Did you know that evaluations are some of the best ways of understanding your abilities? Many people stop self-evaluating themselves after a point. However, I suggest that you improvement areas, continue to evaluate yourself from time to time, just so you know where your knowledge stands and what your market worth is.

In this chapter, we will understand how evaluation is critical to help you understand and assess capabilities. In chapter 5, we had added buffer time to the interview prep schedule to reflect on mistakes and make time to go over areas of improvement. This chapter will throw a little more light on these aspects.

When preparing for an interview, people tend to get stifled with intense preparation. This often leads them to give up halfway and quit the process altogether. Many people tend to feel burnt out with excess preparation, which in many cases also leads to mediocre interviews.

If you’ve come this far, push yourself the extra mile - but do it smartly.

First, let’s look at an example:

Lisa spent a few months preparing for interviews. She was extremely diligent with her interview preparation - she gave up her social life, stayed-in most of the time, and spent all her time revising and reviewing her notes.

Soon, as the interview dates began approaching, Lisa began to feel irritable and restless. She realized she was burning out and couldn’t take the preparation anymore. Fortunately, as fate would have it, her friends turned up and asked her to take a day off and spend some time away from the preparation, which was eating into all aspects of her life. While at lunch with her friends, they generally asked her about her upcoming interview and she casually but confidently spoke to them about the role, her expectations etc., not realising that she was sort of giving a mock interview.

By taking a step away from the interview preparation, she returned back to it refreshed, and realized that this check into reality helped her boost her confidence and restore her purpose.

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Step 1: Based on the target role

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Evaluation

Evaluation can prove to be a real gem in your interview preparation strategy. People should lay more emphasis on this if they want their preparation to succeed. Your evaluation can include mock interviews with peers, mentors, or professionals. In spite of being a costly process, evaluations can help you smoothen out the chink in your armor. As discussed in previous chapters and here, mock interviews are worth your time, effort and money, and are a small step in helping you bag a dream job.

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• Mock interviews:

Set up meetings with friends, colleagues, and mentors who can ask you interview-related questions and give you a more realistic preparation strategy. Taking a mock interview can help you understand what to expect in a real interview. In addition to answering technical questions and personality-based questions, a mock interview also helps you realize basic interview etiquette, like shaking someone’s hand or using formal body language.

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• Don’t get demotivated:

Things may not go well, but that’s not a reason to get demotivated. Isn’t it better that you find room for improvement during practice and not during the actual interview? Reiterate on positives and negatives. You can even change up your timelines if that is what is required for an extreme scenario, but be cautious about changing it too frequently or without any reason.

The idea behind evaluating yourself is to know exactly what your abilities are and how you can push them and improve them further. Remember, if a test doesn’t go well, or you make more mistakes while solving a question paper than you thought, you would don’t be hard on yourself.

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• Avoid burning out:

Most people think that they can end up acing the interview by being extremely rigid on themselves - but this isn’t always right. By being too rigid, people can actually cause themselves to burn out and do more damage than good. To stop yourself from feeling burnt out, take regular breaks from your preparation - remember, it is just one part of your life. Keep evaluating yourself so that you can track your progress and know which areas you need to improve upon, rather than trying to improve everything at once.‍

Exercise -

1. To keep yourself from burning out, how about you try a little physical exercise! Sometimes, when you feel mentally exhausted, it’s better to take a walk, go for a run or indulge in a little workout to ease tension from your body and de-stress. You can then get back to your preparation with a fresh perspective.