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3 Alternatives to Saying, “I Don’t Know” In Interviews
You’ll inevitably hear some question that you don’t know the answer to during an interview. How you handle that moment can either leave the interviewer nodding in approval or unsure if you’re ready.
Before I jump into how to handle this, I want to point out why this is a certainty: The tech field is just too big to have all the answers in our heads. Most interviews favor obscure, ridiculous, and trick questions that are all geared to mess you up. There is a specific interviewing technique that I call “The probing question,” which specifically tries to get someone to the boundary of their knowledge.
In other words, you’ll get asked a question, and you will have no idea what the answer is.
So here’s what you can do about it:
When you hear that question and your brain immediately turns to jelly because it draws a total blank, you want to shift gears quickly.
Instead of focusing on the answer and how you don’t have it, focus instead on the process you’d follow to arrive at the solution.
In other words, tell them what you can do to get the answer.
A pretty easy way to launch into that is to say, “Oh, that’s interesting, I haven’t come across that before, but here’s what I’d do…”
By doing this, you’re keeping a conversation going and demonstrating your ability to solve problems, keep composure, and how you work.
Somewhat related to the first technique, you can instead tell a story about a time you solved a puzzle you didn’t have the answer to either.
Now, this one takes a little bit of extra work because you’ll have to relate your story back to the question. Thankfully this isn’t too hard to do. If you are getting asked about some obscure fact, tell a story where you had to learn an obscure fact. If it was a tricky coding problem, tell a story about solving a problem that felt obscure.
By telling a story, you’re using your past to show you’ve been through similar tricky situations in a deeply relatable way. Storytelling is a potent technique that builds relationships and rounds out rough spots in an interview.
This last technique is probably the toughest to pull off but can pay off pretty big. The idea is to reverse the question back on the interviewer. It might go something like this:
“Oh, that’s interesting. Have you bumped into something like that here?”
If you can get the interviewer to share their story, they will build a relationship with you. You can ask more questions and talk like two peers.
There is a risk with this technique since many questions people ask are genuinely unrelated to anything, so you can’t reverse it for them to tell a story. What this will do in this case is highlight that they just asked you an unrelated question. At this point, your best bet is likely to leverage technique #2 and tell a story about something you can relate to.
I’ll give an example from my past to show how this might play out.
Them: How would you solve this… (Some problem related to relational databases) Me: Wow, do you all bump into this problem a lot? Them: Yeah, almost every project. It’s a pain to deal with, and we need to know our developers can do it. Me: Well, I’d use a NoSQL solution for this case, I think. Them: Uh, we’ve never used NoSQL before. How would that work? Me: No problem, let me walk you through how I’d do this.
I reversed the question, then did moved back to technique #1 and focused on what I could do. I had no idea how to answer the question they asked, so I created a scenario that I could attempt.
There you have it, three ways to handle the moment when you don’t know the answer in an interview.
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