Invite business leaders from your local community to hold supportive, insightful and beneficial mock interviews for your students.

What is a Mock Interview?

Educators are able to invite business leaders into schools to hold practice interviews for their students, which are an emulation of a job interview used for training purposes. The exercise usually resembles a real interview as closely as possible, for the purpose of providing a learning experience for students.

Depending on the class size, students can meet with business leaders one-to-one or in small groups within the same classroom or auditorium. The mock interviews can range in the length of time depending on the group size. The key is that the students have a chance to prepare ahead of time and understand this is a great learning opportunity to practice their skills and build their confidence.

What is the impact of a Mock Interview?

Practice interviews are a fantastic chance for students to experience what a real interview would be like, in terms of format and questions, and provides them with an opportunity to practice their answers.

A mock interview helps students to learn how to answer difficult questions, develop interview strategies, improve their communication skills and reduce stress before an actual job interview.

Pupil Reflections:

“In Year 10 (aged 14 and 15), before we started our first work placements, our whole year group was asked to do mock interviews and we went to…an external place, so we had interviews with adults…and we were given time, in coaching time to prepare for the mock interviews. We [were] asked questions that you’d be asked in an actual interview. It was good, because it gave you an insight in what an actual interview would be like.”

“I was able to experience certain fears and also areas for improvement … I’ve got an interview for a college coming up so the mock interview was a really good way of me knowing what to do, what not to do, how to approach it and how to overcome fears and certain emotions when I’m going into the interview.”

Resources to help you prepare your Students for Interviews


Benchmark 1: A stable careers programme


Benchmark 3: Addressing the needs of each pupil

With our advanced filtering system, we put control of the student-employer encounter firmly in the hands of the educator, ensuring they can select volunteers who are best suited to inspire their students. Educators can filter by industry, gender, race, company revenue and growth. This is particularly important in a context such as mock interviews.

Benchmark 5: Encounters with employers and employees


Benchmark 8: Personal guidance

Using our clever digital platform, Founders4Schools is able to take into consideration the individual needs of educators and students. This means we can guide them towards encounter types and potential speakers to ensure they have the greatest impact. So, after your mock interviews are complete we will be able to recommend the next most relevant encounter type for your young people.

Curricular Mapping and useful research

In 2019 we commissioned research to be completed looking at how we can make Careers Education age appropriate.

From our research we found that this encounter type is most appropriate for the development of young people from 14 and up.

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