Rehearse it before it counts.

Not directly — it works in text, and it's better to be clear about that upfront. What you do is answer out loud using the dictation button your phone already has, then paste the transcript. You get the part that actually matters, which is hearing yourself talk and seeing on the page how much longer your spoken answer runs than the one in your head. The prompts are written to expect spoken transcripts, filler words included, and to judge the substance rather than the punctuation.

The framework is fine; using it as a script is the problem. No interviewer is checking whether you hit four labelled sections — they want to know what the situation was, what you personally did, and what happened as a result. Where candidates lose is spending ninety seconds on setup and running out of room for the result. That's what the scoring targets rather than the acronym.

About six, if they're chosen to stretch. People prepare twenty answers to twenty questions and then freeze when the wording changes. The better approach is a small bank where each story can answer three or four different questions with small adjustments — the story bank builder maps yours against the competencies in your job description and shows you where the gaps are.

It's asked almost every time and it can't be safely improvised. A disguised strength like "I work too hard" reads as evasive and interviewers have heard it hundreds of times. What scores is a real, contained failure with a real consequence and a genuine change afterwards — the toolkit helps you find one you can tell without dreading it, then drills the follow-up that comes next.

Yes, and you flag it before the drills start so the mock interviewer keeps returning to it. That's deliberate — it's usually the question people have practised least and fear most. The version that works is short, unapologetic and moves forward, because long explanations make a small gap sound like a significant one.