How do I practise a job interview on my own?

The 45-minute drill, round by round

You need three things: an advert that matters to you, a recording device, and the discipline to keep to the clock. Everything else is time management. Do it standing up if you can — posture changes pace, and pace is most of what goes wrong.

Round one, two minutes: tell me about yourself. Start where you are now, not with school, and finish on the link between your work and this role. Round two, three minutes: why are you leaving, and why here? One sentence for the reason, no criticism of your current employer, and the rest of the time spent on the employer in front of you.

Rounds three and four, five minutes each: two situations from your work, built as context, what you did, what came out of it. Take the two themes the advert weights most heavily — usually one involving customers or patients and one about a task you carried through on your own. Round five, two minutes: the salary question, answered with a number and a reason. Round six, three minutes: your own questions, spoken in full sentences rather than read off a list.

The remaining twenty-five minutes are the actual training. Play the recording back with the clock running. Anything over ninety seconds without a concrete example is too long. Anything that ends without a result is unfinished. And mark every "basically", "kind of" and "I would say" — those are the places where you do not yet believe your own answer.

Mark yourself: three points per answer

Practice without scoring just rehearses the same mistakes more fluently. Give each answer up to three marks, one per test. First: is there a specific situation, with a place, a time and other people in it — or only adjectives about yourself? Second: does a checkable quantity appear, a workload, a duration, a caseload, a percentage? Third: do you say what the outcome was?

Two out of three is a good first pass. Do not delete the zero-mark answers — rewrite them as three keywords and immediately say them again, same question, same recording. The jump between first and second attempt is the largest gain in the whole session, and it disappears if you leave it until tomorrow.

On the second run, change one thing: the order. Practising in a fixed sequence teaches you a narrative rather than an answer. In the real conversation the weakness question arrives forty minutes in, not as item seven, and only what you can produce cold will hold there.

Take the questions from the advert, not from a list of fifty

The usual mistake is not the format of practice but the choice of material. Work through a generic question list and you will prepare answers nobody asks for, while having no example ready for the themes printed in bold in the advert.

So there is a step before the drill: mark every task and every condition in the advert, and put exactly one example beside each. Our count of advert texts shows which themes come up at all. Customers, guests or patients appear in about sixteen percent, further training in around fourteen, project work in just under fourteen, a formal qualification in about the same.

What is rare matters just as much. Fewer than nine percent of advert texts mention leading a team, about two percent a driving licence, under one percent shift or on-call work. But if your advert is one of the few that does name the driving licence or the on-call rota, that is not a footnote — it is a question that is certain to come, and one of the few where "I would have to look into that" ends the conversation.

Four prepared examples are enough. A single strong example answers three different questions when you move the emphasis: once onto the collaboration, once onto the decision you made, once onto the outcome. That is the flexibility a memorised script never gives you.

Rehearse the language switch on purpose

This is the part almost nobody drills and Switzerland produces constantly. Of the adverts that state a language requirement at all, a good twenty-seven percent name two or more languages and nearly seven percent name three. English with German is the most common pairing; German with French and the three-language combination follow.

In practice that means someone can join after twenty minutes and the rest of the conversation continues in the second language. So rehearse your two-minute introduction again in that language — not the whole interview, just the part where the switch usually lands.

The bar is lower than the anxiety suggests. Among adverts that require English, roughly 86 percent ask for professional working level and fewer than two percent for native. Nobody is scoring your accent; they are checking whether a client call would go well. Prepare two sentences word for word: the one where you state the level you work at, and the one where you ask for something to be repeated.

If you are interviewing in German-speaking Switzerland, expect the small talk to start in Swiss German. Asking once, politely, for standard German is completely normal and is not counted against you. If the advert names only one language, skip this round and spend the time on the example you find hardest.

The questions you ask back are the least-rehearsed round

Your own questions are the only round entirely under your control, and most candidates prepare them last and least. arbeit.swiss puts them on the checklist as their own preparation item, alongside the employer's questions: what do you want to know about the job, the place of work, the working conditions, what is expected of staff and managers, and the company's values?

Our figures tell you where those questions have the most leverage — in the silences. Further training is volunteered in around fourteen percent of advert texts, flexible hours in a good six, the pension fund in two and a half, home office in under two. What an advert does not mention is rarely excluded; it is simply unsettled, and unsettled points are the ones that move in a conversation.

Rehearse four of them out loud, as full sentences: one about what the job actually is in the first three months, one about the team and the person you would report to, one about a condition that matters to you and is missing from the advert, and one about the next step in the process. The last is the most practical — it ends the meeting with an agreement instead of "we'll be in touch".

For the salary round, prepare a number rather than an open-ended range: a target, a justification drawn from your own performance, and a floor you keep to yourself. The federal wage calculator that arbeit.swiss links to gives you a starting point by sector, function and region, which is more defensible than a figure taken from a forum.

Alone, with a person, or with a tool

Alone and recorded has the best effort-to-benefit ratio, because it exposes pace and filler words — you hear both immediately and nobody has to tell you. Its limit is obvious: it never follows up, so a weak answer passes unchallenged.

Practising with a person is therefore worth exactly one session, and only after your second solo run. Hand them the advert and three questions, with the instruction to follow up once after every answer. "And what was your part in that?" is the follow-up that breaks most well-rehearsed answers open. Without the advert in their hand it turns into a friendly chat with no learning in it.

Here you can shorten the preparation that comes before all of this: from the advert and your CV we build a cheatsheet of the points you need to be able to evidence, prepared answer boxes in the language of the advert, and a time plan for a 45-minute conversation. You can edit it line by line. It does not replace speaking out loud — it removes the half hour you would otherwise spend working out what to practise.

One more thing shapes the choice of drill: around 45 percent of the employers in our listings have exactly one open advert, and roughly seven in ten have at most three. The odds are high that you are not facing a structured selection process but the person you would report to. That is not something you rehearse a perfect script for — it is something you rehearse staying concrete in a conversation for.

What not to rehearse

Memorising answers is the most reliable way to make an interview stiff. At most three things belong word for word: the first sentence of your introduction, the sentence explaining your move, and your salary number. Everything else is rehearsed as content, not as wording.

Nor is there much value in polishing a standard answer to the weakness question. A rehearsed weakness that is secretly a strength is recognised in two seconds by anyone who interviews regularly. Name a real one that is not central to the job, and say in a second sentence what you do about it. That is the whole answer, and it needs no drilling.

Finally, rehearse the next conversation, not the whole process. An assessment day, a trial shift, or a second round with the management have their own rules, and preparing for them in advance eats the time that belongs to the meeting actually in your calendar.