I Talked About A Spreadsheet For 4 Minutes In An Interview And I Still Think About It

Have you ever been asked a question in an interview and thought, right, I know this one-and then sat there listening to yourself get it completely wrong?

“Describe a time you had a difficult conversation at work.” I’d been asked that, or something near enough, maybe 4 times before. I had an answer ready. I thought I had an answer ready.

What came out was 4 minutes about a spreadsheet.

The tabs. Why the formulas were broken when I inherited it. Who built it originally-one of whom had left the company in 2016, which mattered to absolutely nobody in that room. And somewhere in the middle of all this I noticed that I had not yet mentioned a single human being. The question had been about a human being. And I was still going.

I finished with “so, yeah, it got sorted in the end.” Which is what you say when you know.

I wasn't nervous. I'd just never said it out loud.

And I had prepared. Properly, I thought. Read up on the company, questions ready, looked up the whole panel on the bus in. I’d picked which examples I was going to use.

Picked them in my head, though. On a bus. Not once out loud. Which is not the same thing as being ready, and I’d have argued with you about that at the time.

Here’s the gap nobody warns you about. Knowing a story and being able to tell that story in 90 seconds under a bit of pressure are two completely different skills, and the only thing that closes the distance is having said the words out loud at least once beforehand. Why? Because the first time you tell any story it comes out backwards. Too much setup, and the point arriving about 40 seconds after anyone needed it.

That’s not jitters. That’s a first draft. And I had decided to do mine live, in front of 3 people who were deciding whether to pay me.

The thing everyone has heard of and nobody actually writes down

STAR. Situation, task, action, result. You know it. I knew it. I could have explained it to you at length, properly, while I was still going on about the tabs.

It didn’t save me because I knew it as an idea and not as 4 lines on a page for one specific story. Written down is the bit doing the work in that sentence. Not the acronym.

Had I had it written down:

Situation - inherited the monthly report. 2 people had built it, neither of them still around.
Task - find out why our numbers didn’t match finance’s. 9 days to do it in.
Action - went to the finance lead, who it turned out had been irritated about this for a year. An hour sat with her. The maths was fine, the two definitions weren’t.
Result - changed the definition, got her to agree it in writing, turnaround went from 5 days to 2, and the arguing stopped.

Same story. 90 seconds. And there’s a person in it. The spreadsheet gets one mention, as scenery, which is all it ever deserved.

What the structure actually does is stop you front-loading the situation, which is exactly what I did. The situation is the part you remember best, so it feels like the important part. It isn’t. Nobody needs any more of it than enough to follow what you did next.

6 stories. Not 60.

This is the part that took the pressure off me, so I’ll be blunt about it.

You don’t need an answer for every question. What they’re digging for is a short list, and the questions overlap enormously-conflict, a failure, leading something you had no authority over, changing your mind, something you’re proud of, cleaning up a mess with no information to hand.

6 of them, written out properly, will cover something like 80% of behavioural questions with a bit of rewording on the spot. That reporting story up there does conflict, stakeholder management, process improvement, and “tell me about something you’re proud of”. 1 story, 4 questions, and nobody in the room any the wiser.

So it isn’t memorise 50 answers. It’s write down 6 true things, 4 lines each, then say them out loud in the car on the way to Tesco. One evening. Two, if you keep stopping.

And if the bit stopping you is sitting in front of a blank page trying to remember your own career-which it was, for me, for about a fortnight-a decent free career resource for building out an interview preparation kit hands you the question list and a STAR method template to drop the stories into. Which takes away the worst part. The starting.

Saying it out loud. Yes, it's embarrassing. Do it anyway.

I can’t overstate how much worse the spoken version is than the written one. You’ll have 4 tidy lines, you’ll open your mouth, and out will come something with three subordinate clauses and no ending.

So do it badly somewhere it costs you nothing.

Out loud in the kitchen, to nobody at all. Into a voice note you delete afterwards-horrible to listen back to, and also the fastest feedback you’ll ever get, because you’ll hear the exact moment you started waffling. You’ll want to skip past it yourself. That’s the tell.

Or do it as a mock interview with an AI interviewer, which I was sceptical about and then wasn’t. The useful part isn’t really the feedback, I’d venture. It’s that something asks you a question you weren’t expecting and you have to answer it then and there, out loud, at a moment when getting it wrong costs you nothing whatsoever. Which is precisely the thing I had skipped.

It’s also the only part of interview prep you can’t do silently. Which is probably why everyone skips it.

Time yourself as well. People get this very wrong-90 seconds feels like about 15 when you’re the one doing the talking. Record one and check it. Mine ran 4 minutes and I’d have sworn it was 90 seconds.

And then the questions you ask them

Bit of a tangent, but it goes here.

They’ll ask if you’ve got any questions, and most people have one polite one about reporting lines. That moment is the best information you’ll get in the entire process and you’re allowed to actually use it.

What does a normal Tuesday look like here. What happened to the last person in this job. What do people find hardest about working here.

You get real answers to those, mostly because nobody asks them, so there’s no rehearsed line sitting ready. And you get to watch them decide how honest to be, which tells you rather more than the answer does.

It’s also where you work out whether you’d still want to be there in 2 or 3 years. Worth taking seriously, that-thinking a few years ahead about where a role actually leads matters more than it used to, back when people stayed somewhere 15 years and got a clock at the end of it.

I did not get that job

I’d like to say I pulled it back in the second half. I didn’t. There is no second half after 4 minutes on a spreadsheet-the rest of it is a formality everybody politely finishes while thinking about lunch.

But I’ve thought about that one more than interviews I actually passed, because it was such a clean and fixable failure. I knew the story. I had the material. I’d just never said it out loud, so what turned up on the day was the first draft.

Write your 6 down this week. 4 lines each. Say them to a wall.

It’s a dull evening of work and it’s the whole difference between having a story and being able to tell one.