Before you know which company you're talking to
Say you're a few weeks from graduating, applying broadly, and haven't landed on the one posting you're building toward yet. A general session doesn't ask for a job description or a resume upload. It runs the questions that show up across nearly every first engineering interview regardless of employer: why software, what you'd want to work on, a project you can explain clearly to someone who wasn't there for it.
It's the baseline round, useful precisely because it doesn't assume you've committed to one target yet.
What a general session covers
Expect an opening question about how you got into engineering and what's kept you interested, then a request to walk through one project in real detail, not a resume bullet read aloud but the actual decisions you made and the parts that didn't work on the first try.
A getting-stuck question usually follows, since interviewers screening a first-time candidate care more about your process when something breaks than a track record you haven't built. There's no coding editor in this type and no document to supply.
Once you have a specific posting or resume ready to work from, job-description and resume-based practice go deeper on those specifics; general is what you run before either exists.
Scoring
What scoring weighs here
Communication and Cultural Fit carry real weight in a general session, since there's no code or document to evaluate against, just how clearly you talk through your own thinking and whether your answers suggest a good working fit.
The penalty system still checks for STAR structure on any behavioral answer, a getting-stuck story that never names what you actually did or how it resolved loses points even if the situation itself was a strong one.
Overall reflects the whole session together, so a candidate who answers every question competently but never quite settles into a natural rhythm can still come away with a lower score than one whose answers were shorter but landed clearly.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a resume or job posting to run a general interview?
No. General practice doesn't require either. It runs the standard opening questions common to a first engineering interview regardless of employer, which makes it the type to start with before you've settled on a specific target.
Will there be any coding in a general session?
No. There's no coding editor in this type. Fundamentals and debugging questions with real code execution belong to the technical interview type instead.
How is this different from resume-based practice?
Resume-based builds its questions from your actual background once you've uploaded one. General runs the same broad opening questions regardless of what background you bring, which makes it useful earlier, before you've decided what to lead with.
What happens after I run a general session?
You get a scored report across five dimensions with written reasoning, useful for spotting whether your project walkthrough or getting-stuck story needs work before you move on to a posting-specific or resume-based session.
Related pages
Start with a general software engineer interview
Practice the questions a first engineering interview opens with before you've picked a specific posting to target.