Nothing feels worse than blowing an interview question. Fortunately, it happens to all of us, and there are ways to recover.
We’ve all done it. During an interview you either go blank when asked a question, or you answer it, and then a little while later realize that your answer wasn’t good. What do you do?
First, don’t panic. It’s all too easy to spiral and focus on it. Interviews have a lot in common with public speaking. With the latter, one of the biggest challenges is to not lose your composure after a mistake. You may say the wrong word, trip over the mic cord, or make some other common mistake. Rookie speakers panic and focus on the moment over and over. Experienced speakers know mistakes happen, and that they’re not the end of the word, so continue onward unphased. You need to develop the same mentality. As with public speaking, practice, practice, practice.
If you realize this mistake during the interview, ask to re-try the question. There may be some jobs where quick thinking matters,, e.g. trading desk, trial lawyer, air traffic controller. In those jobs you need to make decisions on the spot, sometimes with limited information, and don’t often get a second chance. But most jobs aren’t like that. You don’t need to come up with a marketing plan in thirty seconds or scale a database on the spot. Good interviewers and good companies know this. They’re looking more for job-related knowledge and critical thinking than how many seconds it may take you. You can say:
You can do this at any time in the interview, even right at the end.
If a better answer comes to you minutes or hours after, maybe even a day or two later, you can follow up then. In an email, perhaps in your thank you email, you can raise it just like you would in the interview using the approaches above. The one catch is that outside the interview we know you will have had a chance to look up the answer on the internet (and these days ask AI to help you). So, it may be discounted, but how much depends on how much time has passed and how easy it would be to pull an answer from other tools.
Remember that most interviews don’t hinge on a single question. Some companies will ding you for it (*cough* big tech) but that’s only because they have enough people lining up for their jobs that they feel the need for a tight filter. A good interviewer will ask multiple questions to get to know different aspects of you and will judge your holistically across all your answers.
Importantly, use this as a learning experience. If you missed the question because you didn’t know the answer (or know it well enough) it’s time to learn something new. If you froze up, reflect on what caused it and look for techniques or practice routines to help you do better next time.
The best batters in Major League Baseball miss more than half their at-bats. Even the top teams lose one third of the time or more. Don’t let any one mistake, or even a few, hold you back. Your career is multiple seasons (each season being the search for a new job in this analogy); your goal is to win in the end, even if you strike out many times along the way.
It’s critical to learn about corporate culture before you accept a job offer but it can be awkward to raise such questions. Learn what to ask and how to ask it to avoid landing yourself in a bad situation.
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