How to stop saying um in interviews

Um, uh, like, and you know buy you a second while you find the next idea. In a conversation the other person talks over them. In a one-way recording they are the only sound in the room, and a transcript makes them obvious. They are a habit, not a character flaw. Habits move when you can see them.

The practical swap is silence. When you feel an um coming, close your mouth and look at your three-word outline. A short pause reads as thought. A chain of fillers reads as uncertainty, even when you know the story.

Do not try to eliminate every like in ordinary speech in one evening. Focus on the starts of sentences, which is where um and so pile up, and on the moment before the result.

Record one answer and mark every um, uh, like, and you know. OneShot highlights those in the transcript and gives you a count, so you can see whether they cluster at the beginning (you started before you were ready) or in the middle (the story was not clear). Then record the same question once more. One take each time. Comparing two single takes is more honest than retaking until you get a clean one.

Fillers spike when you are building the plot in real time. If you already know the situation, the action, and the result, you are choosing words, not discovering events. That is the difference between notes and a script. You still speak in your own sentences. You are just not lost.

Like is sometimes a filler and sometimes a normal verb or comparison. A counter will not always tell those apart. Use the highlight as a place to look, then decide if that like was doing work. Um and uh almost never are.