Select an interviewer who is experienced at interviewing with different interview styles.  It isn’t sufficient to have experience with one type of interview.  The interviewer should understand the different ways a hiring manager can structure and conduct an interview.  This is essential to assess the job seeker’s strengths and weaknesses.  Most job seekers perform adequately in some interview situations, but struggle in others.  If the interviewer does not understand the differences between these situations, the interviewer will be unable to recognize the weaknesses of the job seeker, and help the job seeker improve.

The interviewer should also be in a position that the job seeker respects.  To simulate a real interview, the mock interview must simulate the anxiety that exists in a real interview.  This requires an interviewer that will intimidate the job seeker.  An expert in a field, a senior executive or an experienced interview coach can all create a situation that will put the job seeker on edge.

Another factor to consider when selecting an interviewer for a mock interview is finding someone who does not know the job seeker well.  The interviewer should enter the mock interview with a similar knowledge of the job seeker as the interviewer in a real interview.  This ensures that the interviewer does not fill in the gaps in the job seeker’s answers with details the interviewer already knew.

Finally, the best interviewer for a mock interview will be an experienced coach skilled at teaching interview techniques.  Each job seeker has different needs, and an experienced coach will quickly identify the best way to develop the job seeker’s interview skills.

Listening to a recording will help the job seeker gain the perspective of the interviewer.  One of the most common reactions when listening is to think of additional things that should have been said.  This is valuable, and it will help the job seeker to craft better and more complete answers in the future.

Another benefit of recording a mock interview is the job seeker can begin to see how their energy and enthusiasm waxes and wanes during the interview.  Job seekers tend to focus so much on their answers that they cannot perceive their delivery.  Some will drift into a monotone speaking devoid of all enthusiasm.  This leaves a terrible impression.  If a job seeker can’t get excited about themselves, the job seeker is not going to inspire enthusiasm in the hiring manager.

The recording can also help a job seeker build confidence.  Many job seekers are very nervous during an interview.  This causes them to perceive time differently.  A short pause of a second or two can feel like an eternity.  Job seekers experience this most when they are asked a question that surprises them and must stop and think about how to answer.  The time spent thinking seems to go on forever, and the job seeker will often assume the interviewer perceives time the same.  The result is a job seeker who feels that they bombed the question due to the long pause, even before they have said the first word.

When listening to the answer, job seekers realize the long pause was actually very short.  They learn that they can take their time when answering questions.  This improves their answers and improves their confidence.

Recording mock interviews is so valuable, I offer to record every mock interview I do at Palladian.  It is a fundamental component of my interview coaching.

To learn the structure of an interview, job seekers need to network.  Most consider networking as an activity where the job seeker asks a lot people for help getting a job.  The real benefit of networking is the information you gain on the hiring process within a company.  Research a company thoroughly and try to find out as much about the interviews.  The more information you gain, the better you can prepare.  If you cannot learn how the company interviews, there are a few common interview structures that are more likely to be encountered.

Some companies use a standard interview format with a fixed number of questions.  These will often have 8 to 10 questions.  If this is the type of interview the job seeker expects, the mock interview should mirror this.  Most candidates will give answers that are 2 to 5 minutes long.  This will yield a 30 to 45 minute interview most of the time.  There are candidates who will give very short answers, and the interview can end in less than ten minutes, and others who struggle with being concise that last more than an hour.  The very short and very long answers will hurt the impression a candidate makes.

Other companies use flexible interview formats where the questions are not pre-scripted.  These interviews can last anywhere from 20 minutes to several hours.  This style of interview often has a lot of follow up questions.  There may only be a few topics discussed, but they are discussed in great deal.  If this is the type of interview expected, the mock interview should reflect this.  Choose a handful of question topics and prepare ideas for follow up questions.

