HR, screening and offer fundamentals

Four things, none of which is technical depth. Whether your experience matches the level the requisition was opened at, because a recruiter who advances a candidate two levels off spec wastes an engineer's afternoon and their own credibility. Whether your compensation expectation is inside the band, since that is the cheapest disqualifier available and the one they are measured on. Whether the logistics work — notice period, location, visa, hybrid days. And whether you can hold a coherent conversation about your own work, which is a proxy for how you will present to the hiring manager. Everything you say is being written into a summary that the next interviewer reads instead of your CV, so the screen is where your framing is set for the whole loop.

Ninety seconds is roughly two hundred words, which is far less than candidates assume, so the shape has to be decided in advance.

Target: 90 seconds. Four beats. Present, evidence, why here, handover.

NOW - one sentence locating you at a level.
  "I'm a backend engineer with eight years in payments, currently a
   senior engineer at Wexford, where I own the settlement service."

EVIDENCE - one or two specifics with a number, chosen to match the ad.
  "The two things I'd point at: I led the move of settlement off a
   nightly batch onto an event stream, which took reconciliation
   breaks from about forty a month to under five. And I've been the
   engineer on call for that system for three years, so I've run the
   incidents as well as designed it."

WHY THIS ROLE - specific to them, one sentence, no flattery.
  "I'm looking at you because the role is on the ledger team and it's
   the same problem at a much larger volume, and because it's an
   individual-contributor role rather than a step into management."

HANDOVER - give them the next question.
  "Happy to go deeper on the settlement work or talk about what I'm
   looking for next - whichever is more useful."

WHAT IS NOT IN IT
  - chronology from university onwards
  - the words "passionate", "journey", "fast-paced"
  - anything the recruiter cannot assess or repeat to the manager

The reason to script this and no other answer is that it is the only question you are guaranteed to be asked, and it sets the frame everything after it is judged against. A candidate who opens with a chronological walk from graduation spends the ninety seconds on their least relevant decade and arrives at the current role as the clock runs out.

The evidence beat is where the answer is won or lost, and the test for it is whether a recruiter could repeat it to the hiring manager. "Took reconciliation breaks from forty a month to five" survives that retelling; "worked on large-scale distributed systems" does not, because it contains nothing to carry. Pick the specifics from the advert rather than from your own sense of what was hardest.

The handover matters more than it looks. Offering the recruiter two directions turns the screen into a conversation you are partly steering, and it prevents the awkward pause where they scramble for a follow-up and land on salary earlier than you wanted.

The omissions are deliberate. Anything the recruiter cannot assess is wasted breath at this stage — architecture detail, framework opinions, the reason your last migration was hard. Save it for the round where someone can appreciate it.

The audience changes, so the currency changes. In a screen you are being matched against a requisition, so you speak in scope, domain and level: what you own, how big it is, how long you have owned it, and the outcome in terms a non-engineer can repeat. In a technical round the same question is an invitation to nominate the system the interviewer will interrogate, so you name one thing with real depth behind it and stop, because whatever you mention becomes the next twenty minutes. The commonest error is running the recruiter version in the technical round, which sounds like a sales pitch to an engineer, and the technical version in the screen, which the recruiter cannot use and will summarise as "seemed strong, hard to follow".

State it accurately and immediately, including the part that is inconvenient. If your notice is three months, say three months and then say what is actually negotiable — whether unused leave can be offset, whether your employer has released people early before, whether a partial handover start is possible. Vagueness here is expensive because a hiring manager planning a start date will discount a candidate whose availability is unknown, and a notice period discovered late in the process feels like something you concealed. Do not offer to break your notice, because it tells the new employer exactly how you will treat them on the way out. If the notice is genuinely a problem for their timeline, better to learn it in week one than after four rounds.

The questions only they can answer, which are mostly about the process and the band. Ask what the stages are and how long the whole loop takes, who you will meet and in what order, whether the level is fixed or determined by the loop, what the compensation band for the level is, why the role is open, and how long it has been open. Those answers are cheap for a recruiter to give and expensive for you to guess. Save the team-health and technical questions for the hiring manager, who has the information; asking a recruiter about the team's architecture wastes a turn and produces a rehearsed answer. Ask what would make the hiring manager say yes, because recruiters often tell you.

By naming what you are moving towards rather than what you are escaping, and by being specific enough to be believed. "I have owned the same service for three years and I want a system at a volume where the design decisions change" is concrete and flattering to nobody. Some negative reasons are perfectly sayable if stated as structure rather than grievance: a reorg that removed the work you were hired for, a company that has stopped investing in your area, a promotion path that does not exist at your employer's size. What loses you a screen is naming a person, describing your manager, or listing several complaints, because the recruiter's only data point on your judgement is how you talk about people who are not present.

Three things, all avoidable. Naming a compensation expectation far outside the band with no flexibility signalled, which closes the file that afternoon regardless of your answers. Being unable to say anything specific about the company or the role, which reads as a mass application and lowers the effort anyone downstream will spend on you. And treating the recruiter as an obstacle — short answers, visible impatience, correcting their terminology — when they are the person who will argue for your level and carry your case to the panel. The fourth, less obvious one is contradicting yourself between your CV and the call on dates, titles or scope, because the recruiter reconciles the two while you talk and cannot advance a candidate whose account does not line up.