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Mock Interview Practice
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Interview Prep mentions practicing this with classmates almost in passing. It deserves more than a passing mention — treated as an actual game with rules, it's the best way to make live Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) probing feel natural before it matters for real.
You need two things: a resume (yours, your partner's, doesn't matter whose) and a scorecard with the four LBIT dimensions on it. That's it.
- Almost anyone can be your partner. Student-student is completely fine for this. Your partner doesn't even need to be an engineer — plenty of real hiring managers won't be either.
- One player is the Interviewer, the other is the Interviewee.
- The Interviewer holds the resume and the scorecard. Pick one entry on the resume and start asking probing questions about it — same technique described on Interview Prep — checking off each LBIT dimension as the Interviewee's answers cover it, and writing down what they actually said, as fast as you can, until all four boxes are checked.
| Dimension | Covered? | What They Said |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership | ☐ | |
| Business | ☐ | |
| Interpersonal | ☐ | |
| Technical | ☐ |
- Then move on. Either pick the next resume entry and keep going, or swap roles entirely and let your partner grill you on one of your own entries the same way — probing questions until all four boxes are checked and recorded.
- With three or four people, run it as a round table. Whoever isn't actively playing Interviewer or Interviewee for that round observes instead, and shares what they noticed at the end of the round — a second and third set of eyes catches things the two people mid-exercise are too busy to see.
The first time you try this as the Interviewer, you'll probably find that asking a good question, actually listening to the answer, and writing down what was said — all without an uncomfortably long, awkward pause — is genuinely hard to do at once. That's normal, and it's exactly the skill the exercise is built to develop. It gets easier with practice, the same way any other skill does.
Strip away the classroom setting and this game is essentially what an organized mock interview event looks like. The one real difference: the student plays Interviewee opposite a volunteer professional playing Interviewer, instead of two students trading roles.
That difference is worth chasing when you can get it. Having an actual working professional in the Interviewer's chair opens up higher-value teachable moments than a peer-to-peer round usually surfaces — moments you can't coach yourself into, because you don't know what you don't know. But that doesn't make the peer version a lesser substitute in the meantime — there's still real value in running this exercise with a classmate, and it's a lot more available on a random Tuesday than a volunteer professional is.
Whoever you practice with, both of you come out ahead — you're each getting real practice at the same time, just from opposite chairs.
Practicing the Interviewer's chair specifically is worth as much as practicing the Interviewee's. Running the probing-question technique yourself, feeling how hard it is to ask, listen, and record all at once, builds real empathy for what the person across the table from you in an actual interview is doing — which is the same point Interview Prep opens with: they're nervous too. This game is where that stops being something you're told and starts being something you've felt firsthand.
Related: Interview Prep · Resumes · The Job Hunt · Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals
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