically - the techniques in handling interview nerves are the ones that hold up. By the fourth spoken repetition of an answer, your body stops filing the question under threat. Getting to that fourth repetition is the entire trick.
Five days, any format
- Day one: confirm format, attendees and duration; list the behaviours named in the advert.
- Day two: draft six to eight STAR stories, one figure in every result.
- Day three: research the company - recent news, the product, two competitors - and write three questions.
- Day four: rehearse aloud, on camera, against the clock; cut anything past two minutes.
- Day five: test the equipment, save the link, review nothing new, sleep.
The plan is front-loaded deliberately: content work is calm, rehearsal is not. Most candidates run it backwards - four days of reading, one anxious evening of practice - and then wonder why the answers arrived shapeless. Two 20-minute spoken sessions on days four and five return more than six further hours of research. With only 48 hours, keep days one, two and four and let a single mock round in Sharp AI Interview stand in for the rest.