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How to prep for any interview like you've done the job before
Most people prep. Few people prepare like this.
Kyle Thomas
May 09, 2026
JOB SEARCH STRATEGY WITH EARLY.
You've had ChatGPT research the company.
Mission statement, about page, Glassdoor reviews, the recent funding round.
What you probably haven't had ChatGPT research is the person who's about to spend 45 minutes deciding whether to hire you.
Which, when you say it out loud, is kind of wild.
But almost nobody does this. Which means if you do, you have a very good chance of standing out.
I've interviewed and hired a lot of people. I could probably count on two hands the number of candidates who were deeply informed about our company AND knew who I was with the same level of detail.
You don't need the best credentials in the room. You don't need the most recognizable names on your resume.
You just need to be the most prepared.
The system I share below is exactly what candidates have used to crush interviews at top startups and turn those interviews into life-changing offers.
IN THIS WEEK'S ISSUE:
2. HOW TO RESEARCH YOUR INTERVIEWER(S)
It's a given that you'll research the company and the role.
What isn't a given is that you give the same level of attention to the audience you'll be speaking with.
Your interviewers.
Why does this matter?
You enter the conversation calmer because you already "know" them
You can predict the questions they're likely to ask
You build faster rapport by spotting genuine points of connection
You build better answers by knowing how to frame them so they land
You ask sharper questions at the end of the interview that make you stand out
In the olden days, I would have told you to start by going to LinkedIn and manually reviewing your interviewers' profiles.
But these are new times.
You still need to start with their LinkedIn. Pull up each interviewer's profile, save the link, and do an initial read-through:
Where have they worked before this?
What's their current role?
How long have they been there?
What does their role involve?
What milestones are in their about section?
Now that you have some familiarity, it's time to do the deep research. The kind that lets you walk into the interview knowing your interviewer better than 99% of the candidates they've ever met.
In the past, this would have taken hours, days even. Searching for talks, keynotes, articles, newsletters, podcasts, and content posted on social. Then consuming all of it.
Today, an LLM can do that in minutes and far more comprehensively than you ever could.
So here's what you do:
Step 1: Save the link to the role and to each interviewer's LinkedIn profile.
Step 2: Save the email from the recruiter with the names, structure, duration, and topics.
Step 3: Click the link below and grab the Early Master Interview Playbook. Inside, there's a deep research prompt where you drop in everything you just gathered, plus details on which LLM to use and how to set it up for best results.
Hit enter and walk away for 5-10 minutes.
When the AI finishes, you'll have a complete dossier on your interviewer. Their career story. The ideas they champion. How they think and how they communicate. Every documented overlap between your background and theirs, ranked, with suggested phrasing for how to bring each one up. It also includes the questions only someone who did this research could ask.
This is connection you can't fake, because it's real.
DON’T JOB SEARCH ALONE
If you’re reading through this thinking “I want help to do this step-by-step” that’s exactly what the Early Accelerator is built for.
Here’s what our members get:
One Early member recently landed a remote senior leadership role at a $500M startup that wasn’t even hiring.
Another went from VP to a COO role less than 90 days after joining.
These aren’t flukes - they’re the result of the playbooks, mentorship, company research, and community we provide.
It’s the best way I’ve found to cut through the noise and land a role at the next generation of world-changing startups.
3. BUILD YOUR UNFAIR ADVANTAGE (INTERVIEW PREP GUIDE)
You know who you're talking to. You have the topics, the structure, the duration. Now we build the prep doc.
In the playbook, there's a second prompt that does the heavy lifting. If you haven't grabbed it yet... wtf?!
Open the doc, scroll to Step 2, and fill in the inputs:
The company, the JD, and the cultural values from their careers page
The interview type, duration, and format (Zoom, in-person, phone)
The time you actually have to prep
Your resume
The Deep Dive Briefing from Step 1
Paste the prompt into Claude or ChatGPT and hit enter.
Five to ten minutes later, you'll have a full game plan calibrated to this exact interview.
The recruiter screen and exec round need different prep than a case interview or a hiring manager 1:1. So it will act accordingly. The plan tells you what to focus on, what to skim, and what to skip.
This is your plan for THIS interview, not a generic one.
The prompt will also spit out your “tell me about yourself” answer drafted from your resume, a STAR story for every responsibility on the JD, every gap in your background identified and accounted for, and a drill pack you can run mocks against, including ChatGPT Voice Mode setup scripts so you can practice speaking to a real virtual person. The whole prep doc is there and ready for you to rehearse.
That's the AI portion of the system.
Here's where most people screw it up.
DON'T BE THE KID IN THE SCHOOL PLAY
When the AI spits out your prep doc, it's tempting to read it once, feel prepared, and walk in with a cheat sheet you can read off of.
Don't do that.
AI can provide the scaffolding. It cannot inject your presence.
Think about a great standup comedian.
When you watch them, every line lands like it just occurred to them. The pauses feel natural. The setups don't feel like setups they were planned. And the punchlines feel like they're being shared with you for the first time.
In reality, they have done that exact bit hundreds of times. Word by word, in front of small audiences, refining the pacing, cutting what didn't land, and tightening up what did.
That's called preparation.
Now think about a kid in a school play.
