The interview before the interview – David Hopkins / Education & Leadership

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a change in the way organisations are approaching interviews; increasingly, candidates are being sent interview questions in advance. I think this is a good thing.

Interviews are strange. We ask people to demonstrate their ability, experience and potential by putting them into an artificial situation where they have limited time to think, respond and explain. The ability to answer a difficult question immediately, under pressure, does not necessarily tell us whether someone can do the job. For some people, particularly those who experience anxiety around interviews or who process information differently, being put in the spotlight can create a barrier that has little to do with their actual capability, no matter the amount of preparation.

Giving people the opportunity to prepare, reflect and think through their answers should help remove that barrier. It recognises that there are different ways of demonstrating knowledge and experience, and that the traditional interview format does not work equally well for everyone, and I fully support that.

However, after experiencing this approach several times, I have found myself thinking about something we often overlook when we talk about accessibility: giving everyone the same experience is not necessarily ‘accessibility’. Sometimes it is simply a different version of the same approach.

The intention behind sending interview questions in advance is positive. It gives candidates time to prepare examples, organise their thoughts and avoid the pressure of having to remember experiences from their career immediately. However, for me, the impact has sometimes been different. Rather than reducing the anxiety, it has moved it earlier in the process: the interview before the interview.

Instead of preparing for a conversation where I can showcase my background and experience, I find myself analysing every part of the process. What does this question really mean? What are they hoping to hear? Which example best demonstrates this? Is my example strategic enough? Is it recent enough? Have I covered everything they might be looking for? The preparation becomes its own challenge.

I write notes. I refine them. I shorten them. I expand them again. I try to find the balance between being prepared and sounding flat and ‘autonomous’, and doing my best to not sound like I’m reading from a script. The more effort I put into preparing, the more conscious I become that I need to somehow forget that side of the preparation and prepare to have a natural conversation.

Then the interview begins, and the challenge changes again. Do I look at my notes? If I do, will I lose the flow of the conversation? If I don’t, will I forget something important that I spent hours preparing? Can I find the right example quickly enough? Can I explain it naturally rather than simply repeating the answer I rehearsed? Sometimes the preparation itself becomes the distraction.

There is another layer here too: increasingly, interview questions are accompanied by guidance explaining what the panel is looking for in your response. The intention here is, again, positive. Transparency is important, and candidates should understand what skills, behaviours or experiences they are being asked to demonstrate. Sometimes this level of guidance creates another source of anxiety: a question that allows four or five minutes to answer might include expectations around strategic thinking, stakeholder management, communication, leadership, problem solving, innovation, evaluation and impact. All of those things may be relevant, but trying to demonstrate them all within a few minutes can become less about explaining your experience and more about trying to reverse-engineer the perfect response.

The challenge becomes not just “what have I done?” but “how do I plan to make sure I mention everything they need to hear?”

Perhaps the most difficult version of this is when the questions are provided in advance, significant time is spent preparing, and then the questions are not asked. We always hear that interviews are a two-way process; you are also interviewing them, and the conversational approach gives you a good sense of them as individuals as well as an employer: a good panel should explore interesting answers, ask follow-up questions and investigate areas that naturally emerge during the discussion. But only if the time you have allows for this kind of adaptability in the interview technique. Nobody wants an interview (either the interviewee or interviewer) where candidates simply read prepared responses to a fixed script.

From the candidate’s perspective, however, it can be difficult when the preparation you have invested time and thought into suddenly becomes irrelevant. You are left trying to recalibrate in the moment, moving away from the structure you prepared and finding your way through a conversation you expected to be different.

None of this means that sharing interview questions in advance is a bad idea. Far from it. For many candidates, this will be an important and valuable adjustment. Traditional interviews can unintentionally reward confidence, speed of response and comfort with unfamiliar situations rather than assessing someone’s actual ability to do the role.

Perhaps we need to be careful about assuming that one approach works for everyone, whether the questions are shared in advance or not. Having chaired interview panels myself, I understand the other side of this conversation too. Recruitment processes need consistency. Candidates must be assessed against the same role requirements, the same expectations, the same evidence, and the same process. Decisions need to be fair, transparent and defensible.

Accessibility does not mean removing all structure or creating completely different assessments for every individual. The challenge is finding the balance between consistency and flexibility.

Different candidates may need different ways to demonstrate their capability, but the purpose of the assessment should remain the same. The skills, knowledge and experience required for the role should not change.

This is something we already understand in education. We do not make assessment fair by requiring every student to complete the same journey. We make it fair by ensuring students have meaningful opportunities to demonstrate the same learning outcomes. Recruitment should work in the same way. Accessibility is not about giving everyone the same experience. It is about removing unnecessary barriers while maintaining the integrity of the process.

Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash

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