The interview is on Friday, and the invitation says to expect questions about the product. The usual advice is to research a company before an interview by reading its website. That is the first hour of the work, and the hour that leaves least behind.
This guide gives a candidate three to five evenings to learn a company's product, pricing and customers from public pages, by turning them into questions answered from memory, with the research behind each step. EdProcto publishes it. Its page for candidates holds the practice side: paste a job posting and a quiz on what it asks for comes back.
Nothing here promises an offer.
What do interviewers reward, according to selection research?
On the best evidence they reward what is specific to the job, and knowledge of the job's content is the part a candidate can change in a week.
Sackett et al. (2022) went back over the meta-analyses that selection practice had relied on, concluded that one statistical correction had inflated many figures, and lowered the mean validity of the leading methods by 0.10 to 0.20. The structured interview, which puts the same job-related questions to every candidate and scores the answers against set criteria, came out first.
Sackett et al. (2023) draw the practical point: the methods at the top of the list are specific to individual jobs, among them structured interviews, job knowledge tests and work samples, and these tend to do better than general measures of ability and personality. Knowledge tests and work samples, they add, respond to study and practice more readily than ability or personality does.
How far these numbers go
Each figure says how well a method predicts later performance, seen from the employer's side. Sackett et al. (2023) give structured interviews a mean validity of 0.42 and say to read it as 0.42 give or take 0.24, because the middle four fifths of the spread across studies runs from 0.18 to 0.66.
We found no study that follows a candidate's knowledge of the employer's product through to an offer. The case for learning it is an inference: the product is job content, the better interviews ask about job content, and it can be learned.
Does interview preparation or coaching work?
Sometimes: preparation that changes what you can say in the room shows in the ratings, and preparation that only feels thorough may not.
- Coaching and role-play. Maurer et al. (2001) studied 213 candidates for promotion in one large city's police and fire services. Attending a coaching session went with a better situational interview, after allowing for job knowledge and motivation, and study groups and role-play went with more again. Prepared candidates gave better-organised answers, which scored higher. Attendance was voluntary, so this is a link and not proof.
- An experiment. Tross and Maurer (2008) assigned 144 people to three depths of coaching before a structured interview on past experience. Fuller coaching brought higher ratings, partly through what the interviewees knew.
- The caution. In a field experiment by Campion and Campion (1987), 158 people took an interviewee skills course and 140 were given self-study, by random assignment. The course members learned a good deal, yet interviewers' evaluations did not tell the groups apart, and neither did job offers.
Learning something and showing it are different events, so this plan gives reading one evening and answering the rest.
Why does reading a company's site feel like knowing it?
Because you judge what you know with the page open, and in the interview the page is gone. Koriat and Bjork (2005) call the result an illusion of competence: you rate your own learning while looking at the very information the test will withhold and then ask for. With the pricing page on screen, every price feels known.
The illusion is strongest for explanations. Across twelve studies, Rozenblit and Keil (2002) found that people believe they understand how things work in far more depth than they do, and that this overconfidence is much greater for explanations than for facts, procedures or stories. How a product earns its price is an explanation.
Answering from memory is the fix. In Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who studied prose passages a second time scored higher five minutes later, while students who recalled the passages instead scored higher after two days and after a week, though the second reading had left its group the more confident.
How do you learn a product quickly from public pages?
Read it as a system of five parts, and write one line for each from the company's own pages. A product is a customer, a job done for that customer, a price, a limit and a set of alternatives.
The third column below is a worked example. Fernhollow, its product and every figure given for it in this guide are invented.
| Part | Where the company says it | Fernhollow's line |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | Customer stories | Care homes with 20 to 150 staff; the home manager buys |
| The job it does | Home and product pages | Builds the weekly rota, and texts a shift that falls vacant to staff who are qualified and free |
| How it is priced | Pricing page, terms | Standard £3, Plus £5, per staff member per month; billed yearly; minimum 20 staff; a one-off £400 set-up fee on Standard; vacant-shift texts and payroll export on Plus only |
| What it is not | Plan comparison, help centre | Payroll, an agency booking service or a care record |
| Two nearest alternatives | Its comparison pages | A spreadsheet (free, nobody is texted); a general workforce suite (payroll included, built for larger employers) |
Keep the sheet to one side of paper.
