The two rooms

Every candidate I have ever interviewed who fell apart had read enough. That was never the problem. They knew what a good answer to the question contained. What they could not do was produce one, out loud, in front of a person, at the moment it was required.

The distance between those two things is enormous and almost entirely unacknowledged. We treat interview preparation as a reading exercise because reading is comfortable and can be done in bed. But an interview is a performance under mild adversarial pressure, and nobody gets better at a performance by reading about it.

So: two rooms.

The first room is empty. It is a kitchen at seven in the morning, or a car, or a walk with the dog. You take a question and you answer it aloud, in your own words, without looking at anything. It will come out badly. You will waffle, lose the thread halfway, reach for a word that is not there, and finish somewhere you did not intend. That is not a sign you are unprepared. That is the whole point of the exercise — you have just discovered, for free and with nobody watching, that an answer you understood perfectly falls apart on contact with your own mouth. Do it again. It is better the second time and unrecognisable by the fifth.

The second room has a person in it. This is the part people skip, and it is the part that matters. Get a friend, a partner, a former colleague, someone from your team — it genuinely does not matter whether they know anything about security, because a good half of the people who interview you will not know much about your specific answer either. What matters is that there is now a human being opposite you who might interrupt, ask what you mean, follow up, or pull a face at the wrong moment.

Ask them to be slightly difficult. And ask them afterwards for the one piece of feedback that actually predicts outcomes: not whether the answer was right, but whether you sounded like someone they would want to work with.

This costs nothing. It requires no platform, no course and no subscription. It is the single highest-return thing you can do in the week before an interview, and I have watched it turn marginal candidates into obvious hires.

Say it alone until it is smooth. Say it to someone until it survives contact.