A man walks into a bar. He orders a beer and notices a seal lounging in a kiddie pool behind the bar. “I like your tie,” says the seal.

The man ignores the seal, finishes his beer, and orders another. “Great choice in beer, by the way,” says the seal.

This goes on for a while. Every few minutes the seal gives him another compliment. Finally the man asks the bartender, “What’s with the critter in the kiddie pool?”

The bartender replies, “That’s our seal of approval.”

Put into perspective, the 1.2 million job cuts in 2025 is equivalent to every adult in Maine being unemployed. It was the highest number of layoffs since 2020 and the second highest since 2009. Companies often finalize their plans and open new budgets in January and February which means new jobs are opening up. That means more opportunity for candidates to take interviews. I want to offer some practical interview advice to anyone on the job hunt, especially students or early career professionals.

When I was laid off last year, I had colleagues who had been hired straight out of their internships. Many had no experience with a job interview despite being years into their careers. Interviewing is a skill and students and early career professionals are at a disadvantage because they haven't had practice developing their interviewing skills. Interviewing students was one of the reasons I became an Amazon bar raiser, and it gave me many chances to speak with unpracticed candidates.

I'm currently volunteering to run mock interviews with students at Per Scholas, an organization that provides technical skills training to advance economic mobility nationwide. I've already done practice interviews with a few students and given them some advice. Some of this advice I've given repeatedly. The repetition made it clear how useful these pointers are for job seekers, whether they’re students looking for their first job or early-career professionals preparing for their first real job search.

There are plenty of interview prep guides out there, and more than a few companies offering mock interviews for a fee. Mock interviews are a great way to get no-stakes practice answering questions on the fly. Every company and every interviewer does things a little bit differently, so there's no such thing as being 100% ready. But practicing helps keep nerves calm for when the real interview happens.

Here are three pieces of advice that I don't usually see in other interview prep guides. They're mainly applicable to behavioral interview questions where you talk about past experience and projects. Incorporating this advice will help interviewers understand how you can be the solution to their company's problems.

Make sure you're talking about the process as much as the result. It's natural to want to highlight accomplishments and talk about results as quickly as possible. But if you leave out the steps about how you got to the answer, you're leaving out the best parts. Don't skip straight from "here's the problem" to "here's the solution." Make sure to fill in the middle.

Think of your story like making a sandwich. You need the middle parts to make it delicious. Otherwise all you have is a loaf of bread. The loaf might be delicious on its own, but it's not a sandwich. The bottom, the first slice of bread, is the problem you solved. The filling in the middle is the process you used to solve the problem. Then you top it off with the second slice, the outcome of having met your goal.

This means talking about the things you tried that didn't work. Talk about the failed attempts that taught you more about the problem. Talk about who you collaborated with or who you had to convince. Talk about how your solution changed in response to feedback. Include the middle to give interviewers a real understanding of how you think, not just what you delivered.

Before an interview, write down one or two sentences about your past experiences that you want to talk about. If you don't have a large work history you can draw from your school projects, volunteer work, or side hustles. These notes make it faster to match your experience with the question being asked. Include relevant numbers in your notes if you have them. Interviewers love numbers because it makes your story more believable and shows the impact.

Don't turn your notes into a script. Interviewers don't like anything that sounds like reading cue cards and scripts don't help as much as you think. Interviewers will interrupt to dig into something they thought was interesting. If you're following a script, this interruption can make it hard to get back on track. Scripts also make it easier to talk without actually answering what was asked if you mismatch your scripted answer to the question.

Also take notes during the interview as questions are asked. If you aren't immediately sure how to organize your response, ask for a moment to jot down some notes. Thirty seconds can improve the clarity and structure of your response. This can be tricky in virtual interviews because your interviewer might think you're using an AI assistant to generate your answers. But if you've written the notes on a sheet of paper, you can hold those up to the camera to stave off any misunderstandings.

Including specifics boosts your credibility. Talk about why something you tried didn't work but got you closer to the answer. If you collaborated with other teammates, clarify the difference between your responsibilities and theirs. If you had to make tradeoffs don't just talk about what the tradeoffs were, but also the criteria you used to prioritize. Describe the impact of prioritizing one thing over another.

At Amazon, interviewer training emphasizes asking good followup questions. These help the interviewer dive in to a candidate's answers to get the data needed to make a hiring decision. Followup questions make sure the candidate really did the work. They also help candidates who may not be skilled at presenting their work by revealing their experience and putting them in a better light.

Not every company gives their interviewers this training, and even if they did, there's no guarantee the interviewer will be good at asking followup questions. If you give them a sandwich with no filling they may just assume that's all you have to offer and move on. That's why it is important to include as many specifics as possible without relying on prompts.

The most common example I see is candidates saying they "did some research" or "searched online." This is too vague. Tell your interviewer about the best sources you found and why they mattered, be they documentation, papers, videos, or online courses.

Every company's hiring process is different and not all interviewers are expert interviewers. Some may have just finished their interviewer training. Some may not have had any training at all. Companies decide when an employee is ready to interview based on a host of factors related to culture, cost, experience, and willingness to accept risk.

This means that it falls to you to make the best case for your value. Interviewers may not ask the followup questions that reveal your strongest aspects. If you don't offer the details yourself, they may assume your experience is trivial and straightforward. A great interviewer will dig to get a better understanding of a candidate's capabilities. But you need to be ready for an average interviewer.

Interviews are like football, it's a bit of an "Any Given Sunday" situation. Despite all your preparation and level of skill, you still might not get the job. Interviewers have bad days, can be jerks, and may ask questions that don't match your previous experience. It may be that there was only one open position and it went to somebody else equally qualified. It's normal and not bad luck.

The bright side is that companies rarely hold grudges. A company telling you "no" after an interview doesn't mean "never," it just means "not right now." You can usually interview again in a few months, and you'll be better prepared now that you've had more practice.

For more information related to the interviewing, check out these links.

The sheal was born of good intentions. It was created by the legendary halfling bard Lyrien Softstep, whose songs were famous for calming beasts and whose heart ached at the sight of suffering animals. After witnessing a coastal famine where seals starved as fish populations plummeted and sheep froze during brutal winters, Lyrien used a single, reckless wish spell to “make a creature that could thrive anywhere, on land or sea, and never want.” The magic answered literally. When the sheal emerged, thick with blubber and bleating, Lyrien realized too late that survival and harmony are not one and the same, but her ability to cast the wish spell was gone forever and the damage could not be undone.

As always, you can find more on the Sheal for free on Patreon.

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