So I just completed my 4th interview of this cycle, and since I likely won't be doing anymore I thought I'd give some thoughts on the process.
Obviously there's some variance depending on the interview style, but I generally felt like the actual answers that were given to specific questions were pretty irrelevant. In my experience, it was just a giant get-to-know-you exercise. If some of my answers were typed out they would look pretty bad, but it really didn't seem to matter.
There's three things that I felt helped me out a great deal:
1) Answer the question that was asked. They'll get annoyed pretty easily if you babble on about something completely irrelevant to the question at hand. If you don't have a great answer, just be concise and move on to the next one.
2) Make it a conversation and not a Q&A. Would you like someone that only talked about themselves for 30 minutes? Sometimes I had really poor answers but followed up with a question that led into a lengthy back-and-forth conversation. In one of my interviews we talked about college football for more than half the allotted time. This is what you want.
3) Be professional, but relaxed. There's a certain professional etiquette you should obviously adhere to, but don't be robotic. Hopefully you've practiced a bit, but the last thing you want to think about during your interview is your posture, or talking speed, or what to do with your hands. If you've made it to this point, do what feels natural to you (within reason, obviously). I crossed my legs, leaned on one of the arm chairs, and made a lot of hand gestures. Any interview guide will tell you these are no-nos, but it felt natural to me and it made a big difference in the way I was able to converse.
I know I'm going against the grain with some of this advice, but in my case I thought it really helped. I've had great results thus far and received generally good feedback about my interview performance. Best of luck.
Obviously there's some variance depending on the interview style, but I generally felt like the actual answers that were given to specific questions were pretty irrelevant. In my experience, it was just a giant get-to-know-you exercise. If some of my answers were typed out they would look pretty bad, but it really didn't seem to matter.
There's three things that I felt helped me out a great deal:
1) Answer the question that was asked. They'll get annoyed pretty easily if you babble on about something completely irrelevant to the question at hand. If you don't have a great answer, just be concise and move on to the next one.
2) Make it a conversation and not a Q&A. Would you like someone that only talked about themselves for 30 minutes? Sometimes I had really poor answers but followed up with a question that led into a lengthy back-and-forth conversation. In one of my interviews we talked about college football for more than half the allotted time. This is what you want.
3) Be professional, but relaxed. There's a certain professional etiquette you should obviously adhere to, but don't be robotic. Hopefully you've practiced a bit, but the last thing you want to think about during your interview is your posture, or talking speed, or what to do with your hands. If you've made it to this point, do what feels natural to you (within reason, obviously). I crossed my legs, leaned on one of the arm chairs, and made a lot of hand gestures. Any interview guide will tell you these are no-nos, but it felt natural to me and it made a big difference in the way I was able to converse.
I know I'm going against the grain with some of this advice, but in my case I thought it really helped. I've had great results thus far and received generally good feedback about my interview performance. Best of luck.
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