Preparing to be Unprepared in Interviews

I’m sure you’ve heard me talking about my 3P approach to interviews (Predicting interview questions, Preparing what to say in response and Practicing getting comfortable talking through your answers).

However, I also talk to clients about how to handle unanticipated questions. I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview where I have anticipated every single question. If you’ve managed to prepare for 8 out of 10 questions on the whole, you will do a strong interview and come across well prepared. But what to do about the other 2!!! Read on my friends…

1. Firstly, I think it’s good to prepare to be unprepared. When I get ready for an interview, one thing I do is to google a list of difficult interview questions. I don’t read through them. I go somewhere quiet and hit record on my laptop and then flick over to the list, read one off and try to answer it without having prepared in advance. By doing this, you are learning a new skill – how to answer questions that you haven’t prepared in advance. I always say interviews are quite strange social interactions, and not ones you do every day of the week. Interviewing is a skill, and like most skills – gets better with practice
2. Get comfortable buying some time for yourself in interviews. Most of us are not training actors / news readers – we are not expected to be word perfect and to speak without pausing to think occasionally. Being able to create time to think can massively reduce people’s interview anxiety. I see this regularly with clients I do interview coaching sessions with. 2 great ways to buy yourself some time – firstly, ask the interviewer to repeat the question, secondly, you can ask directly for “a minute to gather your thoughts”.
3. Have thought of a strategy for how to deal with a question you really can’t think of an answer to, even after taking some time to think. 2 good ways of addressing this – firstly, ask whether you can reflect on the question and come back to it later in the interview (make sure you remember to come back to it!) and secondly, you can say you don’t know the answer, but that when you find yourself in this type of situation how you would go about finding the answer (alternatively here you can say you will find the answer directly after the interview and email it onto them).

You can check out my interview coaching package here