you're practicing leetcode but not rehearsing answers about your own resume

i bombed an interview last month because i couldn't explain a gap on my resume smoothly. spent 40 hours grinding leetcode that week, zero minutes practicing the most obvious question they were going to ask.

it hit me after that interview how backwards my prep was. i can whiteboard a binary tree traversal under pressure, but when the hiring manager asked "so what were you doing between these two roles?" i fumbled through some half-coherent explanation about freelancing and personal projects. sounded defensive, vague, unprepared.

the weirdest part is that resume questions are the *most* predictable part of any interview. they're right there in front of both of you. gaps, job hops, career switches, that one bullet point that looks inflated — you know exactly what they're going to probe. and yet most of us (me included) walk in having never said the answers out loud.

i started writing out answers to every single bullet point on my resume after that. "why did you leave here," "what does this metric actually mean," "walk me through this project." then i found a tool called nxtinterview that actually generates questions based on your resume and lets you record practice answers. not affiliated with them, just found it helpful because it forced me to hear how i actually sound when i'm explaining my own work history.

last two interviews went way smoother. turned out when you rehearse the most predictable questions, you stop sounding like you're making excuses.

anyway, if you're prepping for interviews, don't skip the resume stuff. it feels obvious until you're in the room and your brain goes blank.