Interviews
Updated: Aug 3
Do Your Homework — and Learn the STAR Method
Two things separate a candidate who's clearly prepared from one who's winging it: the research they did before walking in, and how they structure their answers once they're sitting down.
Research the Company Properly
You want them to see that you put in real effort. Start with the website and the mission statement, then go further:
Google them. New funding round, new product launch, new executives, press coverage — any of it gives you something specific to bring up in the room.
Check their social accounts. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok. Different platforms show you different things; the LinkedIn page tells you how they talk to the industry, the Instagram tells you what the office is actually like.
Search the company name on LinkedIn and filter to Posts. This is the trick most people miss — you'll see not just the company's own posts but what employees are sharing about working there.
Look up your interviewers on LinkedIn. Where did they work before? What do they comment on? It's genuine small-talk material, and it tells you what kind of conversation to expect.
Show Up Right
Arrive 5–10 minutes early. Not more. Your interviewer is almost certainly between meetings, and showing up twenty minutes ahead means you sit in the lobby awkwardly.
Ask About the Team
Always. A colleague of mine once told me his single biggest pet peeve was candidates who never asked anything about the team they'd be joining — to him it signalled they didn't actually care about working alongside anyone.
So ask: Who would I be working with day to day? How is the team structured? What's the working style?
The STAR Method
This is the thing that will most improve your actual answers.
STAR is a format for telling a story about your experience so it lands. Instead of rambling, you walk through four steps:
Situation — set the scene and give just enough context.
Task — what your specific responsibility was.
Action — the concrete steps you took.
Result — what came out of it.
It works on every "tell me about a time when..." question, and those are most of the hard ones.
What it sounds like in practice
Question: Tell me about a time you handled a difficult situation at work.
Situation: Our biggest client emailed on a Thursday saying they were considering not renewing — they felt response times had slipped badly over the previous quarter.
Task: I owned that account, so it was on me to work out what had gone wrong and put together a response before our call the following week.
Action: I pulled six months of ticket data and found our average response time had nearly doubled after two people left the support team. I mapped which request types were worst affected, proposed a triage system that routed their urgent issues directly to a named contact, and got sign-off from my manager to pilot it for a month.
Result: Response time on their urgent tickets dropped to under four hours, they renewed for another year, and we rolled the triage system out to our other enterprise accounts.
Notice how much more that says than "I'm good at handling difficult clients." Prepare two or three of these before your interview — one about a conflict, one about pressure, one about a mistake — and you'll have something ready for most of what they throw at you.
During the Interview
Be yourself, be confident, and don't interrupt. Let them finish their question before you start answering — nerves make people jump in early.
And do not speak badly about a past employer or manager. The Israeli tech ecosystem is small; everyone has worked with everyone, and there's a real chance the person across the table knows the people you'd be complaining about.
The Follow-Up Email
Send a thank-you note after the interview. Thank them for their time, mention something specific from the conversation, and say you're looking forward to next steps.
If you only have the recruiter's email, it's worth some detective work to reach the person who actually interviewed you.
Most companies use one consistent format. Find any employee's email address that's already public — on the company's contact page, in a press release, in a PDF or job posting — and apply the same pattern to your interviewer's name.
Common formats:
If you can't confirm the format, send the note to the recruiter and ask them to pass it along. That works fine, and it's better than firing off five guesses and having four bounce.
© 2023 Gila Bublick | Linkedin | gbublick@gmail.com
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