Walking out of an interview knowing you did poorly is a tough pill to swallow. Whether you’re currently employed and trying to land your next position or you’re trying to break into the software industry, the negative emotions that bubble up after a bad interview can be very damaging to your confidence. Take a deep breath.
Rejection is a deeply emotional event, regardless of which context it is delivered in. Just because you’ve had one bad Interview doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be rejected from the job, but it’s likely.
I walked out of an interview last week, and I knew I had blown it. I received the rejection email a few hours later. I am a professional software engineer. I got promoted three months ago, and my employer is very happy with me. Nonetheless, I didn’t do a good job of presenting myself and my knowledge.
True software development requires a very different skill set compared to the technical coding problems present by most companies in interviews. Hackerrank, Leetcode, StrataScratch and other technical interview question banks show what most employers use. Never before in my professional work have I been asked to find the least common denominator and greatest common factor between two arrays of numbers, but I’ve been asked very similar questions in countless interviews.
Keep in mind that coding in real life is different from coding in an interview. Just because you did poorly in a technical interview does not mean you do not have strong technical skills and knowledge.
Maybe you got the job, maybe you didn’t. Either way, there’s room to grow. Let’s step through how to recover from a bad technical interview in order to make the most of this learning experience.
· 1. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Forgive Yourself · 2. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Put Your Failure to Use · 3. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Build Your Curriculum ∘ Issues Exhibiting Your Technical Skills ∘ Issues Exhibiting Your Soft Skills · Final Thoughts on Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview
1. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Forgive Yourself
The first thing to do is forgive yourself for performing poorly. You tried! You put yourself out there! That is a huge reason to simply celebrate your efforts. Recognize that you landed an interview. Give yourself a big hug and take it easy on yourself. Saying no and criticizing someone is actually quite easy to do, but acknowledging the time and energy you’ve invested in getting a new job opportunity is a worthwhile pursuit.
If you have a gut feeling that you didn’t do well, or you immediately feel your lacking performance slapping you in the face – give yourself a moment to feel your emotions. It’s okay to be sad, disappointed, frustrated, or angry. I quickly feel frustrated with myself for not representing my knowledge, technical skills, and soft skills well in an interview. Give yourself the time and space to just think through these emotions. A brief mindful meditation can help you process your motions. You might want to go for a walk, sit quietly for a bit, or pick up a monotonous task like vacuuming.
After you’ve decompressed and let your negative emotions dissipate a bit, celebrate! You are hardworking, smart, and would make for a great addition to their team. For one reason or another, that didn’t come across in the interview, and that’s okay.
Now is the time to focus on the positive. Write down three things you did well in the interview. Did you have some awesome questions prepared for your interviewer? Maybe you did a great job familiarizing yourself with the company and their products, or you put in a lot of hours trying out practice technical coding problems. Whatever you think you did well, take the time to celebrate those small wins for yourself.
Doing well in an interview is a combination of knowledge, preparation, and confidence. Recognizing your strengths and what you already do well is an important part of building and sustaining your interview confidence.
It is very important to be nice to yourself. You might have other interviews lined up soon, or you maybe wanted to apply to some other jobs. Maintaining your motivation and confidence is key to your ultimate success of landing your next coding job.
2. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Put Your Failure to Use
Once you’ve gone through your personal emotional rollercoaster to digest the rejection and disappointment, and you’ve navigated yourself back to being your personal #1 fan, take a hard look at what you could have done better. You are a knowledgeable, skilled person, but you will always have room to grow.
Just like you thought about what you did well, think about what you did poorly. Maybe you only prepped for a generic coding interview and they actually had you implementing functional components in a React code base for a frontend interview. Perhaps you didn’t do a great job of speaking through your thought process, which meant the interviewer couldn’t give you nudges to steer you in the right direction. Whatever the case may be, jot down what you think your top three growth areas are.
