Your mind went blank in an interview. What to do in the next ten seconds

You know the answer. You have told this story to friends more than once. The interviewer finishes the question and nothing comes, no example and no first sentence, only your own pulse and a silence that keeps getting longer.

Interview researchers hear about this moment so often that it has its own category. Deborah Powell and Silvia Bonaccio asked 104 interviewees to describe their anxiety in their own words, and the most common theme was communication. People could not find a good example, could not put a thought together, or lost their words in the middle of a sentence (Powell and Bonaccio). Going blank is the most ordinary part of a nervous interview, and there is a short, practical way through it.

Going blank costs less than it feels

A meta-analysis of 30 studies found that candidates who reported more interview anxiety did receive somewhat lower ratings from interviewers, with an average correlation of −.19. The effect is real and modest. Nerves tilt the scale a little.

The more striking result is what anxiety failed to predict. In a study of 215 applicants for residence assistant jobs, 114 were hired and later rated on their work by supervisors and by students. The correlations between interview anxiety and those job ratings ranged from −.03 to .08, which means essentially none. How nervous someone was in the interview said nothing about how well they did the job (Powell and Bonaccio).

Interviewers also see less of it than you fear. In 119 filmed mock interviews, small nervous habits such as fidgeting or gesturing less were only weakly related to how anxious candidates felt, and the interviewers barely noticed them. Slower speech was the one sign interviewers read correctly. Their judgment depended far more on whether the candidate came across as warm and assertive (BPS Research Digest).

That makes the goal for the next ten seconds a modest one. Keep the conversation going in a way that looks like thinking.

The next ten seconds

Pause on purpose and say that you are pausing. Telling the interviewer, calmly, that you want a second to think turns the silence into visible thought. The silence that feels awkward is the unexplained one, and it feels much longer to you than to the person across the table.

Restating the question in your own words buys a few more seconds, checks that you understood it and often brings an example along with it. When you are asked about a project that slipped, saying back that they want to hear how you handled the people side of a missed deadline usually reminds you which project that was. Amazon’s recruiters tell candidates to ask for more context whenever a question is not clear enough to answer well. Their interviews involve many questions, and asking back is normal there (Amazon recruiters).

When the story will not come, reach for the structure of the answer. A question about a time something happened starts with the situation, where you were and what was at stake, and saying that first sentence often pulls the rest of the story behind it. A question about what you would do starts with the goal you would aim for.

If nothing comes at all, say so and offer the closest thing you have. Telling the interviewer that you have not had exactly that experience and describing the nearest one is a complete and honest answer. Asking to come back to the question is also fine, as long as you return to it before the interview ends. And if you lose the thread halfway through an answer, stop and name the question out loud again, such as the deadline they asked about, and carry on from there. Interviewers forgive a reset far more readily than a long wander.

Call it excitement

Most people try to calm themselves down. Alison Wood Brooks asked 300 adults online, most of them in full-time work, to imagine feeling anxious the day before a big speech and to pick the best advice. About 91% of the people picturing themselves in that spot chose to try to relax and calm down. Brooks then tested that advice.

In one of her studies, 140 students had two minutes to prepare a speech on why they would be a good work partner, knowing it would be filmed and judged, which is close to an interview answer. Before speaking, half of them told themselves they were calm and half told themselves they were excited. Independent raters who did not know who had said what judged the excited group more persuasive, more competent and more confident, and those speakers talked longer, 167 seconds on average against 132 (Brooks, 2014).

Anxiety and excitement are both high-energy states, so calling one by the other’s name is easier than forcing your body down to calm. These were laboratory studies with students, so treat the result as something cheap to try, with no promise attached. Before the call, say once, out loud, that you are excited.

Make it happen less often

Going blank is mostly a retrieval problem. The example exists, and nothing in your head points to it. Preparation that fixes retrieval works better than preparation that produces a script.

Keep a short set of stories, each labeled by what it shows, such as a failure, a conflict, a deadline, a time you led without authority and a time you changed your mind. When a question arrives you only have to choose a label, and the search through your whole career is already done. Rehearse each story aloud at two lengths, half a minute and two minutes, because saying a story is a different skill from knowing it. Powell and Bonaccio suggest recording your practice answers once to hear your filler words, and box breathing for the physical side, in for four seconds, hold, out, hold.

The most useful practice starts from the question itself. Look at a question, answer it without notes, and check afterwards what you left out. That is exactly the skill the interview tests.

Prepped’s question bank is built around that habit. Each common question gets a structure that suits it, a story for questions about a time something happened and present, past and next for the question about yourself. It shows roughly how long your answer takes to say, and it brings the question back on review cards until you can answer without looking. In a live interview, if you stop halfway through a sentence, Nod, Prepped’s character, shows the few words that finish it, taken from the answer on screen and your material.

After the interview

Tonight, while you still remember the wording, write down the question you blanked on and prepare it properly. The question that caught you once is the one most likely to catch you again, and next time you will have the first sentence ready.