Mock Interview Thursdays

Never Search Alone is a job search community built around Job Search Councils: small peer groups that meet regularly to help each other through the search. I started with a listening tour of my own council. I wanted to find out what was actually holding each of our searches back. The answers went in different directions, but one kept coming up: interviewing.

So we started doing mock interviews with each other every week. It helped, for a while.

Once we knew each other's stories, the questions got predictable and the pressure disappeared. Being interviewed by a friend isn't the same as being interviewed by a stranger. We needed new interviewers and real stakes, without making anyone schedule one-on-ones with people they'd never met.

Underneath that was a second problem. Interview feedback is easy to give and hard to use. Most people walked away from a mock with ten things to fix and no idea where to start.

Good feedback doesn't tell you everything that went wrong. It tells you what to fix first.

I opened the session to the wider community's Slack and built a structure someone could walk into cold. It opens with check-ins, then moves to breakout rooms of two to five people for timed rounds of interview and feedback, and closes with a group share-out. Every round of feedback ends with one to three priorities the person can actually work on that week. Within that structure, three decisions shaped the group.

I matched people on what they needed that day, not on their résumé. At first I paired people by industry and seniority, which seemed like the obvious way to do it. It wasn't what made the rooms work. What mattered was what each person wanted from that session, and who they'd open up with. Now I pair people preparing for final rounds with experienced regulars, and I pair quieter first-timers with people I know will draw them out. It takes a few extra minutes of reading the room at the start of every call, and it's a big part of why people come back.

I built a way in that didn't require the hot seat. One member of my council was afraid of interviewing. Rather than wait until they felt ready, I made it an explicit option to attend, listen, and give feedback without being interviewed. It's written into the syllabus now: show up, speak at least once, and help someone else. Sitting in on other people's interviews is how a lot of people learn the rhythm before they try it themselves.

I changed a rule when the people using it showed me a better one. The group started with a ban on AI recording and transcription. Then a participant used a feedback transcript to prepare for a real interview, and that made me question whether the rule was serving the group. Instead of flipping the rule on my own, I surveyed the group on notetaking preferences and privacy concerns. I also partnered with Mirror AI to beta test their peer-matching platform. The first collaboration week was rocky, so we met up and built an event structure that let invited participants join another call the day after the group call for more interview practice with real people, so they could try it out. We embedded Mirror's best resources, like their interview questions database, which is especially advantageous for technical interview questions that are hard to come up with on the fly. I added another collaboration with a founder building a live delivery trainer to help address the challenges people expressed implementing the feedback they shared in the moment. Through all of it, the introductions and share-outs stayed human.

I'm currently building a resource cache to connect participants to the resources that keep coming up in calls, organized around the issues people voice most, so they can go directly to several relevant and helpful sources for tackling each of these top problems.

The group has logged 320 participant sessions and counting since April 2026 and averages eight to ten people a week. I wrote a syllabus and a facilitator run-of-show so other members can host when I'm away. Many regulars come back week after week to interview others, not just to be interviewed.

One participant, Alex Liss, had hit a run of final-round rejections. After working with the group, he landed an offer, and he told me the group made the difference.

"One learns so much about how to interview better while helping their peers interview better. You can't get that same experience even when working with a private interview coach!"– Antonio

A big part of my job is reading the room. I look at each person's background and current goals, and I figure out where they could give someone else the insight that person needs. It's less about helping people solve their own problems and more about fostering the connections that let their partners' expertise do the work. The group puts collective knowledge to work on individual needs, at the scale of a network. This group showed me that facilitation is one of my strengths. All the little things you have to juggle to make a session land are things I do almost without thinking. It also showed me how much impact that can have on a community's collective success and resourcefulness.