​Practice does make perfect! If you have an interview coming up, the best preparation is to practise how you would speak in the interview. Even if you don’t have an interview lined up, but are searching for jobs, it’s a good idea to run through interviewing a few times. For many, the difficulty arises from memorising answers to certain questions and due to nervousness or stress, forgetting the answers in the actual interview.

It’s one thing to read about what to say, it’s quite another thing to say it. Here are a few suggestions on adding a rehearsal step to your job interview preparation.

• Write out answers to questions you perceive as being particularly Certainly your responses shouldn’t sound rehearsed or memorised but the process of putting your responses on paper will help you evaluate and organise the most effective answers.

• Associate key words in your answers to certain ideas you want to express. Let those key words trigger your memory to speak in a natural manner in the interview. This way you won’t have to worry about memorising or even forgetting certain ideas.

• Ask a close friend, especially if you have one in the corporate world, to interview you and give you feedback.

• You can also ask your spouse or a family member to ask some key behavioural interview questions which can be sourced online and even made job-specific.

• Practise your answers into a voice recorder or video recorder (smart phones have both these capabilities). Put yourself in the interviewer’s seat when you play it back and be tough on yourself in review.

The more you practise, the more you’ll become better at interviews. This way, you’ll be familiar with your skills and experience and how to relate them to any question that’s posed to you. It’s worth spending the time on a mock interview to avoid mucking up the real one!