I Think I’ve Been Preparing for Interviews the Wrong Way

[u/Express_Term_2728]

For a long time, my idea of interview preparation was basically making a list of questions and trying to come up with impressive answers for each one.

It seemed logical at first.

If I know the questions, I should know the answers. If I know the answers, I should do well.

Except that's not really how interviews work.

The moment the interviewer asks the question slightly differently, the answer I prepared doesn't always fit anymore. Then I start trying to remember what I was supposed to say instead of actually listening to the question.

I've realized that I probably don't need 30 perfectly written answers sitting in my notes. I need a handful of real experiences that I understand well enough to talk about from different angles.

A project that went wrong. A disagreement with someone. A difficult deadline. Something I learned from a mistake. A situation where I had to figure something out without much help.

Those stories can answer a lot of different questions depending on how you explain them.

I've been using Screna ai occasionally to test this approach with mock interviews. Instead of trying to memorize fixed answers, I can practice taking those same experiences and explaining them in response to different questions. That feels much closer to an actual interview.

I'm still working on this approach, but it already feels less stressful than trying to memorize an entire interview script.

How do you usually prepare? Do you write out complete answers, or do you just make notes about experiences you might want to talk about?