Mock Interview Techniques for Tech Job Searchers

Set a Start and End Time

To mimic a real interview, you must to give it a time limit that you follow from start to finish. That means that even if the mock interview is not going well, you have to persevere and continue until it’s over. Don’t just give up if the question looks too difficult, or if you get stuck halfway through.

Situations like these will undoubtedly happen in real interviews, so your ability to recover from errors and missteps is crucial. Set a time limit somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour for your mock interviews.

Limit Your Access to Resources

Even though this is only a mock interview, you still shouldn’t cheat and use external tools to help you succeed. Before you start, determine which resources you can and cannot use in a real interview and stick to them. Otherwise, you’ll defeat the purpose of practicing.

Don’t use Google to look up answers, and don’t use your reference materials during the mock.

Most importantly, don’t use Xcode or your usual IDE! It’s highly likely that your interviews will happen on a whiteboard for in-person interviews or a coding collaboration tool for remote interviews. You don’t have access to your IDE in either of those scenarios, so get comfortable without it.

Finding an Interviewer

Ideally, you’ll find another person to interview you. This gives you better feedback and feels more realistic. In the best-case scenario, you’ll find someone who’s senior to you and has experience doing interviews in their current or previous roles — these people know how to evaluate candidates.

If you can’t find someone like this, your peers or friends with a similar background will also do the trick.

Here are a few options for finding people to interview you:

1. Find engineers from the companies you’re interviewing for and ask them to do a mock interview with you. You can use LinkedIn, Twitter, or email to reach out. They might say no, but showing this initiative can work in your favor at the real interview.
2. Ask your ex-colleagues or ex-managers.
3. Ask someone from the coding community at large — they’re a helpful bunch. For example, try the raywenderlich.com Discord or the iOS Developers Slack or Twitter.
4. Use a mock interview service. You can review your interviewer’s profile and rest assured that you’ll get quality feedback. You’ll find links to these services in the Resources section below.

If all else fails, you can always fly solo, record your mock interview and review it.

Another way to do more live interviews is to open yourself up to interviewing at companies that you feel lukewarm about.

You might be hesitant to interview at such companies because you don’t think you’d accept an offer from them. However, you never know until you chat with them, and you might even end up liking the company. If the worst outcome is declining an offer from a company that you weren’t initially sure about, that’s not a terrible problem to have!

Reflecting After Each Interview

Remember that simply doing the interviews isn’t enough — reflecting on your efforts and gathering feedback are the most valuable parts of the process. This is where you put your mock interview rubric to use to understand where you succeeded and where you need more practice.

If you’re working solo, you must record yourself and play it back — that’s the only way you can judge your performance fairly and without bias. This will be uncomfortable and potentially scary, but it’s the best way to improve.

By watching your recording, you can focus on your output rather than your internal thought process. Did you notice you didn’t say anything for five minutes or that you didn’t explain your reasoning? Well, that’s a mistake, so you know what to fix next time. If you’re brave enough, you can even invite others to watch with you.

When working with an interviewer, your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to understand how to give you feedback when the interview is over. Give them your rubric beforehand so that they can pay attention to the items on your list. Remember that the more specific your question, the more likely it is you’ll get an actionable response. For example, you’ll get a better response with a question like: “Hey, I think I did really well on keeping a running commentary. What do you think?” than with a generic: “How did the interview go?”

At the same time, allow them to speak freely with any comments they might have outside of your evaluation criteria.

Knowing When You’re Ready to Interview

How do you know that you’re ready to have a real interview? Unfortunately, the answer is: You don’t. Your goal should be to do as many mock interviews as your timeline allows. You’ll learn something new from every single one.

However, you should keep applying for interesting positions, even as you set up your mock interviews. If you’re tight on time, you should concentrate on doing a:

1. Mock interview with a question you know the answer to, to focus on performance.
2. Mock interview with an unknown easy question to see how you handle new problems.
3. Mock interview with an unknown medium or difficult question to see how you collaborate with the interviewer to make progress.

Remember: “The point of a mock interview is not to prepare you to solve a problem, but to prepare you to succeed in an interview setting.” Ash Furrow, Senior Staff Developer at Shopify.

Where to Go From Here?

Now, it’s time to challenge yourself and put what you learned into action:

• Do at least one mock interview on your own, from start to finish.
• Create a list of your interview strengths and weaknesses by watching the recording and thinking about what went well and what didn’t in past interview experiences.
• Create your personal evaluation rubric based on the weaknesses you identified above.
• Find other people to interview you.
• Start a list called “My Unique Interview Strategies” where you catalog every story, gesture or interaction that received a good response from your interviewer.