A good follow up question will relate directly to the candidate’s answer.  You should prepare follow up topics, but the actual questions should be spontaneous and based on the job seeker’s previous answer.  With this type of interview, three or four questions may be sufficient, with each question having a number of follow up questions.  Although this type of interview may only require a few questions, it is still a good idea to prepare at least 6 to 8 questions.  There are times when a question that seems very complex will have a short, straightforward answer.  If the interview only has a few questions, a question with an unexpectedly short answer can cut an interview short.  Having secondary questions to add to the interview is a good tactic.

The one question that is always a good idea to include in a mock interview is the common “Tell me about yourself” question that kicks off so many interviews.  This is the most common question seen in interviews, but there is another important reason why it should be practiced.  This question provides the job seeker with an opportunity to highlight the best features of the job seeker.  It can become a sales pitch.  To do this, the job seeker should approach the question as “why should I hire you?”  This approach will lead to a broad answer that describes the job seeker within the context of the interviewer’s goal – determining if the job seeker is the best person to hire.

The first step in selecting questions for a mock interview is to review the job description of the position being pursued. This is easy if the mock interview is being conducted in advance of a scheduled interview. If the job seeker does not have an interview scheduled, and is just working on their interview skills, get a copy of a job description that is close to the ideal position for the job seeker.

Review the job description and identify the most significant skills required, the main responsibilities and the greatest challenges of the position. This will lead to a list of experiences that a hiring manager is likely to use to generate questions. There are a number of skills and attributes that are important in virtually every job. The relative importance varies, but each attribute is a factor. Below are some of the most common skills and attributes:

• Dealing with conflict
• Mentoring others
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Communications skills
• Leadership skills
• Organizational skills
• Project management
• Ability to work under tight deadlines
• Administrative skills
• Ability to multitask
• Attitude
• Work ethic
• Overcoming adversity
• Accepting responsibility
• Technical skills

Select a few main areas to focus on in the mock interview and write a question or two for each. Add in at least one, and preferably two questions about failures and weaknesses. These are questions that typically give job seekers trouble, and should be worked on in a mock interview.

If the job seeker has a red flag in their background, consider asking a question about it in the mock interview. A red flag is something that a hiring manager is likely to question. For example, an unusual career path, a gap in employment, or a series of quick job changes are all situations that need to be explained by the job seeker. The mock interview should address these head on by questioning them.

Finally, add the most common question found in interviews: “Tell me about yourself.” This question kicks off most interviews and is a critical question for any job seeker to answer. It should be practiced in every mock interview.

The result is a set of 8 to 10 questions. Mix the questions up, so that similar questions do not immediately follow each other. This will help the job seeker practice bouncing from concept to concept.

We’ve all been there.  You’re in an interview, and a question blindsides you.  You freeze, and then come up with the best answer you can.  You know it’s a lousy answer, but it was the best you could think of at the time.  That single answer may hurt the impression you make in the interview, but you are not doomed.  Candidates are rarely rejected because of one answer.  Unfortunately, most job seekers can’t shake the bad answer, and follow it up with a series of bad answers.  The result is a terrible interview, and a rejection.

A mock interview will help you avoid this pitfall.  You can practice being in this situation – a situation where you fail dismally at answering a question – and work on how you will continue the interview and recover.  With this practice, you will perform much better in a real interview.

The reality is that your confidence is a huge factor in an interview.  You need to be confident in your abilities, experiences, accomplishments, and most importantly, your ability to communicate.  Without confidence, your experience and abilities will not appear as strong.  If you aren’t confident about yourself in an interview, you are going to have a tough time trying to make the hiring manager confident in you.

Confidence is tough in a job search, especially if you are out of work.  Being fired or laid off causes many job seekers to question their abilities.  They lose confidence, and this shows in their interviews.

Often, the solution is a mock interview, where the job seeker has a chance to practice telling their story.  By reviewing and practicing the interview, the job seeker gets a chance to focus on their selling points and accomplishments.  This can remind some candidates of how valuable they were, and focus them on the value they will offer.  Then in an interview, the job seeker can communicate that value and make a strong impression.  This all starts with practice and mock interviews.

