Interviews come in many shapes, and each format has its own rules. A phone screen is a fifteen-to-thirty-minute recruiter call confirming basics, motivation, and logistics, while a true phone interview with the hiring manager can include technical questions and runs longer. For either, find a quiet space, keep your resume and notes at hand, smile to project enthusiasm through your voice, and consider standing for energy. Video interviews add the technical layer: test your audio and video in advance, use a neutral background, dress fully professionally, and remember that looking at the screen rather than the camera breaks eye contact. One-way recorded interviews, such as HireVue, give you limited re-takes, so rehearse once, light the room well, and direct your gaze at the lens.
Panel interviews, where multiple interviewers evaluate you simultaneously, demand that you address the entire group while making appropriate eye contact with whoever asked the current question. Lunch and stress interviews test social grace and resilience respectively: at lunch, order something easy to eat, avoid alcohol, and keep conversation professional; during stress interviews where the interviewer is challenging or rapid-fire, stay calm, slow your pace, and respond with structure. Matching aggression signals immaturity, while calmly lowering your vocal intensity and answering with facts conveys the composure the format is really measuring.
Specialized formats require their own preparation. Case interviews — common in consulting and finance — give you a business problem to solve on the spot; structure your thinking aloud using MECE buckets (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive), round numbers aggressively so the math stays manageable, and explicitly state your assumptions before calculating. Resist the "framework trap" of reciting a memorized structure without tailoring it to the actual problem. Coding and whiteboard interviews reward communication as much as correct code: talk through your approach, start with a brute-force solution, optimize incrementally, and discuss time and space complexity in Big-O notation. For senior or specialized roles, system design interviews shift the focus to architectural decisions — load balancing, caching, APIs, and the CAP theorem's tradeoffs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. Across every format, practicing mock interviews — ideally recorded or with a mentor giving feedback — is the fastest way to surface filler words, tighten pacing, and build the poise that formats like HireVue and assessment centers reward.