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Interview nerves are not a weakness. They are a sign that you care. But when they go unchecked, they get in the way — and a candidate who is prepared and anxious will almost always underperform against a candidate who is equally prepared and calm.
The good news: interview anxiety is manageable. Not by pretending it doesn’t exist, but by understanding where it comes from and building practical habits that address it before you walk into the room.
At Gogotechy, we work with candidates preparing for roles at Google, Amazon, Meta, TikTok and the most competitive startups in Europe. Nerves come up in almost every coaching conversation. These are the 12 techniques that actually work.
Interview nerves are your body’s stress response doing exactly what it was designed to do. Your brain registers the interview as high-stakes — because it is — and prepares you accordingly: elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, heightened alertness, dry mouth.
The problem is that these physical responses are designed for physical threats, not for a conversation in a meeting room. Your body is preparing you to run or fight when what you actually need is to think clearly and speak well.
Understanding this helps. The anxiety is not irrational. It is simply misdirected energy — and with the right techniques, you can redirect it.
The single most effective thing you can do for interview nerves is thorough preparation. Most anxiety before interviews is rooted in uncertainty — the fear of being caught off guard, of not knowing the answer, of being exposed.
Deep preparation removes uncertainty. When you know your stories cold, when you’ve researched the company properly, when you’ve practised out loud — there is simply less room for anxiety to take hold.
Nervousness before an interview is often your brain telling you that you haven’t prepared enough. Listen to it early, not the night before.
Running through answers in your mind feels like preparation. It isn’t — not fully.
Speaking out loud engages different cognitive processes. It reveals hesitations, filler words and moments where your answer loses structure. It also builds muscle memory: the more you’ve physically said the words, the more natural they feel when it counts.
Practise with a friend, a coach, or record yourself on your phone. Ten minutes of spoken practice is worth more than an hour of silent rehearsal.
This is one of the most research-backed techniques available, and one of the most underused.
Anxiety and excitement produce almost identical physical responses. The difference is how your brain interprets the signal. When you feel your heart rate rise before an interview, try saying — out loud if possible — “I’m excited” rather than “I’m nervous.”
It sounds too simple. But the reframe works. You’re not lying to yourself. You’re choosing a more useful interpretation of a genuine physical state.
When your stress response kicks in, your breathing becomes shallow and fast. This sends more signals to your brain that something is wrong, which deepens the anxiety loop.
Deliberate slow breathing breaks the loop. A simple technique: inhale for four counts, hold for four, exhale for six. The extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system — your body’s natural calm-down mechanism.
Do this for two to three minutes before you enter the building, or in the car before you go in. It works quickly.
Physical movement is one of the fastest ways to shift your nervous system state. A fifteen-minute walk before an interview reduces cortisol, improves mood and sharpens cognitive function.
You don’t need a gym session. Walking to the location rather than driving, getting off the tube a stop early, or spending ten minutes outside before going in — all of this counts.
At Gogotechy, we actively recommend building movement into interview day logistics. It is not a nice-to-have. It genuinely changes how you show up.
How you spend the hours before an interview matters more than most people realise.
Avoid cramming. Last-minute preparation the morning of an interview tends to increase anxiety rather than reduce it. If you’ve done the preparation work in the days before, trust it.
Eat something. Low blood sugar amplifies stress. Have a proper meal or snack, not just coffee.
If possible, schedule the interview in the morning. Waiting all day for a late-afternoon interview builds tension unnecessarily.
Give yourself a buffer. Arriving early and spending a few minutes outside or in a nearby café to settle — rather than rushing in stressed — sets a completely different tone for the conversation.
If you feel anxiety spiking while you’re waiting to go in, a simple grounding technique can bring you back to the present quickly.
The 5-4-3-2-1 method: identify five things you can see, four you can physically feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste. It interrupts the anxious thought loop by forcing your attention onto concrete sensory reality.
It takes about sixty seconds. It works.
One of the biggest drivers of interview anxiety is the feeling of being judged — that all the power sits with the interviewer and you are simply hoping to be found good enough.
This is a distortion.
A job interview is a two-way process. You are also deciding whether this company, this team and this role are right for you. Going in with genuine curiosity — does this place actually match what I’m looking for? — naturally levels the dynamic and reduces the performance pressure.
Prepare thoughtful questions. Ask them. Be genuinely curious. It changes the energy of the whole conversation.
Silence feels awkward in interviews. It isn’t. Most interviewers appreciate a candidate who takes a moment to think before speaking, rather than rushing into an unfocused answer.
When a difficult question lands, it is perfectly acceptable to say “That’s a good question — let me think about that for a second” before answering. It signals composure, not confusion.
A two-second pause before speaking also helps regulate your breathing and slow your pace — both of which reduce the physical symptoms of nervousness.
This one is simple and often overlooked. A short conversation with someone who genuinely believes in you — a friend, a partner, a mentor — before an interview has a measurable effect on confidence.
It doesn’t need to be a pep talk. Just talking to someone warm and supportive shifts your internal state. You go in feeling seen and backed, rather than isolated with your anxiety.
If you’re coaching with us at Gogotechy, this is part of what the 1:1 sessions provide — someone in your corner who knows your strengths and can remind you of them.
You do not need to eliminate nervousness entirely. A degree of activation before a high-stakes conversation sharpens focus, improves recall and raises energy. The goal is not to arrive completely flat and detached.
What you want is the sweet spot: alert, engaged and present — not overwhelmed, frozen or scattered.
Chasing zero anxiety often makes it worse. Accepting that some nerves are normal — and that you can perform well with them — is itself a calming reframe.
Knowing that the interview is a bounded event — that it ends, and that something good comes after it — reduces the sense of it as an all-or-nothing moment.
Plan something enjoyable for after: lunch somewhere you like, a walk, meeting a friend. Not as a distraction, but as a signal to yourself that your wellbeing is not contingent on the outcome of one conversation.
This mindset — that you have a full life on either side of this interview — is one of the most effective long-term approaches to managing interview anxiety that we see at Gogotechy.
Interview anxiety typically has one of three root causes: underprepared (you know you haven’t done the work), overinvested (you’ve attached too much of your self-worth to this specific outcome), or under-experienced (you haven’t been in enough high-stakes conversations to feel comfortable in them).
The good news is that all three are addressable. The first through preparation, the second through perspective, the third through deliberate practice.
Yes, entirely. Even highly experienced candidates feel nerves before significant interviews. What changes with experience is not the absence of nerves but the ability to manage them — to acknowledge the feeling, use what’s useful, and not let it derail the performance.
For most people, the sharpest anxiety peaks in the minutes immediately before the interview begins. Once the conversation is underway, nerves typically subside as the brain shifts into engagement mode. If you find that anxiety persists well into the interview itself, that is usually a signal that more preparation — especially spoken practice — would help.
Interview nerves are normal. They are not a sign that you’re not ready or not good enough. They are a sign that you care about the outcome — and that’s not a bad thing to bring into a room.
What separates the candidates who land the roles at top tech companies isn’t the absence of nerves. It’s the ability to prepare thoroughly, manage their state, and show up as themselves under pressure.
At Gogotechy, this is exactly what we help you do. Our 1:1 coaching programme is built around getting you genuinely ready — technically, strategically and psychologically — for the roles that matter to you.
If you have an interview coming up and want to work through it with someone who’s been on both sides of the table, drop us a message at info@gogotechy.com and we’ll take it from there.
Pilar Alfonso is the Founder of Gogotechy and former team member at Google and TikTok. She coaches tech professionals on career strategy, interview preparation and offer negotiation.
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