How to Prepare for a Job Interview in Tech (From a Former Recruiter)

Before I became a coach, I spent years as a recruiter and then as a People lead in tech. I've sat in a lot of hiring debriefs — the calm, candid conversations that happen after a candidate leaves the room, where the team decides whether to move someone forward or not. Those rooms taught me something that took me years to un-learn as a candidate myself: interviews are not about being impressive. They are about being understandable.

Most people prepare for the wrong thing. They over-prepare for the questions and under-prepare for the story they're telling. This post is the advice I wish every candidate I ever interviewed had read the night before.

What hiring managers are actually deciding

In almost every tech interview I've ever been part of, the debrief boiled down to three quiet questions:

1. Can this person do the job? (Skill.)
2. Will this person make my life easier or harder? (Collaboration.)
3. Do I trust what they told me? (Consistency.)

Notice what's not on that list: "Did they sound impressive?" "Did they have a perfect answer to question seven?" Hiring managers are not running a pub quiz. They are making a bet on a person they'll spend 40 hours a week with. Your job in the interview is to make that bet feel obvious.

Everything below is in service of those three questions.

How to prepare the week before

1. Research the company like you already work there

Most candidates research the company. Very few research it like someone who's already on the team. There's a difference.

• Read the last 6 months of their engineering or product blog. Note what they're proud of and what's hard for them.
• Look up your interviewer on LinkedIn. Read what they've posted or reposted. Notice what they care about.
• If they're public, skim the most recent earnings call or investor update. If they're a startup, look at who just joined — hiring patterns tell you what the company is betting on.
• Find one genuinely interesting thing and bring it up. Not "I saw you got funding," but "I saw you just brought on a Head of AI — is that changing how the platform team is thinking about infrastructure?"

This is the single cheapest way to move from "candidate" to "peer" in a hiring manager's mind.

2. Prepare stories, not answers

When I was reviewing candidates, the ones who stood out were not the ones with slick answers. They were the ones with concrete stories — specific moments where they'd actually done the thing they were claiming to be good at.

Before your interview, pick six projects or situations from your career and write them up in STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result. Pick ones that show different muscles — one technical win, one time you navigated a conflict, one time you made a decision with incomplete information, one thing that failed and what you took from it.

Most tech interview questions are some version of "tell me about a time when…" If you have six stories ready, you can answer almost anything.

3. Prepare questions that are actually questions

The "do you have any questions for us?" moment is a trap that people keep walking into. "What's the culture like?" is not a question. It's filler. A real question comes from genuine curiosity about whether this is the right fit for you.

A few that I've watched land well:

• "What does someone who's doing well in this role look like six months in?"
• "What's the thing about this team you'd change if you could?"
• "What's the biggest challenge you're trying to solve that this hire is meant to help with?"
• "How does the team handle disagreement?"

Questions like these do two things: they tell you things you actually need to know before accepting an offer, and they signal to the hiring manager that you're evaluating them too — which, paradoxically, makes them want you more.

The day-of: working with your brain, not against it

Here's where the neuroscience matters. Interviews trigger a low-grade threat response in almost everyone. Your amygdala, which doesn't know the difference between a hiring panel and a sabre-toothed tiger, floods your system with cortisol. Blood flow shifts away from the prefrontal cortex — the part of your brain that handles clear articulation, working memory, and nuance — right when you need it most.

You can't will this response away. But you can soften it.

• Regulate your breathing for 90 seconds before the call. Four seconds in, six seconds out. Longer exhales than inhales down-regulate the sympathetic nervous system. This is not woo — it's the simplest lever on your physiology you have.
• Name what you're feeling. "I'm nervous" said out loud to yourself activates the prefrontal cortex and measurably reduces amygdala activity. Labelling emotion is one of the few evidence-backed shortcuts to calming down.
• Arrive 10 minutes early and do nothing. No last-minute cramming. You can't learn anything useful in the 10 minutes before an interview, but you can raise your cortisol levels trying to.

The five mistakes I saw most often (and how to fix them)

After years of debriefs, the same patterns came up again and again:

1. Rambling. A good answer is 60–90 seconds. If you're still talking after two minutes, you're losing the room. Land the plane.
2. Selling, not explaining. Candidates who used marketing-speak — "I'm a results-driven collaborator who thrives in ambiguity" — almost always came across as less competent than candidates who just described what they'd actually done.
3. Answering the question they wish they'd been asked. Hiring managers notice. Always.
4. Being vague about failure. "I worked too hard" is not a weakness. Pick something real, show what you learned, and move on.
5. Underselling the hard parts. If you made something look easy, say so. Candidates who said "this was harder than it looks, and here's why it worked" consistently outperformed candidates who said "it went great!"

People also ask

How early should I start preparing for a tech job interview? A week is usually enough for a role you're qualified for. Three days if you're rusty. Any more than a week and you're usually just rehearsing yourself into stiffness.

What should I wear for a tech interview? Whatever you'd wear on a good day at that company. For most tech companies, that means neat casual — a plain t-shirt or button-down, nothing you'd wear to a wedding or a festival. On video, solid colours read better than patterns.

Should I follow up after a tech interview? Yes — a short, specific thank-you email within 24 hours. Not a sales pitch. Reference one thing you actually discussed. Keep it under four sentences.

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If you want help with this

Interview prep is one of the most common things I coach on, because it sits right at the intersection of strategy (what to say) and self-regulation (how to stay in your head while saying it). If you've got an interview coming up and you want another pair of eyes on your story, your questions, or your nerves — book a free discovery call. We'll figure out together whether a few sessions would actually move the needle.

And if you're further along — if the interview is going well and you're about to get an offer — the next thing to read is Salary Negotiation: What Most People Get Wrong. Because what most people leave on the table in the last 15 minutes of the process often matters more than what they did in the first 15 hours.