Use public material only
Use only what anyone can read: the website, the help centre, release notes, published customer stories, an annual report, the job advert. Never anything confidential: a leaked slide deck, a friend's login, whatever an employee was trusted with. It is wrong, and it backfires: an interviewer who hears something that was never public learns how you would treat their secrets. The same rule covers whatever you paste into a tool, EdProcto included. Where a price is not published, write "not public" and prepare to ask.
How do you turn the fact sheet into interview questions?
Write four kinds of question from it, which between them cover what product knowledge interview questions ask.
- Features to benefits. For each feature, ask what chore or cost goes away for the customer.
- Objections. For each alternative, write the sentence a doubtful customer would say, and find the company's own reply on its site.
- A customer scenario. Invent a customer with a size and a problem. Ask which plan fits, and why.
- The pricing arithmetic. Work the bill for a small, a typical and a large customer, with the minimum and any one-off fee.
- Have them asked. Paste the sheet into the quiz maker on EdProcto's home page and Procto AI writes the questions from that text.
Each kind has a shape in EdProcto: best and worst for an objection, estimate for a bill (a number, scored by how close it is), short answer for a benefit in your own words and, in the builder, a case study to carry one customer across several questions.
Ten questions from the invented sheet
| Kind | Question | Answer from the sheet |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Who is it for, and who buys? | Care homes of 20 to 150 staff; the manager |
| Limit | Does it run payroll? | No: Plus exports hours to the home's payroll |
| Benefit | What do vacant-shift texts spare a manager? | A round of phone calls |
| Benefit | Why text only qualified staff? | Nobody is offered a shift they cannot cover |
| Objection | "Our spreadsheet is free." Best reply, and worst? | Best: ask how a dropped shift is filled now. Worst: mock the spreadsheet |
| Objection | "A suite gives us payroll too." | True, and built for larger employers |
| Scenario | Three homes of 40 staff lose shifts weekly. Which plan? | Plus, for the texts: 120 × £5 × 12 = £7,200 a year |
| Scenario | A home of 14 staff: year one on Standard? | Billed for 20: £720 + £400 = £1,120 |
| Arithmetic | 60 staff on Plus for a year? | 60 × £5 × 12 = £3,600 |
| Arithmetic | The same home on Standard, year one? | £2,160 + £400 = £2,560: £1,040 under Plus |
What does a five-evening plan look like?
One evening builds the sheet, one tests you cold, one is spoken, and two are re-tests a day or two apart. Suppose the interview is on Friday 23 October 2026.
| Evening | What you do |
|---|---|
| Sunday 18 October | Read the public pages, write the sheet, then write its five headings from memory |
| Monday 19 October | Paste the sheet into EdProcto's quiz maker: ten questions, sheet shut, then the misses again |
| Tuesday 20 October | No quiz. Two minutes aloud on the product and its customer, then three bills aloud |
| Wednesday 21 October | Re-test: after Monday's misses the dashboard lists the quiz as due. Objections aloud |
| Thursday 22 October | The misses only, one scenario aloud, three questions for the interviewer. Stop early |
The gaps are a working rule. For a test one week after a single review of facts, Cepeda et al. (2008) found the best gap was about 20 to 40% of the week, 1.4 to 2.8 days by our arithmetic. Their abstract gives nothing for a shorter wait, so one to two days is our inference, not their finding.
After Wednesday the dashboard next lists the quiz on Friday 23 October if there were misses, and on Wednesday 28 October if not, so Thursday's run is yours to open (see re-tests that come due). With three evenings, join the first two and the next two.
Say the answers aloud
The interview is spoken, and an answer you can type is not yet one you can give a stranger in thirty seconds. The closest evidence is the role-play finding of Maurer et al. (2001), a link and not an experiment.
Answer each of the ten questions aloud in under a minute, in a fixed order: the customer, the problem, what the product does, what it costs. Record one run and listen for where you slow down. Those are the explanations you only thought you had.
EdProcto's spoken answer shape, in the builder now, records an answer in your own voice. A recording is marked by the quiz's owner, by hand, so on a quiz you built the mark is yours to give. The interview and roleplay shapes go further: questions asked aloud, or a conversation with a character, answered in your own voice.