If you were given explicit feedback, that’s great! Not every company takes the time to invest in their applicants by sharing the interview notes so that you can hopefully learn and grow from them. However, it’s really important that you look at this feedback with a critical eye. It’s very easy to point out the weaknesses or shortcomings of somebody else, so take this feedback with a big grain of salt. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. Not every piece of criticism is valid.
In my last interview, I really let my nerves get the best of me. I wasn’t able to properly exhibit my knowledge, and the interviewer told me to go review the basics. I know that I know the basics, but my nerves and emotions got in the way of me showing that. Sure, reviewing the basics might allow me to feel more confident of my knowledge, but it doesn’t mean the critique is entirely fair.
Look at the feedback with a critical eye towards your interviewer. Take a moment to figure out which aspects of the feedback you care about and are open to working on. Consider what the top three growth areas are that you consider important enough to invest time to improve.
3. Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview: Build Your Curriculum
Areas of poor performance are the biggest opportunities for growth, so try to look at the positive side. In the worst case scenario, this bad interview is just another training exercise for you.
If you consider your biggest area of growth in the technical interview, you can work to build a technical interview curriculum for yourself.
There are two main areas to improve on in a technical interview. Either the representation of your technical skills is lacking and/or the representation of your soft skills is lacking. I’ll walk you through some examples of each and how to think about training yourself to improve your performance in technical interviews.
Issues Exhibiting Your Technical Skills
You might work daily in React, but your employer doesn’t use the latest and greatest. Maybe your coding challenge was a functional component that uses hooks. If you say you’re proficient in React, make sure you’ve got the very simple basics down pat. Reviewing documentation of this potential employer’s preferred framework is a good plan for showing off your knowledge.
Maybe you don’t create a new component very often in your day job, but it’s a small, simple thing you can practice. Having these little things memorized can help you remain calm during the interview and lends you a polished, composed look during the interview.
Is your go-to interview Programming language Java? Maybe consider learning JavaScript, since it’s much more lightweight, so you can communicate your brilliant ideas with less typing on your part.
Issues Exhibiting Your Soft Skills
Just because you’ve landed a job before, doesn’t mean you’ll land every other one you apply to in the future. I’m currently employed as a software engineer. I have been promoted since I’ve been at this company, and I just got rejected from another company. It’s okay! It happens.
Interviewing is something that should be practiced, but I get it. It’s hard to fit in consistent interview prep along with your day job and your life. If you haven’t interviewed in a while and you’re looking to change jobs, whether that’s within your current company or to a different one, getting back to interviewing can be as painful as pulling teeth.
Despite getting promoted three months ago, I got overwhelmed, nervous, and stressed when it came to my first technical interview in over a year. Unfortunately, it was a company I was really interested in, and I didn’t get the job. I was out of practice, and I let it show.
If you’re really looking to change jobs ASAP, just start applying wherever in whatever order. However, if you are targeting one or a few companies and you’ve really got your heart set on them, then you should really consider lining up for some "practice" interviews with other companies before you submit your application for these dream employers.
It can be hard to take mock interviews or practice conversations with your friends or family seriously enough to make them into really good interviewing practice. Nothing beats an actual interview to motivate you to prepare for by brushing up on your algorithm problem solving skills and preparing for behavior questions.
Final Thoughts on Recovering from a Bad Technical Interview
Interviews are tough. It’s really challenging to provide evidence for all of your technical knowledge in a clean, coherent narrative.
Walking away from an interview where you feel you did poorly or you’re told as much, hopefully with kinder words, can be frustrating and sad. It’s hard to keep this poor performance from digging away at the cracks in your self-confidence and in your belief of your technical skills.
Remind yourself that interviews are artificial environments. One bad interview doesn’t invalidate all the work you’ve done to date. You are still a brilliant and knowledgeable developer who is a great team player.
Dust yourself off, reconsider your strengths and weaknesses in the context of a technical interview, and go get your next interview!
Open for freelance writing and ghostwriting work: [email protected]. I focus on frontend programming and data science.
