An interview invitation that ends with "please prepare a ten-minute presentation" changes what the day is. You are no longer only answering questions. You are being watched doing a small piece of the job, in front of the people who would work with you.
Read the brief for what is being assessed
Most briefs run to two or three sentences, and most candidates read them once. Read yours five times. The topic is rarely the test. A brief that asks "how would you approach your first 90 days in this role" is not looking for a correct plan, because nobody outside the organisation could write one. It checks whether you can prioritise, whether you understand what the role is for, and whether you can explain a decision to people who will have to live with it.
Pull the brief apart before you build anything:
- The verb. "Present your approach", "analyse", "recommend" and "tell us about" ask for different work. A recommendation needs a position. An analysis needs a method and evidence.
- The audience. If the invitation names job titles, write for the least specialist person at the table.
- The limits. The time, any cap on slides, the file format, and a deadline if they want your material in advance.
- The daily work of the role. A sales candidate is being read for persuasion, a finance candidate for whether the numbers hold up, a trainer for clarity.
If something is unclear, ask. An email to the recruiter checking whether there will be a screen, who is attending, and whether questions sit inside the ten minutes or follow them is an ordinary request and reads as careful. Guessing the format wrong costs far more.
When the topic arrives on the day
Some employers hand over the topic when you arrive and give you twenty or thirty minutes alone with it. The method does not change, it compresses. Spend five minutes reading and choosing your answer, ten on an outline on a single sheet, and the rest saying your opening under your breath. Do not write full sentences. You will not have time to read them back.
A structure that fits in ten minutes
Ten minutes is short. At a calm pace it holds roughly 1,300 spoken words, which is room for one message and an order the panel can follow without effort:
- Opening, one minute. Give the answer first: your recommendation in a single sentence.
- Framing, one to two minutes. How you read the problem and what you assumed.
- Body, five to six minutes. Two or three points, each carrying a fact, a figure or an example from your own work.
- Trade-offs, one minute. What you would give up, and what you do not yet know.
- Close, thirty seconds. The answer again, then the next step.
Saving the conclusion for the end is a habit from school essays, and here it is a risk. If you are cut off at minute nine, the panel has heard everything except the point.
Say your assumptions out loud. You do not have the internal numbers and everyone in the room knows it. "I am assuming a team of five and a flat budget" shows reasoning. A plan that ignores its own blind spots sounds like a template.
Slides, a handout or nothing at all
Follow the brief. If it says nothing, slides are the cautious choice on a video call and one option among several in a room. My view is that candidates always make too many. Five or six are enough for ten minutes.
- One idea per slide, with a full sentence as the heading. "Sales have fallen since 2024" beats "Sales".
- Text that can be read from the back of the room. If you are about to say "you probably cannot see this, but", delete the slide.
- No paragraphs. The panel reads faster than you speak, and while they read they are not listening to you.
The slide is for the panel and the notes are for you. Mixing the two is how people end up reading the screen with their back to the room. A simple check: if you cannot talk through a slide without reading it, either it holds too much text or you have not rehearsed it enough.
Two alternatives are worth knowing. A one-page handout, one copy per panel member, suits roles where writing matters. Speaking with no visuals at all, using a flipchart if the room has one, can work well for leadership and training roles, as long as the brief does not rule it out.
Rehearse against a clock
Reading your notes in silence proves nothing, because speaking aloud takes noticeably longer. Rehearse standing up, out loud, with the timer on your phone. Aim for nine minutes. Some panels will stop you at ten, occasionally in the middle of a sentence.
A few habits change the result:
- Set a checkpoint. At five minutes you should be starting your second point.
- Decide in advance which block you will drop if you are running late.
- Learn the first sentence and the last one by heart, and nothing in between. A script memorised in full collapses at the first blank.
- Record yourself once. It is uncomfortable, and within three minutes it shows every filler word you use.
Do at least one run in front of someone who does not know the subject. If they cannot repeat your message in one sentence afterwards, the message needs work, not the slides. On the day, it is reasonable to ask whoever is chairing to give you a nod at eight minutes.
The questions are the real test
The presentation is prepared. The questions are not, or not entirely, and that is why panels weigh them so heavily: they want to see what happens to your reasoning when someone pushes on it. Handling several interviewers at once has its own guide on this blog, so what follows is only about questions aimed at your content.
Prepare them like the rest. List the five weakest points in your talk and write an answer for each. Keep two or three spare slides after your closing one, with the detail behind a figure or an option you rejected.
When a challenge comes, do not defend the plan by reflex. Something like "That is a fair challenge. I assumed the budget stays flat. If it drops, I would start with the second workstream instead" does more for you than a word-for-word defence. If you do not know, say so, then say how you would find out.
Close with a question of your own, tied to what you have just said: "Which part of this would be hardest to do here?"
Remote delivery, and what to do when the tech fails
On a video call, test screen sharing the day before, on the tool named in the invitation. Share one window and not your whole desktop, mute notifications, and put the camera at eye level. While you are sharing you can barely see faces, so pause halfway and ask whether the pace is working.
Plan for failure, remote or in person:
- the deck as a PDF alongside the original file, on a USB stick and in your own inbox
- a printed copy for each panel member, plus one for you
- an adapter if your laptop has only one kind of port
- for a video call, the PDF sent to the recruiter beforehand and a phone number to call if the connection drops
If the projector will not start, do not spend your ten minutes on it. Say "I will carry on without the screen", hand out the printed copies and continue. A candidate who stays calm in front of a dead cable gives the panel information that no slide contains.
One last check. The panel will usually have your CV in front of them while you talk, so the examples you cite should be findable on it. If your CV has fallen behind your LinkedIn profile, a tool such as Postulit can rebuild it from the profile in a few minutes.
Tonight, write your answer to the brief in one sentence. Until that sentence exists, do not open the slide software.