Nerves are the one thing every candidate I have ever coached brings up, and the one thing almost no panel I have ever sat on has scored. That gap is the whole subject of this piece.
I want to describe an interview from both chairs, because I have sat in both over thirty years, and because the view from each one is so different that it is hard to believe they are looking at the same room.
My early interviews in the UK were in my second language. I remember one in particular: a panel of three, a glass-walled room, and a reception area where I sat for twenty minutes rehearsing an opening line I had written the night before. By the time I was called in, my mouth was dry, my hands were cold and I had read the same paragraph of the job description six times without taking in a word.
The first question came and the line I had rehearsed evaporated. I heard my own voice from somewhere slightly behind me, faster than I wanted and with an accent I was suddenly conscious of. I answered a question they had not quite asked. I noticed one panel member look down to write something and decided, instantly, that it was a note about how badly this was going.
What I only understood years later, from the other chair, was this: I spent the rest of that interview performing for the version of the panel that I had invented in the waiting room. Everything I did was aimed at hiding the nerves rather than answering the questions.
Thirty years on, I have sat where those three people sat, at every level up to board panels. So let me tell you what that panel member was actually writing down.
Almost certainly, it was a fragment of what I had just said. Panels take evidence notes. The pen going to paper is usually a good sign, because it means something you said was worth capturing against a criterion. Silence and no writing is the thing to worry about, and even that often just means the panel member is thinking about the follow-up question they have to ask next.
What else is going on in the panel's head? Mostly things that have nothing to do with you. You may be the fourth candidate of the day. The chair is watching the clock because there are six questions to get through in forty-five minutes. Someone is trying to remember whether the previous candidate gave a stronger example for the same question. Nobody is sitting there cataloguing your nerves.
We can see them, of course. Shaky first answer, a slightly too-fast delivery, a glass of water picked up and put down. And then we discount them, almost completely, within the first three or four minutes, because every candidate has them and they tell us nothing about whether you can do the job.
The scoring sheet has no row for composure. It has rows for evidence.
When nerves actually do cost you
I don't want to pretend nerves never matter. They do, but not in the way candidates fear. From the panel's chair, nerves cost marks in four specific ways, and none of them is "they could tell I was nervous".
Answers with no ending. A nervous candidate keeps talking because silence feels dangerous. The answer wanders past the point where it scored, into detail nobody asked for, and then trails off. The panel is now trying to work out which part of a four-minute answer was the evidence. Rambling is the single most common way I have seen good candidates score lower than they deserved.
Answering the question you prepared rather than the one you were asked. This is what I did in that glass-walled room. Under pressure, the brain reaches for the nearest rehearsed material. The panel asked about a time you influenced a decision; you gave your prepared answer about delivering a project. It was a good answer. It scored nothing, because it was evidence for a different criterion.
Apologising for the nerves. "Sorry, I'm a bit nervous" once is fine and human. Repeated apologies, or a running commentary on how badly you think it is going, do something unhelpful: they invite the panel to notice the thing they had already decided to ignore.
Speed. Nervous delivery gets fast. Fast delivery is hard to take notes on. If the panel cannot write it down, it is very hard for them to score it later when they are moderating, and moderation is where the decision gets made.
Every one of these is about whether the panel can find the evidence. None is about how you seemed.
What the nerves are really telling you
What I tell every client is this: nerves on the day are a signal about preparation, not about you. They are loud in exact proportion to how much of the interview you expect to have to improvise.
If you walk in knowing that four of the six questions are near-certainties, because you have read the criteria properly and you have a specific, structured example ready for each, then most of the interview is delivery rather than invention. Nerves have far less to work with. What remains is the ordinary adrenaline that a panel expects and, frankly, quite likes to see, because it means the role matters to you.
If you walk in hoping to think of examples in the moment, the nerves are entirely rational. You are about to improvise in front of strangers with your career on the line. Nobody's breathing exercise fixes that.
Four things to do differently
Give the panel the shape before the content. Start an answer with a signpost: "There are two parts to this. The situation, and then what I changed." It sounds like a small thing. From the panel's chair it is enormous, because the note-taker now knows what is coming and where it ends. It also gives you, the candidate, a structure to hold on to when your working memory is being eaten by adrenaline.
Write the first sentence of every answer, not the whole answer. Fully scripted answers collapse under pressure, as mine did, because one forgotten phrase derails the lot. A single opening sentence per likely question is easy to hold, gets you moving, and the rest follows from the example you know well because you lived it.
Treat the pause as yours. "Let me think about that for a second" costs you nothing. I have never seen a panel mark a candidate down for a considered pause, and I have seen many mark candidates down for the rushed, half-formed answer that comes from feeling they had to fill the gap. If you have lost the thread of a question, ask for it again. The panel repeats it, marks nothing, and you get a clean start.
End your answers on purpose. Have a closing line ready: "And the result was X, which is why I would use the same approach here." Then stop. The silence that follows belongs to the panel, not to you. They will fill it with the next question, and you will have given them a clean piece of evidence with a beginning, a middle and an end.
The panel sees far less of your nerves than you feel, and scores none of them directly. What they score is whether they can find clear evidence in what you say. Prepare so that most of the interview is delivery rather than invention, give every answer a shape and an ending, and the nerves stop being the thing the interview is about.
I still get nervous before the interviews and panels that matter to me. The difference now is that I know exactly what the other side of the table can and cannot see, and I prepare for what they are actually looking for. That's a learnable thing, and it's most of what I teach.