If you are a job seeker, job interviews can be stressful, especially if you don’t feel fully ready for the interview. A mock interview can be useful to reduce the stress of your interview process before you are in front of real companies. First off, let’s define: what is a mock interview for those who don’t know much about it.
What is a Mock Interview?
A mock interview, also called a practice interview, is a kind of simulation of an actual job interview. The mock interview provides practice for you as a job seeker before having a real-world job interview. Also, it creates an opportunity for you to get feedback about their interviewing skills.
As future IT job seeker, you will put a huge effort into searching for a job, building out a portfolio, and preparing your resume. But it is important to make sure that you spend the necessary time prepping their interview skills. Therefore, making sure that you take the time to thoroughly practice the interview process through a series of mock interviews is a “must”.
Since your mock interview simulates a real job interview, it helps you to learn how to answer specific interview questions and get comfortable with those answers. Additionally, practice interviews help you to develop appropriate strategies for the live interviews by refining your communication skills (especially for non-native English speakers), and reducing your stress by practicing all of the possible scenarios that could come up.
Why Do You Need Mock Interview Practice?
If you are the type of person that is uncomfortable with public speaking, or you are not as polished as you would like to be, or you have a fear (or inexperience) around interviewing for IT positions – practicing with a partner and having several mock interviews is the best thing you can do to develop your interview tools. To overcome all these fears, you should have a mock interview with experts in the IT market to get beneficial feedback for you.
What Are The Benefits of A Mock Interview?
1. Help candidates reduce their stress and anxiety before a real job interview.
Suppose you are:
- A junior IT job seeker,
- A newcomer to the IT field
- Feel that you are not fully confident in your interviewing skills
Practicing your interviewing skills (starting as soon as possible) is really an excellent opportunity for you to gain confidence. For those who are unsure about their foreign language speaking level, IT technical skills, or are intimidated by the (sometimes) tricky behavioral questions, mock interviews are just for you to improve these skill sets.
Make sure that you practice with someone with IT experience and/or a skilled interviewer. As these types of people can give you the best feedback on whether your answers are suitable for the specific interview questions that will be asked. In this way, you are gaining real experience and learning the proper answers for future interview questions. That will help dramatically reduce the amount of stress on our back.
2. Help you boost your confidence.
As you practice, you will learn the answers to the most common interview questions and you will get feedback about your weaknesses and strengths. This will help you to feel comfortable when it comes time to conduct actual interviews. In addition, being confident about your skills and knowing about do’s and don’ts for the interviews will make you perform better in an actual interview..
3. Provide you with useful feedback in a low-stress environment.
In a real interview, you will not receive any feedback about your interviewing abilities. If you aren’t performing well, you likely will never know about it. However, a mock interview in a friendly atmosphere can support you in getting clear about your shortcomings, so that you can correct them before the real thing. So it is clear that a mock interview is an excellent opportunity to help you find your dream job much faster than you would trying to do this on your own.
4. Help you prepare for behavioral-based interview questions.
Many companies use “BI(Behavioral Interviewing)” questions to help them identify the proper candidates for their positions. These questions are trying to tease out which candidates have the best people skills to mesh with their company culture. These are the little details that you can practice and refine during your mock interview process.
Do not hesitate to take advantage of mock interviewing opportunities even if you think your skills and experience are enough for the market. Everyone has tools that they can work on developing to make an even better impression on a potential employer.
How to Prepare for a Mock Interview?
First of all, do not forget the expression that says, “train as you fight”. This simply means that you will want to prepare for your interviews as if it is the real thing. Act, behave, think, and treat your mock interviews as if you are in a real interview. Before meeting with your mock recruitment manager, create a real environment as you can while practicing:
- Arrive enough time early, or open the link just on time if you have an online interview.
- Keep the documents you need to be ready for the real interview in the mock interview. Or send them to the interviewer by email earlier.
- Bring a notebook to take notes for the feedback of your mock interviewer.
- Dress professionally, even if you have an online meeting.
Conclusion:
So to wrap this up, working with someone who can help you to practice (and refine) your interviewing skills before you start applying is extremely important to getting you to a position faster. You need to get feedback before the real thing. This is the value of mock interviewing.
At Clarusway, we have an entire staff of CMS (career management system) personnel who are responsible for preparing our students. We help our students perfect their interviewing skills and provide in depth feedback for our students. Also, all sessions of the interviews are recorded so you have a chance to observe yourself and learn how you can improve.
Our students walk away from our programs incredibly well prepared to ace their IT technical interviews.
Last Updated on February 24, 2023
