One morning I got to spend 4 hours deliberating on a fake jury. A law firm had 3 lawyers expound a fascinating case to us. Millions of dollars were at risk. It was great fun. They even paid us $9 per hour to do it. We obviously came to conclusions they weren’t expecting as they tried to sway us with more information during our deliberations. All of this was caught on film so that later they could parse our every word. In the afternoon they had a different fake jury hear the case. My mole tells me that they heard slightly different evidence, but came to the same conclusion based on the facts.
Some schools do fake job interviews with their students. They film the whole thing. After it is over they go over your interview with you. You can also pay some recruiting agencies to do those interviews with you. It can be a valuable experience. By valuable I mean it can get you an extra 5% in salary.
Why not do your own fake interviews? Surely you know someone who is a supervisor or team leader who will help you do a practice job interview. While you are at it, have them help you do practice phone calls and phone interviews. You can practice any part of the job hunting process that you find yourself failing at.
The two biggest roadblocks to practice are fear of proving your incompetence and not wanting to take the time to do it. If you are incompetent, it is better to fix that with a friend instead of messing up a great job opportunity in front of strangers. If finding time is a problem, then don’t even start your job search. If you don’t have time to prepare, you don’t have time to look.
Something to do today
Find a video camera and 2 friends. Have a fake job interview. Just for fun do a fake phone interview too. Then go over it and see how well you did with your friends.
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Later: Get references on yourself
Audio on your resume