Use This 15-Minute Checklist to Prepare for

a Job Interview
In just a few minutes you can make sure that you’ll nail
your first impression.
 Rich Bellis

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Your job interview is just days away and you’re feeling unprepared. You’ve reread the job
posting about 67 times and you’re pretty clear on the role itself–but you can’t really think of
much else to do to brush up.

Don’t sweat it. In fact, you may only need another 15 minutes or so in order to prep, so here’s
what to do.

1. Confirm everyone you’ll be meeting with.

One minute. If the hiring manager or an HR officer set up your interview and didn’t explicitly
tell you whom you’re going to be chatting with, don’t just assume it’s them and only them.
It’s not at all uncommon for hiring managers to shuttle you off to someone else on their team
who’s become available to meet you at the last minute. Firing off a quick email like this puts
them on the hook to plan ahead rather than surprise you:

Hi Kamala, I’m really excited to come in on Tuesday. Just wanted to confirm that I’ll be
speaking with you and Jarrod. Could you please let me know if there’s anyone else I should
look forward to meeting? Thanks so much!

Hit send and move on.

2. Check out the interviewer’s LinkedIn and Twitter.

Five minutes. Chances are you’re more familiar with the job description than with the roles
and backgrounds of your interviewer. Once you’ve nailed down which people you’ll be
talking to, it’s time to do some digging on each of them.

LinkedIn is the obvious great place to start. Skim their previous roles (including at other
employers), take note of how long they’ve been with the organization, and then head way
down to the bottom: If there are endorsements and recommendations, these can give you a
feel for what a prospective boss might be especially good at. Any common themes in the
praise their colleagues are sharing? Obviously, you’ll only find positive feedback in these
sections, but that can still help you hone better questions about their management style.
Twitter is a handy guide, too: What articles is your interviewer sharing? Are their tweets
opinionated and casual, or do they sound serious and formal? It’s certainly an imperfect
measure, but this can still help you guess at an interviewer’s personality, interests, and values.

3. Line up your “about me” answer.

Seven minutes. Chances are your interview will open with some form of “Tell me a little
about yourself” or the longer variant, “Tell me a little about yourself and what interests you
about this role.” So plan your answer using a few quick bullet points in order to keep things
short and concise.

As Glassdoor’s Isabel Thottam pointed out recently, it’s all about first impressions, so you’ll
want to avoid sharing a lengthy backstory. “Skip your personal history and give about two to
three sentences about your career path and how you ended up in this interview, applying for
this job,” she explains. “You don’t need to be too detailed, there are plenty more questions
coming. You just want to leave enough curiosity that the interviewer becomes excited to learn
more about you throughout the interview.”

Take a few minutes to sketch out this capsule narrative and commit it (loosely, not word-for-
word) to memory.

4. Brainstorm one great question to ask.

Two minutes. Get one really sharp question lined up that you can pose to the hiring manager.
Sure, you can brainstorm three or five if you have time, but interviews ted to get truncated
more often than they drag on longer than expected–so think about the No. 1 thing you really
want to know.

Not sure what that is? Here are a few good questions you might want to pose depending on
your career-stage. These are a bunch of all-around sharp questions that help you probe deeper
about how performance is measured, expectations for the role, career advancement, and more,
and these are a few more that can help you really dig into the company culture.

But when in doubt, just ask a question that shows off your curiosity. According to
psychologist and talent expert Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, “just being curious is a marketable
job skill.” It’s “the precursor to learning faster and better, and thereby adapting to change
rather than succumbing to it,” he explained in a recent Fast Company column. He suggests
asking qualitative questions like, Why do you see X as important?” or “How do you see Y
changing in the future?”

This can help interviewers see that you’re thinking ahead and considering how the role fits
into the bigger organizational picture, but it does something much more fundamental, too:
Continued curiosity is a sign that you’re actually interested in the job and giving it some
serious thought. At a minimum, you want to walk out of your interview having convinced
them of that.

Rich Bellis was previously the Associate Editor of Fast Company's Leadership section.