645 interview questions, built from 2,694 distinct UK job adverts and 21,477 scored NHS person specification criteria.
Not AI guesses. 155 requirements measured, 39 of them also verified against an official published framework.
Most interview pages are a list somebody made up. This one is a measurement.
Where a requirement turns up often enough to matter, it becomes a question, and the question carries the number that put it there. For NHS roles that number comes from person specifications, which list what a panel actually scores against and mark each criterion essential or desirable.
Receptionist interview questions
The phrase every advert uses is "first point of contact", and it is not filler. It means every problem arrives at you first, including the ones that are not yours. Three quarters of these adverts are a phone job, and nearly half ask you to hold confidential information at a desk that sits in public.
Medical Receptionist interview questions
A GP or hospital desk is a different job from a corporate one, and the corpus says where the line falls. Appointments run 80.0% here against 26.6% elsewhere, confidentiality 62.6% against 20.3%. A third are asked to signpost or care navigate, which is the biggest change to the role in a decade and the one most candidates have never heard of.
Warehouse Operative interview questions
Previous experience is the figure to read carefully. A keyword count finds it in half these adverts, but 68 of those 188 raise it only to say none is needed, which puts the real requirement at a third. The forklift licence is a differentiator rather than a gate, and it is not a licence.
Forklift Driver interview questions
A forklift post is a different job, not a harder warehouse job. Previous experience is asked for in 45.3% of these adverts against 33.7% across the corpus, while training offered falls from 24.0% to 8.0% and the picking, packing and lifting requirements largely drop away. The ticket replaces the general labour.
Customer Service interview questions
Two thirds of these adverts are a phone job, whatever they say about channels. The role also has a published occupational standard, which most do not, and it names dealing with conflict as a skill in its own right.
Teaching Assistant interview questions
Measured on 358 distinct adverts, after 500 postings were collapsed and 18.9% of the text turned out to be recruitment agency boilerplate. Safeguarding is the number to read carefully: schools state their own commitment more often than they ask the candidate for it, and the statutory duty applies either way.
Higher Level Teaching Assistant interview questions
The higher level posts are a different job, and the corpus shows where the line falls. Three in five ask you to cover whole classes and deliver planned lessons, against one in five across teaching assistant posts as a whole. One to one support goes the other way.
Learning Support Assistant interview questions
Learning support assistant is the SEND end of the same job. Seven in ten of these adverts name special educational needs, against fewer than six in ten across all teaching assistant posts, and almost none of them ask you to cover a class.
Care Worker interview questions
Care worker and support worker adverts are the same job under two titles, so they are measured together. The most-named requirement is not personal care. It is helping people do things for themselves.
NHS Band 5 Nurse interview questions
Band 5 is the entry grade for a registered nurse and the specifications show exactly that. A post-registration specialist course is named in 2.7% of Band 5 specs against 25.9% at Band 6, and leadership in 5.7% against 28.3%. What Band 5 asks for more of is communication, 59.7% against 49.8%.
NHS Band 6 Nurse interview questions
The step from Band 5 to Band 6 is not a clinical one. Clinical skills sit at 18.1% against 18.5% at Band 5, while mentoring doubles to 46.7%, leadership goes from 5.7% to 28.3% and a post-registration course from 2.7% to 25.9%. Prepare the three that move.
NHS Band 7 Nurse interview questions
Band 7 keeps going in the same direction, and one requirement makes the jump on its own: managing change is named in 27.3% of Band 7 specifications against 10.9% at Band 6 and 5.0% at Band 5. Degree-level registration reaches 64.0%.
Nurse interview questions
Measured on 21,477 criteria taken from NHS Jobs person specifications, each one marked essential or desirable by the employer. Where the two numbers differ, the gap is the useful part: a criterion marked essential is scored on every candidate, a desirable one is what separates them.
The panel will ask if you have any questions for them. We counted what 1,349 adverts left out, and 98% never say who you would report to, so the questions worth asking at the end start there.
How we build this
- We analyse thousands of real UK job adverts, and NHS person specifications where they exist.
- We collapse reposts and strip recruiter boilerplate first. On the school corpus 18.9% of the text was the agency describing itself, and one advert had been posted 22 times.
- We check them against official frameworks, and cite those only after reading the live source.
- Every number on the page links back to what produced it.
Important. These are not leaked interview questions. They are built from real UK job adverts and official employer frameworks, to reflect the requirements employers consistently assess.
We do not claim these are the exact questions you will be asked. We measure what UK employers consistently ask for in their job adverts, check it against published assessment frameworks where one exists, and turn those requirements into realistic interview questions. Every question shows where it came from.