The interview kit, drafted

Five for Tuesday

Lina: Thursday the first of April. The written test is marked, and Tuesday's panel interview is set.

Elena Novak: Five candidates, three on the panel, four competencies. What the panel needs now is questions for this job.

David: Didn't the panel have a kit already?

Lina: A few general questions, the same for every job. Nova drafts the rest — and this time, not one of them reaches the panel until someone has read it.

Lina: The interview kit, drafted. Nova writes questions for each competency, and the panel uses only the ones a person has reviewed. And Farah gets a kit of her own.

Six applied, five go through

Lina: First, where the round stands.

Lina: Six people applied, from Istanbul, Lahore, Madrid, Lyon and Berlin.

Lina: All six passed scrutiny, which Elena did blind.

Lina: Five passed the written test. One scored forty per cent, under the fifty per cent pass mark, and Elena closed that application.

David: And Zeynep?

Lina: Eighty per cent. Farah, ninety. All five are on Tuesday's list.

The panel session

Lina: The panel interview, on Tuesday the sixth, on video,

Lina: with the Lahore Data Analyst Panel.

Lina: And in the actions: Draft Kit Questions with Nova.

Panel and schedule

Lina: Three sheets: Daniel chairs, Kenji and James mark as well, each on their own sheet.

Lina: And five slots of forty minutes.

Draft the kit

Lina: The form says what happens next: the questions wait as drafts, and the panel sees a question only once someone reviews it.

Lina: Two per competency.

David: What does Nova get to work from?

Lina: The job — title, summary, skills — and the four competencies with their descriptions. Nothing about any candidate.

A structured kit, not a chat

Lina: A kit is more than a list of questions.

Lina: Each question can be asked of every candidate in the same way,

Lina: with what a strong answer contains,

Lina: and a follow-up probe for when an answer stays general.

David: And the questions nobody should ask?

Lina: Nova is told never to ask about age, family, marital status, religion, health or origin — anything that isn't the work.

Eight drafts

Lina: Fifteen seconds later, eight drafts, two for each competency.

Lina: Every one marked to review. The panel can't see any of them yet.

Lina: Elena goes through them with Daniel on a call. He stops at the first.

The first draft

Lina: Walk me through a project where you used SQL and Python together.

David: And the advert asks for SQL and a BI tool. Python is on the skills list, but it isn't a requirement.

Lina: So a candidate who does her analysis in Power BI would lose marks for something the job never asked for.

Lina: It's a good question, pitched a little above the advert.

Edited, then reviewed

Lina: Elena rewrites it: SQL, and whichever tool you analysed the data in,

Lina: and what a strong answer looks like to match,

Lina: then ticks reviewed. The question now belongs to the panel's kit, with her name on the review.

Seven to go

Lina: Saved, and it leaves the list. They read the other seven the same way, and keep them all.

The kit adds up

Lina: Now the kit tab adds it all up: fourteen questions — the six general ones plus Nova's eight — fifty-six minutes, for a forty-minute slot.

David: So Nova made the interview too long.

Lina: It did what it was asked: two per competency. The screen caught it, and the choice is theirs — trim the kit, or give each candidate more time.

Lina: They give each candidate an hour.

The kit, as the panel sees it

Lina: Fifty-six minutes of questions in a sixty-minute slot.

Lina: And under Technical Knowledge, the general questions sit beside Nova's — Elena's rewrite among them,

David: still marked as Nova's, and reviewed. The panel can see who drafted what.

An invitation

Lina: Half past seven in Lahore. Farah Siddiqui opens her invitation.

Farah Siddiqui: Tuesday. Three of them on video — Lahore, Singapore and London. What will they ask me?

Her application

Lina: Her application: invited for Tuesday, on video.

Lina: Ninety per cent on the written test,

Lina: four of the job's five skills — Python is the one missing,

Lina: and a card from Nova: an interview prep kit.

Nova prepares

Lina: Build my kit. One call, about twenty-five seconds.

Her prep kit

Lina: It starts with what to expect: four competencies, and examples from her last three years, with numbers attached.

Lina: Then likely questions, each with a tip. Finding duplicates in half a million rows of maintenance logs, in SQL,

Lina: and designing a Power BI dashboard that engineering leadership checks every week.

David: That's close to one of the panel's own questions.

Lina: Close — and not because Nova saw the panel's kit. It never does. It gets the public advert and the four competencies, and any good candidate reading that advert would expect this question too.

And advice

David: Then collaboration: working with engineering leads, in a hybrid team.

Lina: And the tips end with the advert's own words: clear written English is a requirement, so practise summing up a finding in three or four sentences.

Three easy mistakes

Lina: Three easy mistakes with a drafted kit.

Lina: Letting drafts straight into the kit. Then the panel is asking Nova's wording, not yours.

Lina: Forgetting the clock. Fourteen questions in forty minutes means every candidate is rushed, and the last competency gets the least time.

David: And coaching candidates with the real questions. A prep kit is built from the advert — never from what the panel will actually ask.

Lina: Next: Tuesday's panel, the merit list, the bill for the whole round — and who decided.