What are some ways mentors can show commitment to their mentee during an interview?

Understanding the mentee’s key objectives is incredibly important before a mentor can really be useful in this context. If the mentee wants help with a specific interview question, then the mentor can role-play and help provide feedback along the way in a practice interview. If the mentee wants more general assistance with interviewing prep, the mentor can provide valuable experience in a number of ways, including personal experience, introductions to others in the same space, industry networking information, and many other areas for focus. The important thing to remember is that the mentor should be responding to what the mentee is asking, and not pontificating about things that the mentee is not interested in learning or knowing.

Having a deep understanding of the mentee is key to providing the right overall advice to them. Get to know the mentee on a personal level: their aspirations, motivations, strengths, and fears, and leverage your greater experience as a mentor to help frame the challenges and opportunities that a potential interview might provide. It's also vitally important to be unafraid to let a mentee know if a potential interview might not be a good fit to them. By drawing upon greater levels of experience as a mentor, you can provide the mentee with an understanding of trade-offs that they might not have considered when first applying for the interview.

Support your mentee by providing constructive feedback and challenging their responses. By helping them anticipate tough questions, you can boost their confidence for the interview. However, it's crucial to strike a balance and avoid demoralizing them to ensure they stay motivated and show up for the interview.

Practice makes perfect! Mentees are smart and capable in their own right, but may lack the muscle of organizing their strengths into a cohesive narrative during an interview. Through guided practice, a mentor can help a mentee discover and share their own voice. Be careful as a mentor not to project your own styles or constrain mentees to a particular path. Having the leeway for self discovery ultimately makes for a more powerful and authentic interview experience.

In my opinion, mentors can best serve their mentees by providing feedback and encouragement in the moment. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use the SBI (situation, behavior, impact) model, as it allows the real focus to be on the impact the mentee’s response had, rather than the skill or intention of the mentee. There are no right or wrong answers in interviews, and helping mentees understanding how their responses are landing is a huge step in the right direction. Framed using SBI, the feedback neutralizes the emotion of receiving 'negative' feedback as doing something bad; rather, focusing on the impact of the mentee’s response allows for a graceful learning opportunity and also provides a backstop to adjust against.

There is a saying that the value of a mirror is in its ability to allow one to see oneself. Effective mentorship provides mentees with a similar opportunity to see their own strengths and weaknesses. This ability to "see oneself" is at the core of the value that mentors can provide to mentees during the feedback process, and helps mentees grow authentically through self reflection. As a mentor, it helps to be open minded and non-judgemental to provide mentees with a "clear mirror" of feedback that is unbiased by the mentor's own preferences.

All of this assumes the mentee has asked for the mentor’s help in preparing for the interview. Sometimes, the offer of help and support is all that the mentee needs. Offering and sharing unsolicited advice can backfire on the mentor and create some discomfort with the mentee. If the mentee has asked for or accepted the support and help, by all means follow their lead and provide what they are asking for. To go overboard could overwhelm your mentee and you really want them to know that you support them no matter what.

It’s often useful to hold a retrospective as an after-action. In addition to discussing what went well and what was challenging in the interview, it’s also important to discuss what was useful and, just as importantly, what was not in the mentoring conversations leading up to it. Investigating how you and your mentee can improve your process and the mentoring relationship is an integral part of any mentoring relationship and where much of the growth - on both sides - can occur.