i kept bombing interviews until i realized i was prepping for the wrong questions

spent weeks grinding leetcode and behavioral frameworks, then got destroyed by "walk me through your internship at X" in three straight final rounds.

the weirdest part of interview prep is that we obsess over the hardest stuff—system design, edge cases, STAR method—and completely skip the easiest part to prepare for: our own resume.

like, i had this project on my resume where i "reduced API response time by 40%." sounds great. but when the interviewer asked me *how* i did it, i froze. couldn't remember if it was caching, database indexing, or both. stumbled through it and could see their face change.

happened again with a team conflict question tied to another line on my resume. i wrote the bullet point six months ago and never thought about the actual story behind it.

the thing is, every interviewer reads your resume before the call. they *will* ask about specific lines. it's the most predictable part of the interview and i was walking in cold every time.

started using this tool called nxtinterview that generates questions directly from your resume—like it pulls each bullet point and asks you to explain it out loud. practiced for maybe 30 minutes before my next interview and it was night and day. actually had answers ready instead of scrambling.

still working on the hard stuff obviously, but it's wild how much easier it got once i could talk about my own experience without sounding like i was reading my resume for the first time.

if you're prepping for interviews, try running through your resume line by line out loud before you do anything else. there are tools like nxtinterview (nxtinterview.com) that automate it, but even just recording yourself works. just don't skip this part like i did.