Tessa DavisI help doctors in the UK prep for their senior job interviews

Think you messed up an interview answer?

1 Nov 2024 · 1 min

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In this segment, career coach Tessa Davis reassures interviewees that a single flawed answer is not catastrophic. She explains that candidates often judge their own responses more harshly than interview panels do, and that even a genuinely poor answer is just one question among many. Davis emphasizes the danger of letting one mistake trigger a cascade of errors due to stress, and she advises a mental reset: acknowledge the slip, take a breath, and consciously move on. By drawing a line under the error and focusing on the next question, candidates can prevent a single misstep from derailing the entire interview, especially since competitors may have made similar or worse mistakes.

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If you make a mistake in one of your answers, it happens. It is not a disaster. Now, often with the people that I coach, they think their answer was terrible when actually it was good. So your perception of how you're answering is not going to be the same as the way that the panel is receiving it. So you have to just accept that it's not as bad as you think it is. And even if it is as bad as you think it is and you mess up an answer, it's just one question. So what you don't want is that one question to derail you for the rest of your interview. You need to forget about it and move on. So find a way to practice drawing a line under it and moving on to the next question. Because you've no idea what your competitors did. They might have messed up the same question. They might have messed up more. It might not be as bad as you think. It's very rare that one question is going to mess up your whole interview. Actually, what's more common is that you mess up one question and then you're so stressed that you mess up the next. But what's important is that you just accept that, take a breath, move on, and forget about it.