🎤 Practise The Interview Before The Interview

Think about the last genuinely high-stakes thing you did. Driving test? You had lessons. Wedding speech? You muttered it in the shower for a fortnight. Presentation at work? At least one panicky run-through the night before.

Now think about interviews. A conversation that can decide your income, your commute and your Sunday-night mood for the next five years… and most people walk in having rehearsed exactly zero times. The first time they hear themselves answer “tell me about a time you dealt with conflict” is live, in the room, with their future manager watching.

Here’s the reframe this whole guide hangs on: the interview should never be the first time you hear your own answers. And you don’t need a friend with endless patience or a £300 coaching session to fix that. You need Claude, one good setup prompt, and a couple of evenings.

Why practising with a human doesn’t quite work

People do try the human version. It usually goes one of two ways: your partner asks three questions, says “that was good babe” regardless, and goes back to the telly. Or a well-meaning friend does one session, and you can’t exactly ask them for take four on Thursday at 10pm.

An AI coach has none of those problems. It’s available whenever the nerves strike, it never gets bored of your answers, and - this is the important bit - you can instruct it to be honest with you. It won’t spare your feelings out of politeness unless you let it. That combination of endless patience and ordered honesty is basically the job description of a good coach.

Set it up: the coach prompt

Don’t just type “ask me interview questions”. You’ll get twenty questions dumped in a list, which is revision, not rehearsal. The whole difference is in the rules: one question at a time, follow-ups when you waffle, and feedback in a format you can actually use.

Open a fresh chat and paste this in with your details:

Nick this one, fill in the blanks:

You're my interview coach for a [JOB TITLE] role at [COMPANY, or the type of company]. Here's the job ad: [PASTE THE AD]. Here's my CV, or a quick summary of me: [PASTE IT].

Run a practice interview with these rules:

1. Ask ONE question at a time and wait for my answer. Never dump a list of questions on me.
2. Mix it up: an opener, competency questions ("tell me about a time..."), questions specific to this job ad, and at least one curveball.
3. If my answer is vague or waffly, don't move on. Push back like a real interviewer would: "what was YOUR part in that?", "and what was the result?"
4. After each answer, give feedback in this exact format: a score out of 10, one thing that worked, one thing to fix, and a tightened version of my answer in MY words - not fancier ones.
5. Be kind but honest. Do not tell me an answer was great if it wasn't.
6. After six questions, stop and give me a debrief: my three strongest moments, my two most common bad habits, and the single thing to work on before the real interview.

One thing to know about me before we start: [the thing you're worried about, e.g. "I ramble when I'm nervous" or "I go blank on the 'tell me about a time' ones"]. Watch for it.

Ask your first question when I say "ready".

That last fill-in-the-blank matters more than it looks. Tell the coach your specific weakness and it becomes a spotter for exactly the thing you do under pressure. Nobody thinks to do this, and it’s the difference between generic practice and your practice.

The Rehearsal Ladder

Three rungs, easiest first. You don’t need all three for every interview, but each rung fixes something the one below can’t.

1. The read-through. This is the typed version: run the coach prompt and answer by typing, at your own pace, with the pressure off. The job of this rung is content - digging out your actual stories, remembering that project from 2023, finding the numbers that make an answer land. How to do it: one sitting, six questions, take the feedback seriously and redo your two weakest answers. The non-obvious bit: type your answers the way you’d say them, contractions and half-sentences and all. If you write polished little essays, you’re rehearsing an answer your mouth will never produce, and it’ll feel like a stranger’s script on the day.

2. The out-loud round. Same coach prompt, but in the Claude phone app with voice mode on, answering out loud while you pace the kitchen. The job of this rung is delivery - because there’s a canyon between knowing an answer and saying it, and you only find the “um”s, the trailing sentences and the nervous laugh by actually speaking. How to do it: pick an evening, tell the house you’re on a call, and do six questions aloud. The non-obvious bit: your first out-loud answers will be noticeably worse than your typed ones, and you will cringe. Good. That cringe was scheduled for the interview itself… you’ve just moved it to your kitchen, where it costs nothing.

3. The pressure round. Once the basics feel solid, tell the coach to turn up the heat: “Be a tougher interviewer this round. Interrupt me if I ramble past 90 seconds, be a bit sceptical of my answers, and make sure you ask: [the question you’re dreading].” Gap in your CV, why you’re leaving, “why should we pick you over someone with more experience” - whatever makes your stomach drop, put it in. How to do it: one deliberately uncomfortable session, two days before the real thing. The non-obvious bit: dread shrinks with repetitions, and interviewers almost never invent new ways to be scary. The question you’ve answered four times in your kitchen simply cannot ambush you in the room. That’s not a mindset trick, it’s just exposure doing its job.

A worked example, so you can see the input

Say you’ve been a shift supervisor at a big supermarket for four years and you’re going for a team leader role at a distribution centre. Here’s what good filling-in looks like:

• Job ad: paste the whole thing, even the boring bits - the “responsibilities” section is literally a list of what they’ll ask about.
• About you: “4 years supervising a team of 8 on shift, cut sickness-cover chaos by building a swap rota, trained 6 new starters, no formal management qualification.”
• The worry: “I undersell myself - I say ‘we’ for things I actually led.”

Now the coach knows to ask about rotas, training and stepping up… and to pounce every time you hide behind “we”. Ten minutes of setup, and you’ve got a rehearsal a generic list of “top 50 interview questions” couldn’t touch.

The night-before version

No time for the ladder? Interview tomorrow and nerves rising tonight? Use the short version. It’s deliberately light - the goal at 9pm the night before is confidence, not homework.

Nick this one (the 10-minute version):

I have an interview tomorrow for [JOB TITLE]. Here's the job ad, if I have it: [PASTE, or delete this line]. I've got 10 minutes and I need confidence, not a mock exam. Do this:

1. Ask me the three most likely questions for this role - drawn from the ad if I've pasted it - one at a time. After each answer, give me ONE fix only.
2. Then build me a strong 30-second answer to "tell me about yourself", based on this: [two lines about you and why you want this job].
3. Finish with three smart questions I can ask them at the end, and one sentence telling me why I'm more ready than I feel.

Keep everything short.

This works in ChatGPT too, if that’s what you’ve got - the rules are the thing, not the tool.

Before you get carried away

Honesty corner. A rehearsal can’t tell you the actual questions - it makes good predictions from the job ad, but there’ll be surprises, and that’s fine, because practice makes you better at answering, not just at specific answers. It can’t paper over a genuine skills gap; if the job needs a forklift licence you haven’t got, no amount of polish changes that. And it won’t delete your nerves - you’ll still feel them on the day. They’ll just be sitting on top of preparation instead of on top of nothing, which changes everything about how they behave.

One warning: don’t memorise scripts. If you learn answers word-for-word, one interruption derails the whole recording. Aim to walk in with remembered bullet points - the story, the number, the result - and let the sentences come out fresh each time. The ladder builds exactly that.

One thing, then close the tab

One out-loud session in voice mode, six questions, the night before-the-night-before. Hearing yourself answer, even once, moves you past 90% of candidates - because almost nobody does it.

You’ve got this. And if the CV that gets you the interview needs a once-over first, Tailor Your CV In 10 Minutes is the ten minutes to spend before this guide’s ten minutes.