tl;dr Rehearse your responses and behaviours and if you lie, just make it fit within the larger context of your work history so it’s plausible

I’m very glad I could help. I was unemployed for most of 2023 and had to study, introspect and practice all of those interview and job hunting things anew, and realise how so much of it is this strange set of inculcated norms.

But the flip side of that is that recruiters do put out these resources that you can reverse engineer and practice like scripts, and I found that I was able to learn them and ‘act’ (like in the sense of an actor) the role convincingly for long enough to get through online interviews.

My main technique for online interviews was to have a word document out with pre-prepared responses against each of the main selection criteria, written out as dot points into an STAR format. When I got a relevant question, I would use a stalling reply from above while scrolling through the doc for the best example.

I’d have rehearsed each of these multiple times before the interview so I could recite them fluidly and hit on major points while still giving the appearance that they were off the top of the dome. It was exhausting.

(Fortunately they were still mostly doing them online in 2023 but the return to offline only would be a whole nother mountain to summit. The other thing I’ve seen is that some online interviewers insist that interviewees share their screen so that they know that they’re not using an LLM to spit out answers. The trick here is that you can cradle your phone underneath the camera and load the LLM up there while maintaining something similar to ‘eye contact’.)

About 30% of my responses are lies (as in it’s truth and lies mixed together for an aggregate 30% mistruth). Firstly because I will shoehorn any rehearsed example into a response because it’s better to have a fluid, prompt response than to have dead air. Secondly, because if I stumble and misspeak I do not stop to correct myself because this fails their ‘fluency’ test and makes you look untrustworthy or forgetful.

You kind of just have to barrel on. They will take everything at face value, so if you make something up they may ask you about it to expand upon. E.g. if you misspeak and say you were reporting to a section manager (more superior) instead of a line manager, then you kinda gotta roll with it. Just port across whatever action you took with the line manager and say section manager instead. They probably won’t ask why you were reporting to a section manager instead of a line manager because unless the place you’re interviewing for is /very/ similar in structure to the one you’re getting your example from, then they’re in no position to call you out.

The only thing that will most likely trip you up is lying whole-cloth. You’ve got to make your lies fit within the context of your CV (embellished ofc).