Mock Interview Techniques for Tech Job Searchers

In-Person Mocks

Do your in-person mock interview in an office with a whiteboard whenever possible. That will best mimic your actual interview. If you don’t have access to an office, buy a whiteboard and practice from home. Most importantly, practice the physical activity of whiteboarding. While it might sound silly, it’s more difficult than it sounds.

Get yourself a whiteboard, stand up and write the solutions out. The financial investment is negligible compared to the financial gain you’ll receive if you do well!

Remote Mocks

When you’re interviewing remotely, you’ll encounter different remote collaboration tools. Make sure that you know which ones you’ll use in your interview by explicitly asking the company which tools to prepare for. If they don’t indicate a preference, you should pick the tool you’re most comfortable with.

The three tools you’re likely to use are:

1. A text editor for writing code.
2. Xcode or the most popular IDE for your tech stack.
3. A remote collaboration whiteboarding tool.

If your interview won’t use an IDE, make sure to practice coding in a text editor that has no autocomplete or highlighting. You’ll be surprised at how challenging and time-consuming this is until you’ve practiced it.

IDEs are excellent tools, but they can also be crutches that you most likely won’t be able to use in an interview. This means you’ll type much slower and you’ll have to memorize certain classes and functions. You don’t have to memorize them perfectly, but you should be pretty close to the real deal when you write your code. If you can’t remember something exactly, try to explain what the function does and make up a name.

When you finish your mock interview, run your code through Xcode or your IDE of choice to see how many errors you made. That’s a great way to improve your text editor coding skills. And hey, at least your SwiftUI previews won’t have problems loading during the interview!

You might have to do an interview that doesn’t involve code in a remote setting as well. In that case, you can use a virtual whiteboard to diagram architecture, explain a system design question or mock up a UI.

Recording Your Interview

Whether you do your mock interview in person or remotely, you must record it so you can analyze and reflect on it post-mortem.

Recording is much easier to do in a remote setting because you can simply turn on your computer’s recording software and screen capture everything that happens.

If you want to get more advanced, you can set up an additional camera, like your phone, to record your face and gestures.

When you’re doing a mock interview in person, you can use your phone to record. Make sure you position it at a good angle to capture yourself from the perspective of a potential interviewer. Use a tripod if you have one handy.

If you absolutely can’t record video, use an audio recording app on your phone to at least capture the conversation.

Once you finish the interview, take a photo of the whiteboard so you can analyze it alongside the recording.

Preparing for Your Mock Interview

To fully harness the benefits of a mock interview, you should follow a few standard steps to ensure you cover everything you need in your interview. While there are many ways to set up a mock interview depending on the type of interview you’re expecting, your preparation should follow this basic outline:

Create a Mock Interview Rubric to Evaluate Your Results

Before you start a mock interview, you need to understand what you’re trying to assess or improve. In a real interview, the interviewer has a set list of criteria, also called a rubric, that they use to evaluate you. By creating a mock interview rubric for yourself, you make it much easier to determine whether you succeeded or not.

To do this, make a list of the specific criteria you’ll evaluate and how you’ll score the results. For examples, see the list below. You could then score your results on a scale from 1 to 3, like so:

• (1): Excellent performance.
• (2): Room for improvement.
• (3): Needs more work.

Creating an evaluation rubric ahead of time is especially necessary when you’re working with a mock interviewer because it helps them understand what to pay attention to. By asking them to use your rubric to score your performance, you’ll have a clear view of what’s already working well and where to focus your attention to improve.

Common Coding Interview Pitfalls to Evaluate

Here’s a list of common things that interviewers are looking for but interviewees don’t do well. It can form the basics of your evaluation rubric for practical, computer science, system design and platform-specific interviews:

1. Take a breath and don’t rush your answer.
2. Don’t jump into code or solution too quickly.
3. Ask clarifying questions.
4. Propose a few different ways to address the problem.
5. Outline your plan out loud and visually.
6. Get feedback early and often.
7. Listen to the interviewer and take their suggestions on board.
8. Keep a running commentary.
9. Ensure all your sentences are full sentences instead of something like “Uhh, maybe I could…” or “What if I move this…”.
10. Explain your decisions and ask for feedback before moving on.
11. Don’t be quiet for more than a minute.
12. If you do want to take some time to think and be quiet, let the interviewer know explicitly with something like “I need two minutes to collect my thoughts on this; I’ll explain right after”.

Don’t skip any of these questions, even if you’re doing the mock on your own. It might feel silly, but it will be useful.