What Our Hiring Partners Actually Ask in a First-Round Interview

Across every technical role, the single most repeated first-round question is some version of 'walk me through a project you built' — not a trivia question, not a whiteboard puzzle. What separates candidates isn't the project's complexity; it's whether they can explain a decision they made and why they made it instead of memorising a script.

For development roles, expect one question that tests whether you actually wrote the code yourself — a small bug to spot, or 'what would happen if this input were empty'. For data and marketing roles, expect a case-style question: given this dataset or this campaign result, what would you do next.

Almost every partner also asks some form of 'tell me about a time something didn't work and what you did about it'. This is the one candidates prepare for least and it shows — have one real story ready, not a hypothetical.

Our mock interview rounds are run by people who've sat on the other side of this table, using exactly this pattern, before you sit in front of a real panel.