The participants in a mock interview should treat the interview as if it is real.  Some job seekers consider the mock interview as an informal exercise.  They might stop in the middle of answers and start over.  They could skip questions that are tough.  They might even ask the interviewer for feedback or suggestions during the interview.  All of these examples will disrupt the flow of the interview.  One of the important elements to practice in a mock interview is the challenge of recovering from a bad question/answer.  This makes it essential to complete a mock interview without interruption.

The mock interview should have a pre-scripted set of questions that the job seeker has not seen.  The unpredictability of the interview is critical, so the interviewer needs to select the questions.  It is also important to select a range of questions.  Even if the job seeker has a specific need, such as answering questions about weaknesses, the interview should include questions on other topics.  This is essential to create an interview experience similar to a real interview.

The mock interview should be challenging.  It won’t help as much if the interviewer asks easy questions.  Ideally, the questions will be tough enough to make the job seeker struggle.  This will help the job seeker prepare for the tough interview questions in a real interview.

The location of an interview should be chosen so that the job seeker feels like they are at an interview.  The mock interview does not need to be conducted in person.  It can be conducted by phone or video conference, but the job seeker must be in a location where they can concentrate on the interview.

A great way to maximize the value of a mock interview is to record it.  You can record video of the interview if it is in person or by video conference, or record audio if it is by phone.  In either case, the recording will allow the job seeker to review their performance and work on improving.

Designing a mock interview to simulate exactly an upcoming interview will maximize its effectiveness, but don’t worry if you do not have detailed information on how a company interviews.  Any practice you gain interviewing will help.

Mock interviews can be completed in person, by phone or by video conference.  All three methods work well.  The key to success in a mock interview is recreating the interview experience as much as possible.

One benefit of a mock interview that is often overlooked is the confidence gained after completing a mock interview.  Most job seekers are at least a little intimidated by the interview experience, and some are absolutely terrified when interviewing.  This fear can dramatically hurt a job seeker’s interview performance.  By completing a mock interview, the job seeker will be more comfortable in the real interview.  Like anything, the more you practice, the more confident you will be.

Mock interviews, like real interviews, can take a wide range of forms.  They can be traditional interviews, behavioral interviews or other types.  The interviewer can be friendly and make it easy for the job seeker, or the interviewer can be tough and challenging.  No matter the type of interview or the style, practice will help, but to get the most out of the mock interview, the session should be tailored to the type and style of the interview the job seeker is likely to encounter.  This requires researching every company and learning as much about how they interview as possible.

The biggest style decision in a mock interview deals with follow up questions.  Some interviewers foster a dialog with a lot of follow up questions, while others take the answer from the job seeker and move on to the next question.  In most cases, candidates struggle more when they are not asked follow up questions, but each job seeker is different.  The mock interview should mimic the style of the upcoming interview if possible.  If the type of interview is not known, then work on types of interviews are more likely to be a problem for the job seeker.

Choosing an interviewer for a mock interview is an important decision.  The interviewer should have experience interviewing.  The interviewer should not be a close friend of the interviewer.  The interviewer should have a background that the job seeker respects as an equal or superior.  The goal is to find an interviewer who will be respected by the job seeker, and possibly intimidate the job seeker.  It is important to simulate the stress, anxiety and fear of an interview situation and the interviewer needs to fill this role.

To have a chance of landing an interview, you must first grab a hiring manager’s attention.  Your resume is a sales document.  It needs to sell your potential from the instant a hiring manager starts reading.  To do this, you need a strong, impressive and effective introduction.  This introduction will create excitement in hiring managers and motivate them to want to learn more.  In other words, you need an introduction that will lead to interviews.

Most job seekers understand how important the start of their resume is, but this is also the part of their resume that they struggle with the most.  The result is typically a weak, uninspiring start that is completely ineffective.

This book offers the solution.  It is entirely focused on Objective Statements and Professional Summaries, the two most common styles of introductions.  Other resume writing books provide a little advice on a wide range of resume writing topics.  They try to answer every question a job seeker might have, but provide limited depth on each topic.  You need to become an expert at creating a powerful and effective introduction.  You need this book, and you need the winning introduction you will learn to write.

