How to prepare for an interview
Preparation fails in a predictable way: people study the material and rehearse nothing. Here is what the rounds actually test, based on what gets scored across 194 researched seats, and what to do about it.
Communication is scored more than knowledge
Looking across every seat we have researched, the dimension assessed most often is communication — ahead of technical foundations. Motivation and collaboration follow. That is not a soft-skills platitude; it is what the rubrics weight.
It means the marginal hour is better spent saying an answer out loud three times than reading a fourth guide. Knowing the material and being able to deliver it under time pressure are different skills, and only the second one is tested.
Know the shape of the round you are sitting
Across the banks, roughly half of all questions are behavioural, a quarter technical, and most of the remainder cases, with market and product questions concentrated in particular desks. Behavioural questions dominate even in technical seats, and they are the ones people prepare least because they feel improvisable.
They are not. “Tell me about a time you disagreed with someone” has a right shape — the situation in a sentence, your decision, the trade-off, the result, what changed afterwards — and candidates who have not rehearsed it tell a story with no decision in it.
The habits that cost marks
- Answering the adjacent question rather than the one asked.
- “We” with no “I” — the interviewer cannot score the team.
- Reciting the CV they have already read, instead of the decisions behind it.
- “Why this firm” that is really “why this industry”, which every other candidate also said.
- Burying the point at the end of ninety seconds instead of opening with it.
A week that works
Find the actual questions for your firm and seat. Answer five of them out loud, recorded, with the real time limit. Read the transcripts — not the recordings, the transcripts — and mark where the point arrives. Fix the opening sentence of each answer. Repeat with five more. Do a recorded one-way round, because every seat has one.
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Falas is not affiliated with or endorsed by any employer named. Simulations are independent practice based on publicly described recruiting formats.