They deliver every line at the same volume and stare at a fixed spot in space, remembering what comes next. You can tell they're just reciting the lines, not acting them.
That's also preparation. Just the wrong kind.
The AI prep doc, on its own, gets you to the school-play level.
To get to standup level, here's what you do.
Rewrite it in your voice. The AI doesn't know how you actually talk. Go through every drafted answer and rewrite it in your own words. Cut anything you wouldn't say. Add flavor, details, and personality. Read everything aloud. If the answer doesn't sound like you, the interviewer will hear it.
Add the stuff the AI couldn't know. What was the actual situation? Who pushed back? What were the stakes? What almost went wrong? What did you have to figure out on the fly? What would you do differently? Go through every story and add the details only you have. That texture is what makes it memorable.
Know your numbers. This week I was catching up with a senior recruiter at a Series E company with investment from top VCs. I asked her what was separating candidates who got offers from candidates who got passed up.
Her exact words:
"I see a lot of candidates get tripped up by staying too high level throughout the whole interview process. They don't give the 'how I did this' or the impact of their work, like saved $X or Y hours. Then it's hard to really know what they actually did."
YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW YOUR NUMBERS.
Revenue driven. Incremental customers gained. Percent changes. Hours saved. Profit margin improvement. Tie the work in your stories to tangible business outcomes and be ready to defend them. They will ask follow-up questions.
If you show lots of action without clear understanding of impact, you risk being seen as a person who was either so far removed they don't actually know how to operate, or like a person who just does a lot of stuff but the stuff doesn't drive the company forward.
Neither of those is good.
Write your answers by hand.
I know this sounds crazy in 2026.
Do it anyway.
A Princeton and UCLA study published in Psychological Science found that students who took notes by hand outperformed students who typed on conceptual questions, even though the typers captured more words on the page. Handwriting forces you to process and synthesize in a way that transcribing can’t.
The same logic applies to your prep.
Print the prep doc, grab a notebook, and write each answer out longhand at least once. Twice for the ones that matter most.
Rehearse out loud. Three rounds.
Listening to YouTube videos about interviewing is not preparation.
Creating the AI prep docs is not preparation.
Reading silently is not preparation.
You have to REHEARSE. That's the actual preparation.
Round 1: Do this alone, out loud, with a timer. Your "tell me about yourself" should be done in 90 seconds. Your STAR stories should wrap in 60 to 90 seconds. If you can't say them in that window, they're too long.
Round 2: Do this with an AI voice mock. ChatGPT Voice Mode is great for this. It will play your interviewer and push back when you stay too high level. There’s a setup script in the playbook so make sure you download it.
Round 3: Do this with a real human. It could be a friend, a mentor, or a member community like the Early Accelerator. The bar for the human mock is that they have to be willing to push you and call you out where you're weak, not nod along and say, "You did great!"
By the third round, your answers will feel second nature.
It'll feel just like talking.
That's the standup level we're after.
It's how you walk in prepared.
4. WHAT TO DO IN THE HOUR AFTER THE INTERVIEW
One Early Accelerator member sent a Loom thank-you video after her final interview.
It wasn't polished, and it took five attempts while the kids were getting home from school and being crazy because they were hungry. But she recorded it, and sent it.
The HR team later told her it was the reason she got the offer.
"If we had three spots, we would have hired all three finalists. But your video stood out as something really special."
That's what 30 minutes of post-interview work can do.
Most candidates close the laptop, eat something, and refresh their email every 20 minutes for the next three days.
Don't be most candidates.
Here's what I recommend instead.
Step one is the reflection. Immediately after the call, write down what went well, what didn't, where you felt underprepared, and what you could send as a follow-up to address any gaps. Don't wait until tomorrow. Do it while it's fresh.
Step two is the follow-up. And not a standard email.
Send a thank-you email with a video attached within an hour of the conversation ending. Record it in Loom. Keep it tight at roughly 30 to 90 seconds. You can reference something specific from the interview, reiterate why you're excited about the role, and address anything that you felt didn't land the way you wanted it to.
That's how easy it is to separate yourself when most candidates send nothing or a three-line AI-generated email written in 45 seconds.
If you’ve downloaded the playbook (final warning, if you haven’t done this yet I don’t know what’s going on with you) it walks you through the exact 24-hour follow-up process including thank-you’s, value deliverables, and a 90-second Loom script with stage directions. If you recorded the interview, the script is built from the actual transcript.
The interview is where your preparation shows.
The follow-up is your last chance to shape the impression the hiring manager walks away with.
I've watched this play out enough times inside the Early community to tell you with confidence: This is the system.
Two prompts that build everything from a calibrated game plan to a memorable Loom follow-up.
A prep doc tailored to whether you’re walking into a recruiter screen or a final round with the founder.
This is the kind of preparation that makes you walk out of the interview saying, “There’s nothing more I could have done to land that job.”
And every part is learnable.
If you want hands-on help building the whole system, including story bank, value deliverables, and how to negotiate the offer once you get it, the Early Accelerator is where we do that work together. You'll do it surrounded by a community of badass startup operators. Applications are open at BeEarly.com.
Let’s go get you that job! 🏆
Kyle
Founder of Early
P.S. Reply with how you used the playbook, what interview you’re using it for, and what else you wish you had to prepare. I read every reply.
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