Get the book today:

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Whitesmoke is an excellent tool to catch all the mistakes Word misses.  I always use Word’s built in grammar checker, but it only catches the obvious errors.  Whitesmoke will run circles around it.  This does not mean that Whitesmoke is perfect.  It isn’t.  It will still miss some mistakes, but it is an excellent resource.

When using Whitesmoke, you will quickly learn that the software makes a large number of style choices.  For example, it recommends changes when the same word appears more than once in close proximity.  This is an easy mistake to make, but it is not something Word is going to address.  Whitesmoke is also pretty good at finding missing words.  When I type fast, it is not uncommon for me to skip an occasional preposition.  For any reader, this will jump off the page as a mistake, but for grammar checkers, this can be a difficult mistake to identify.  Whitesmoke does a good job with this.

I also like the ability to check for synonyms.  All you have to do is click a word in a document and a box pops up with suggested alternatives.  This is great when you need to come up with a high-impact word and don’t want to pull out a thesaurus.

Whitesmoke isn’t perfect.  It is supposed to integrate with Word well.  I’ve found this integration does not always work.  As a result, I copy from a Word document into the Whitesmoke editor rather than having Whitesmoke edit the text directly in Word.  This is more cumbersome, but it works.  Hopefully, Whitesmoke has addressed this in the latest version, but I haven’t tested it.

In addition to Whitesmoke, I’ve also been tested Grammarly, and found it to be a very effective grammar checker too.  Grammarly is web-based, while Whitesmoke is an application installed on my computer.  I prefer having it installed on my computer, although with a web-based solution, Grammarly is always up to date with the latest version.

I’m going to put together some articles on the effectiveness of the grammar checkers on resumes.  Check back, those will hopefully be complete in a week or two.

Grammarly is a web-based grammar checker.  You just copy and paste text into an online form, and it runs the check.  It is extremely rigorous, and almost overwhelming with how many suggestions it makes.  It took time to get used to this.  Many of the suggestions are style related, suggesting synonyms or simplifying complex sentences.  Although these are valuable suggestions, they aren’t mistakes.

For the major grammatical errors, Grammarly does a great job.  It identifies very subtle mistakes in sentence structure.  This makes it a program you have to spend time using to get the real value out of it.  I found a number of cases where the program identified an error that I thought about writing off as ok.  Then, after reading the sentence very closely, I confirmed the software was right.  This was most likely to occur with long, complex sentences.  The software was able to analyze these sentences and figure out that something was wrong.

Grammarly also identified a number of false positives.  These were sentences that had a structure that didn’t fit exactly how the software recommended.  The suggestions were not wrong.  I’ve seen this with other grammar checkers.  There are always a number of false positives.

The synonym suggestions were helpful.  On every page, the program offers dozens of suggestions for alternative words.  Any writer looking to expand their vocabulary and write with more varied wording choices will find this valuable.

I have also been using the grammar checker in Word and the program Whitesmoke on the book.  Whitesmoke and Grammarly are similar in what they accomplish, but they are very different programs.  Both are much more effective than the Word built in grammar checker.  For my book, I ran everything through Word, then Whitesmoke and finally through Grammarly.  This meant that every error Grammarly found was an error Whitesmoke missed.  Whitesmoke does a great job, but there were numerous corrections Grammarly found that Whitesmoke missed.  I expect that if I had reversed this order, Whitesmoke would have found errors Grammarly missed.  Neither will catch 100% of the mistakes.

Overall, I like Grammarly.  It is very effective at identifying grammatical errors, and will help any writer proofread their work.  I’m still deciding if I’ll keep my online subscription.  I already have Whitesmoke and it is effective.  I like both of them, but am not sure I don’t think I need two complete grammar checking packages.  If you are considering a grammar checker (if you don’t have one, you should), it’s really a toss up between the two – they are both very effective.

I’ve been testing both programs on resumes and will follow up with a series of articles with the results.