How many times should I practise before the real interview?

Practice plan by time left

Editorial rule of thumb, not a study. If you are answering in a second language or have not interviewed for a long time, add one or two rounds.

Why the number is the wrong question, and what to ask instead

"How many times" sounds like a training schedule, but interview practice is not endurance work. The aim is not to pile up repetitions; it is to reach three conditions. Every likely question has an answer. Every answer reaches its point in roughly ninety seconds to two minutes. And the answer survives someone asking a follow-up. Once that happens twice running, another round adds little.

Three is a useful default because three rounds map onto exactly those three checks. Someone who has not interviewed for years, who is answering in a second language, or who faces a panel for the first time will usually need four or five. Someone who sat two similar interviews last week may need only one round focused on the new advert.

Three rounds, three different jobs

Round one is a diagnosis, not a performance. Answer every question out loud, including the ones where you run dry, and afterwards note where you lost the thread. The usual suspects are an opening that goes on too long, an example with no outcome, and a salary question met with a dodge instead of a number. This round is allowed to be bad. That is its purpose: the bad version happens here and not in front of the employer.

Round two repairs what round one exposed. For each weak answer, settle on a shape, the situation, what you did, what came of it, and say it again. You are not memorising sentences. You are learning the order and the one detail that makes the answer believable: the figure, the client, the deadline.

Round three simulates the real thing. No notes, no pausing, no second go at an answer that went wrong, and ideally someone or something that asks follow-ups. This is where a learned answer and an understood one part company. The learned answer falls apart at "Could you be more specific?"; the understood one gets sharper.

Spread the rounds out rather than stacking them

Three rounds back to back the evening before beat none, but they are clearly worse than three on separate days. Between rounds, what you noticed last time settles; the improved version comes more easily the next day than ten minutes later. With a week to go, put the rounds on days one, three and five, and keep the day before free apart from a short pass through the awkward questions.

With three days the same plan compresses: one round a day, the last one the day before, not the morning of the interview. With a single day, do round one in the morning and round two in the evening, then on the morning itself run only your introduction and your salary figure. A full round on the day rarely pays; a shaky run an hour before the appointment costs more confidence than it adds content.

Which answers deserve more repetition than the rest

Not every question earns the same number of rounds. Most people answer questions about their strengths or their interest in the company reasonably well, because they have already thought about them. The questions that are certain to come up in a Swiss interview and regularly fail on the first spoken attempt are different: expected salary, which is asked directly here and wants a figure or a narrow range; the reason for leaving, which has to work without criticising your current employer; your notice period and earliest start date; and, for candidates without a Swiss passport, the work permit.

Those four get their own short rounds of a few minutes on top of the three run-throughs, three or four spoken attempts each, on different days. They are short, predictable and give the biggest return per minute, because a hesitant answer to the salary question leaves more of an impression than an average one about your hobbies.

The other category is the advert itself. If it asks for "experience with SAP" or "leading a small team", that is exactly what you will be asked about, usually as a situation. These do not practise well from a generic list, because your answer needs a concrete example from your own work.

How to tell you have practised enough, or too much

When the right combination comes together, three essential elements align: you possess a clear understanding of your response to every probable query, you arrive at a conclusion without the need for notes, and a follow-up propels you into additional detail rather than veering off track. If this holds true twice consecutively, the subsequent phase is characterized by activity, rather than a period of preparation.

Too much is when your answers start to sound identical however the question is put. If you notice yourself reciting a sentence word for word, you have memorised it, and memorised answers are easy to hear in an interview. The remedy is not more practice but different practice: the same answer with another example, or the question deliberately asked in a different way.

The opposite warning sign is an answer that changes fundamentally every round. That is a content problem, not a practice problem: you do not yet know what you want to say. Another spoken round will not fix it. Ten minutes of thinking on paper will.

When you need a fresh round even though you have practised

Practised answers are tied to one advert. A new job means at least one new run-through, because the technical questions and the examples shift even if your introduction and salary answer barely change. The same goes for a second interview with the same employer: different people often sit in, such as the line manager or someone from senior management, and the questions go deeper into what came up the first time.

A change of language also counts as new practice. An answer that works in English does not automatically work in German or French, and in Switzerland interviewing in something other than your first language is routine, a Standard German interview in Zurich, an English one at an international firm. If the interview is not in your strongest language, plan for four or five rounds rather than three.

What this looks like with a practice tool, and where one is not enough

In the SwissJobs.app practice interview a full round is eight questions, generated from your CV and the advert, with follow-ups when an answer stays vague and a score for each answer. That makes round three realistic, because you do not know the next question. Without an account, two questions are generated and one answer is scored; a free account scores five answers on the day you sign up and five a month after that, which is less than one full round. The trial or Premium (CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year) gives forty scored answers a month, enough for five full rounds; the annual plan allows eighty.

Where it is the wrong choice: if your nerves in front of real people are the problem, a dry run with a friend or a human interview coach gives you something no voice on a screen can. If you are registered with the RAV, ask first about an application course, which is free for participants. And for round one, where the only goal is finding gaps, a phone recording is enough; our page on practising alone explains how. All quota and price details as of 16 September 2026.