I helped out with interview prep and coaching a while ago.
One of the unexpected hardest parts was getting people to open up to the idea that they needed to improve something about their communication in interviews. It's so easy to comfort yourself with fictions about the interviewer failing to recognize your qualifications due to their own ego or other explanations. There are a million blog posts, Tweets, Reddit posts, and angry internet comments that will validate these feelings. Getting rejected and then going to the internet to validate your feelings of being wronged is so much easier than trying to reflect on how you could have done better.
Doing mock interviews for people was exhausting due to the time commitment, but it's one way to try to get around the defensiveness that comes from being rejected for a real job. Even with that, some of the mock interview candidates would get angry with the feedback and try to argue with you. It's weird to see. Nobody likes feeling evaluated and judged, so imagining an explanation that shifts the problem to the other person protects their ego.
One of the unexpected hardest parts was getting people to open up to the idea that they needed to improve something about their communication in interviews. It's so easy to comfort yourself with fictions about the interviewer failing to recognize your qualifications due to their own ego or other explanations. There are a million blog posts, Tweets, Reddit posts, and angry internet comments that will validate these feelings. Getting rejected and then going to the internet to validate your feelings of being wronged is so much easier than trying to reflect on how you could have done better.
Doing mock interviews for people was exhausting due to the time commitment, but it's one way to try to get around the defensiveness that comes from being rejected for a real job. Even with that, some of the mock interview candidates would get angry with the feedback and try to argue with you. It's weird to see. Nobody likes feeling evaluated and judged, so imagining an explanation that shifts the problem to the other person protects their ego.