The 3 Neuroscience-backed Techniques I Used Right Before My Technical Interviews That Helped Me Land the Job.
The definitive game plan for your next interview, brought to you by Neuroscience.
Your palms are sweaty, knees weak arms are heavy; Eminem’s words paint a picture of what it feels like as that video call starts ringing and your interviewer introduces themselves. You’ve worked hard, your hours of practice on leetcode are etched into your keyboard, the stats questions that plagued you a month ago aren’t as intimidating anymore, so why are your palms still sweaty? If, like me, you are a nervous wreck during interviews, here are 3 pointers backed by science that you can do within 1 hour of your interview that will help bring out your best self.
1. Free your working memory of anxiety
Your working memory is memory used to plan and carry out behaviours, such as retaining intermediate results whilst doing a math problem, analysing the premises of logical statements (essential in coding), or even whilst baking a cake (remembering you already added that pinch of salt and not doing it again). Clearly it’s going to be super relevant in your interview, so how do you prepare your working memory for what’s to come?
Working memory relies on many complex cognitive tasks such as attention, distraction inhibition and information updating for optimal performance. There is strong evidence to suggest that anxiety can severely compromise your working memory because your heightened sense of a perceived threat takes over most of those important cognitive tasks at the expense of other stimuli (Bar-Haim et al., 2007).
For example, people with severe anxiety have difficulties disassociating the frightening nature of an image or word from the task at hand, making it more difficult to focus on task completion (Grant et al., 2015). A study where subjects were asked to memorise a set of numbers found that those with higher anxiety recalled far fewer digits than those with low anxiety (Diamond, 2013). Crucially, (Ansari & Derakshan, 2011) showed that people with elevated anxiety take a long time to shift between cognitive tasks, which can be particularly detrimental when the interviewer reveals the longer and more involved part (b) of that SQL coding exercise we were set.
So what does the science recommend?
- Creatively Writing Your Worries: I’m serious! A great technique for managing my working memory came from a study by Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock. Here is a summary:
Researchers gave 20 students two math tests. The students did nothing special before the first test. But before the second test, students were told they’d receive money for high marks. Half of the students were then instructed to take 10 minutes and write down any concerns they had about the test. The other half sat quietly.
Those who just sat waiting did 12 percent worse on the second test than on the first. But those who wrote about their fears showed a five percent improvement on the exam.
Another part of the research found that writing in general didn’t work — it had to be about test-related concerns to trigger the effect. So to write may prevent some wrongs.
2. Read something engaging but challenging: Studies have found that spatial and verbal working memory are both similarly impacted by anxiety, but incredibly, verbal working memory is much less impacted by higher-load tasks (Vytal et al., 2013). This means that tasks requiring more verbal processing, such as reading, can exert greater control over the cognitive processes that are typically robbed away by anxiety. What I found myself doing before my interview was reading a short article (5–10 mins) in an area I enjoyed. The point is that it should be challenging enough to require active focus, and this helped quell other anxiety signals competing for the same resources.
3. Box Breathing: This simple but extremely effective technique is used by Navy SEALS to remain calm and focused in operations. All you need to do is picture a square, take a deep breath for 4 seconds whilst imagining yourself travelling along one side of the square, then hold it for another 4 seconds whilst imagining yourself walking around the corner and down the other side. As you exhale, imagine your breath moving along the bottom of the square to the final corner. Then rest for 4 seconds while traversing the final edge, and repeat. Not only does this visual provide a mental anchor that shift your attention away from anxious cues, but the deep, controlled breathing helps stimulate the vagal nerve, which activates your parasympathetic nervous system (the part of your nervous system associated with calming you down).
2. Actively recall your notes one last time
The spaced repetition technique for learning arises from the seminal work by Ebbinghaus H, who showed that studying content with intervals is more effective in promoting long term memory retention than massed training (which is why late-night cramming for your combinatorics exam never worked). The premise is that each repetition in learning increases the optimum interval before the next repetition is needed.
The way to do this of course is not by passively reading the content, which gives the illusion of competence, but by using active recall as I discussed in an earlier post. If my interview is a coding interview, I’ll quickly glance through a list of toggled questions and answers I have in Notion (below), that I’ve been revising using active recall and spaced repetition, trying to recall and prime the attention in my mind to the information I will need later on. Please bear in mind: do not spend 1 hour hand-writing out all these algorithms before your interview. The point of this is to see if you can recall the general strategy of the solutions, and if not, identify what little issue you might have forgotten since your last repetition.
Doing this helped get my mind into the zone, pushing me back up the forgetting curve, especially if I hadn’t reviewed the content in a while. And the point isn’t to study the entire thing- if I was fairly confident about an area I wouldn’t bother to go through it, but something I might have forgotten since my last repetition is definitely an area I’d actively recall and review before my interview. It definitely helped when it came to recalling things that ALWAYS tend to come up in these interviews:
3. Visualise your interview
Various studies have shown that thoughts produce the same mental cues associated with actions: using mental imagery in athletics and other sports was found to be effective in tasks such as learning new skills, managing anxiety and boosting self confidence (Jones et al., 1997). Furthermore, chess grandmasters can visualise and reconstruct entire chessboards in their mind, carrying out plays several moves ahead (AJ Waters, 2008). The way I used this in a job interview to both be maximally prepared is like this:
- I imagine introducing myself to the interviewer, giving a concise overview starting with my most recent or current job, then stepping backwards to my education profile.
- I imagine the opening question the interviewer will ask, if it’s a programming exercise I know it’s most likely going to be something that demonstrates a basic understanding of algorithms and data structures. I know they will most likely ask what the time complexity and space complexity will be.
- Now I imagine the question becoming more challenging. Again, I imagine trying to build on the simple algorithms I know with more extensions. I imagine getting stuck and asking the interviewer for help (you should definitely ask as many clarifying questions as you can, there are no stupid questions here). If I still don’t get it, I will give a brute force solution and explain its limitations. I make sure I give the edge cases. Again I would at least try and explain what the optimal solution should look like, even if I can’t get the code on the keys.
- I repeat 2–3 in my head for a variety of different programming exercises, and I become much more relaxed each time I do it, imagining bringing my best self to the interview.
This isn’t some movie or a montage in my head, but a recipe that gets my brain primed for whats to come, and tries to visualise and expect the unexpected.
All the luck in the world to you for your interviews, I hope these pointers help you out, let me know how you get along!
