- Read the advert for the competencies
- Not the duties — the competencies. VA: “make note of the competencies listed — they’ll likely guide the interview questions.”
- Find an example for each
- From “past jobs, volunteer work, military service, or other experiences”. Include ones “where you learned something valuable from a challenge”, not only wins.
- Write them out and say them aloud
- “Write out a few examples in the STAR format and rehearse your delivery. Practicing out loud helps you feel confident and articulate in the moment.”
- Then the logistics
- Video: test connection, audio and video; quiet, well-lit space. In person: plan the route and arrive early. Either way, dress professionally.
Work tower · floor
How to prepare for an interview that is being scored
Advice on how to prepare for an interview arrives in numbered lists — eleven steps, fifteen things, thirty tips — and nearly all of it assumes the interview is a conversation you need to go well. For a great many jobs, and for essentially every large employer and public body, that is not what it is.
Read those two bullets again, because between them they replace most of the advice on this
subject. The questions are written before you arrive. Your answers are scored against
a standard. Preparing for a conversation and preparing to be scored are different
activities, and the second one is far more tractable.What you are actually walking into
US Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s own definition — read 22 August 2026
That changes what preparation means. If the questions are drawn from a list of competencies, then the list is the syllabus — and in most cases it has been published, in the advertisement, before anybody applied. The single highest-value hour you can spend is not rehearsing charm. It is going through that list and finding one specific example for each item on it.
A US federal employer sets out the same method from the candidate’s side, and it is short enough to do properly.
- You are allowed to pause
- “Take a moment to think before responding. Ask for clarification if necessary.” That is the employer saying it, not a coach.
- Say “I”, not “we”
- “Use first-person (‘I’) statements to clarify your role in the situation.” A story told in “we” tells them nothing about you.
- Failures are allowed
- “Be truthful, even when discussing failures — what matters is what you learned or how you improved.”
- Go past the technical
- Reflect on “how your actions impacted others, how you managed emotions, resolved conflict, or showed empathy”.
Three of those deserve pulling out, because they contradict what people assume about interviews.
The first is the pause. Candidates rush because silence feels like failure, and rushing is how a good example comes out backwards. An employer telling you in writing to take a moment, and to ask for clarification, is permission worth carrying into the room.
The second is “I” rather than “we”. It feels graceless and it is the entire point — the interviewer is scoring you, and a story told in the first person plural gives them nothing to score. This is also the commonest reason a strong candidate rates poorly on a competency they genuinely have.
The third is that failures are permitted, and specifically that “what matters is what you learned or how you improved.” The prepared answer to “tell me about something that went wrong” is not a disguised success. It is a real difficulty with a real ending.
Which leads to the pair of sentences that is the best advice on that entire page, and possibly on this entire subject.
Both sentences are from the same page, one after the other, and together they are the most useful
thing on it. Claim your part loudly and claim only your part. The failure mode on each side
is real: the modest candidate who says “we” all the way through and is scored on nothing, and the
one who takes sole credit for a team project in front of somebody who has run teams and knows
better.“Be honest but not modest; this is your chance to brag about your skills and
accomplishments…”
“Teamwork is very commonplace, and most successes are not achieved alone in
the modern workplace. Do not flagrantly exaggerate your contributions or claim sole credit for work
that was clearly team based.”
One practical note about the examples themselves. VA is explicit that they need not come from paid work — “past jobs, volunteer work, military service, or other experiences” — which matters enormously to anyone returning to work, changing field, or starting out. A competency demonstrated while running a committee or a unit is a competency demonstrated.
And prepare questions of your own. Coming with none is itself an answer, and it is not the one you want on the sheet.
The floors below take it four ways: the preparation itself, the answers and how they are shaped, the specific questions that come up most, and what happens once it is over.
Where to start
Four ways in.
- “It is tomorrow morning.”
- Start at the preparation
- “How should an answer be shaped?”
- Go to shaping the answers
- “What will they actually ask?”
- That is the questions
- “It is over.”
- That is afterwards
The preparation
The hour before the hour. Most of it is reading the advertisement properly and finding one example per competency, which is more useful than any amount of rehearsing.
What to wearThe question that gets asked last and worried about first — answered from public guidance.Open this floor →
Reading the job advertisementThe competencies list, and why it predicts the questions almost exactly.Being built
Choosing your examplesWhere to look, including the experience people wrongly discount because it was unpaid.Being built
Rehearsing out loudWhy writing them down is not enough, in the words of an employer.Being built
Video interviewsThe logistics that are different, and the ones that are exactly the same.Being built
Shaping the answers
A scored answer has a shape. These floors cover the framework, its length discipline, and the two words that decide whether you are credited with anything.
The STAR methodA length rule rather than a formula, plus the three other acronyms employers use.Open this floor →
Saying “I” rather than “we”The habit that costs strong candidates marks on competencies they genuinely have.Being built
Talking about failureA real difficulty with a real ending, rather than a disguised success.Being built
Questions to ask at the endComing with none is itself an answer, and it goes on the sheet.Open this floor →
The questions
The handful that come up almost everywhere, each with a floor of its own explaining what it is really testing.
Common interview questionsThe ones that recur, and what each is written to measure.Open this floor →
Tell me about yourselfNot a STAR question, and treating it as one is the usual mistake.Open this floor →
What are your weaknessesThe question most often fumbled, and the shape of an answer that works.Open this floor →
Why should we hire youPrepared least, asked most.Open this floor →
Afterwards
It ends and there is still something to do — including, on one of these floors, the only sanctioned chance to improve an answer that came out wrong.
The thank-you emailTwo careers offices on what it is for, and the twenty-four hours it lives in.Open this floor →
Negotiating the offerThe conversation all of this was leading to.Open this floor →
Handing in your noticeThree lines and a date, and whether the notice is required at all.Open this floor →
What this tower will not do
It will not give you eleven steps. The government that publishes its own interview method describes three things to do beforehand, and the first is reading the advertisement properly.
It will not tell you to perform. Structured interviews are scored against written standards precisely so that performance matters less than substance.
And it will not script your answers. Every example has to be yours, which is the one part of this that nobody can do for you. What holds instead is simple: the definition of a structured interview is quoted from the US Office of Personnel Management and the preparation guidance from a US federal employer, both listed below.
Where this page got its facts
- US Office of Personnel Management — Structured Interviews (the definition, that all candidates are asked the same predetermined questions in the same order, and that all responses are evaluated using the same rating scale and standards) — www.opm.gov, read 22 August 2026.
- VA Careers (US Department of Veterans Affairs) — The interview process (the before-and-during guidance, the instruction to note the competencies in the announcement, the permission to pause and ask for clarification, the first-person rule, and the balance between claiming your part and claiming only your part) — vacareers.va.gov, read 22 August 2026.
Written by Alberto Gulotta
Founder and editor of AI Tools Primer, writing from Palermo, Italy. Thirty-five years of taking computers apart, starting with a Commodore 64 — the long version is on the about page.
Something wrong on this page? Write to aitoolsprimer@gmail.com and it gets fixed.
Written on 22 August 2026.
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