I was one of the very last people hired on my team about two years ago who just had to do 1:1 interviews as part of my interview process, so no mock business reviews or presentations were required of me. Instead, after I started and had to go through product certifications, the final round of my onboarding was a mock business review meeting with fellow colleagues on my team, who would critique my presentation, discovery, and mock interaction with them as though this was a real customer meeting.

I’m pretty grateful for the fact that I didn’t have to do that because now, as someone who is interviewing potential candidates, I am truly pained watching prospective employees do mock business presentations. Thinking about the amount of prep work, Powerpoint finagling, and practice in public speaking makes me want to crawl into a ball and hide under my sheets. It’s not like I have an issue with presenting or speaking in meetings; it’s rather that the idea of a “simulated” or “mock” meeting drives me crazy. There are so many hypotheticals that go into the evaluation that you could easily get rated poorly when you actually did a great job, and vice versa.

Also, there’s a lot of randomness on our side, too, as the people who are evaluating. We have to make up “facts” on the spot to actually make this a meeting where conversations happen. This is when I have to catch myself from laughing or smiling too much because we’re literally lying as we go.