You might look at what this site does and think to yourself — I don’t want to speak when going through questions, I can just type it out.

I’ve sat through hundreds of interviews and one thing I’ve noticed is how often people who are otherwise technically very competent tend to struggle to verbalize their thoughts well. It’s understandable, people are very nervous in interviews but being unable to convey your thoughts clearly over voice can be a real dealbreaker. All the knowledge in the world won’t help you if you struggle to string coherent sentences together.

The thing is, often people never practice speaking for interviews — they might cram specific technical answers but never how to actually convey that verbally.

Being put in a position where you are asked an unknown question and speak through a full response in a clear and confident way is a skill that you might not have now, but you can absolutely develop. As a personal anecdote: I grew up as an extremely shy and awkward kid, when I first got into consulting talking with clients was a pretty major struggle. Over the years of doing hundreds, maybe thousands of client calls that skill went from being a weakness to a strength. When I gave the speech at my wedding I had dozens of family members come up to me in shock because the kid they knew would never be able to speak so well.

And to be clear, I still get nervous before calls sometimes and I often will talk myself into walls, but after years of practice I’m able to adapt to difficult situations on calls quickly and respond well. As embarrassing as it might sound, when I was younger I would dry run calls when I was sitting at home alone or driving just to go through the motions of how I would respond.

When you are in a client call, a meeting with stakeholders or an interview you are going to be asked questions, you need to be able to process the question, think of the correct response but also formulate how you want to respond. Truthfully, in any of these situations I mentioned above even if you don’t have the correct information to respond right now, being able to amicably respond without freezing up makes the impression of your ability much, much better.

The voice interview on this site will grade you for how you speak, in addition to the technical quality of your responses and will take mark offs if you stumble through a response. The metrics it will grade you on include how much filler was said, if you spoke yourself into a wall and stopped, or if you tried to pad the response with irrelevant content.

None of these are bad on their own, everyone has quirks to how they speak and you don’t need to eliminate ums, or ahs in order to be seen as a competent communicator but practicing being able to clearly deliver messaging on the fly is a very valuable skill.