The words, and what they cost you.

An Amazon interviewer from outside the hiring team, trained to protect the hiring bar and able to veto an offer.

A round that asks what you have actually done before, on the theory that past behaviour predicts future behaviour.

A consulting round where you work through a business problem out loud with the interviewer.

Palantir's signature technical round, where you break an open, underspecified problem into parts out loud rather than solve one clean algorithm.

The um, uh, like and you know that appear in speech, usually while the speaker plans what to say next.

A timed, automatically scored coding test sent before any human interview, used by a large number of firms including Goldman Sachs.

Amazon's published set of principles that its behavioral interviews are explicitly scored against.

McKinsey's behavioral round, run alongside the case and scored on its own dimensions.

One of the four attributes Google scores in its hiring process: whether you have real, evidenced depth for this specific role.

A four-part structure for answering behavioral questions: situation, task, action, result.

A trait-based online assessment used by several investment banks to screen candidates before any interview.

Capital One's automated pre-interview assessment, roughly 20 to 45 minutes, built from four named modules.