That sounds like an awfully big project for a job interview. If someone asked me to do this, I would probably install phpbb.
3 Tables "posts", "replies", "users" (replies was a closure table), topics index, topic view page, a form page for registration and one for the profile page. JS form validation and a simple layout via CSS and HTML5.
It was more of a Twitter-lite (a very poor man's Twitter-lite)