🛠️ Career Strategy

The Matrix Method for Interviewing

Most candidates fall into one of two traps when they prepare for interviews.

Trap 1: Wing it.

These folks assume their experience will “speak for itself.” That if they just show up and talk off the cuff about their career, everything will go great.

It rarely does. Management consultant Kent Aldershof mentions that those who wing it often cannot “ answer questions or talk constructively about their primary work topic. Or they speak in generalizations, cliches, and bromides.”

It makes no sense to wing it. As Allison Green from Ask a Manager says, “some questions are so common that you’d be foolish not to prep your answers to them in advance.”

Trap 2: Script it.

Conversely, some people over-prepare. They write out long paragraphs for every possible behavioral question. They try to memorize every line, as if that will unlock the job like a cheat code.

Career coach and author Madeline Mann remarks, “Far too often, candidates sound rehearsed and stiff in job interviews… you start sounding like a character instead of yourself. Suddenly, the hiring manager is thinking: ‘This person doesn’t feel real. I don’t know if I trust them.’”

So what do you do?

You don’t wing it or script it. You structure it. You build a system that helps you remember the right story at the right time, with the right level of detail, while sounding natural.

The Matrix Method gives you that structured system.

The Matrix Method

The Matrix Method prepares you for the behavioral section of any interview without sounding rehearsed.

It’s as simple as building a table in Excel or Google Sheets:

• Along the leftmost column, you list the common behavioral question types, readily available via Google.

• Across the top row, add headers for 2-3 real examples from your own work that you can reuse in different contexts.

Fill each cell in the matrix with 3-5 bullet points to serve as signposts: short, simple thoughts to jog your memory. Just enough to anchor you in the story.

Want a list of common questions and a formula for writing stories? Subscribe by clicking below.

🤖 AI Tactic

The Matrix Method, Automated

Want to make the matrix method significantly easier? You can use AI to prepare your matrix!

The prerequisite: create a paragraph library of your job responsibilities. This can be as simple as a spreadsheet with paragraphs in one column and tags of job skills / duties in the next.

My prior post on instantly generating a cover letter can help with this.

But once you have a paragraph library, AI can tailor a matrix for any given job you apply to via this prompt:

If you want the prompts, please sign up for the newsletter :) 

🧠 Curiosity Corner

ChatGPT 5.1 is here!

You may recall that I detested the new ChatGPT 5 release a while back, so much so that I had to find a way to reinstall the old version 4 models.

Today, I’ll admit that I’m eating my words. The new 5.1 release is absolutely nuts. It delivers “deep research” level thinking in a fraction of the time.

I was working on a legal project and 5.1 researched all the relevant state laws, analyzed existing contracts, and provided detailed guidance on how to improve the contracts in line with the law.

If you use this model, reply back and let me know what you think!

💼 Job Board

Racking up big bucks in remote roles 🤑 

Here are the 3 most interesting remote job openings I’ve seen this week:

If you want the jobs, please sign up for the newsletter :) 

That’s it for this week.

-Rahul from The DesAI Digest

P.S. Reply back to this email with a business challenge you’re facing! I’d love to help.

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