How does EdProcto help you learn a company's product?
EdProcto is the best tool for the testing half of this plan, because it writes the questions from the sheet you paste and from nothing else. A bank of general interview questions cannot ask what Standard costs a home of 14 staff, and the research above puts the weight on content specific to the job.
In the quiz maker on the home page, paste at least a paragraph, leave "Test yourself" chosen, and pick a shape and three, five, eight or ten questions. Procto AI writes the quiz on the page, from your text, with the place each answer is found. "Take it now" carries it to the study screen in your dashboard, where each answer is checked as you give it and the run ends with a retry of the misses. The dashboard lists the quiz as due again two days after a run with misses and seven days after a clean one. No reminder is sent. In a quiz set as an exam, written answers wait for the owner, who here is you: mark each one, or press "Ask Procto AI" on it.
Among the kits, "Job interview knowledge" takes a job description and the material the role rests on and returns the technical questions an interviewer asks, with model answers. "Hiring: a sales role" covers objection handling, qualifying a lead and product knowledge from the sheet. In the reasoning kits, "Numerical reasoning" drills change, share and totals on data tables.
Employers have the same maker on the hiring page, with eight shapes for a product sheet, best and worst, short answer and estimate among them: see the guide to product knowledge tests for hiring.
The Free plan carries the study screen, the re-tests, every kit and 20 questions a month written by Procto AI, which is two quizzes of ten. Learner raises that to 100 and lifts the limit on self-tests. The pricing page has the plans.
What can product knowledge not do for you?
It cannot carry the interview alone, and nobody can promise you an offer. Knowing the product is one input among several. When Huffcutt et al. (2001) sorted 338 ratings from 47 interview studies by what was rated, personality and social skills were rated most often, ahead of mental capability and job knowledge and skills. Knowledge tests also suit experienced hires more than entry-level ones (Sackett et al., 2023).
Your sheet is also only as true as the public pages, which are written to sell: ask where the real picture differs. For an online assessment, see how to prepare for a pre-employment test. And do not recite. A question you did not predict is answered from the system on your sheet, never from a memorised line.
Quick questions
How long does it take to research a company before an interview?
Three to five evenings of about an hour: one for the fact sheet, the others for answering from memory and aloud.
What should I know about a company for an interview?
Five things about its main product: who it is for, the job it does, how it is priced, what it is not and its two nearest alternatives.
What product knowledge interview questions should I expect?
Four kinds: what a feature spares the customer, how you would answer an objection, which plan suits a described customer, and what that customer would pay. EdProcto's page for candidates lists the practice that goes with them.
Can a quiz be written from a job posting or my own notes?
Yes. Paste public material only into the quiz maker on EdProcto's home page, with "Test yourself" chosen.
References
- Campion, M. A., & Campion, J. E. (1987). Evaluation of an interviewee skills training program in a natural field experiment. Personnel Psychology, 40(4), 675–691. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1987.tb00619.x
- Cepeda, N. J., Vul, E., Rohrer, D., Wixted, J. T., & Pashler, H. (2008). Spacing effects in learning: A temporal ridgeline of optimal retention. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1095–1102. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02209.x
- Huffcutt, A. I., Conway, J. M., Roth, P. L., & Stone, N. J. (2001). Identification and meta-analytic assessment of psychological constructs measured in employment interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(5), 897–913. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.5.897
- Koriat, A., & Bjork, R. A. (2005). Illusions of competence in monitoring one's knowledge during study. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(2), 187–194. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.31.2.187
- Maurer, T. J., Solamon, J. M., Andrews, K. D., & Troxtel, D. D. (2001). Interviewee coaching, preparation strategies, and response strategies in relation to performance in situational employment interviews: An extension of Maurer, Solamon, and Troxtel (1998). Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(4), 709–717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.4.709
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x
- Rozenblit, L., & Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: An illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521–562. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1
- Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994
- Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2023). Revisiting the design of selection systems in light of new findings regarding the validity of widely used predictors. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 16(3), 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2023.24
- Tross, S. A., & Maurer, T. J. (2008). The effect of coaching interviewees on subsequent interview performance in structured experience-based interviews. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 81(4), 589–605. https://doi.org/10.1348/096317907X248653