Yes, you read that right… Dating Apps are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about internship – or job – interviews.
Because let’s be honest… An interview is very much like a first date with someone – but a much faster and straight to the point one, and with very different expected outcomes, of course!
If this is your first internship application, it is also likely your very first professional interview. And just like a first date, it is normally awkward! Even when we know the other person as a friend or an acquaintance, a first date might be odd. So meeting a complete stranger that has decision power over something you are interested on might feel much more daunting…
My goal here is to share a few tips that were passed down to me as I got ready for my first interviews, and that I observed as success factors in hundreds of intern candidates I interviewed over the years since then…
1. Do your research: have a good sense of what the company does and their main values – internet makes it really easy today. One extreme anecdote of a failure is a candidate interviewing for a position at Pepsi who, when asked what was their favorite soda, answered Coke… Buzzing noise fills the air! Understanding what the company does, what are its values (normally cued in their motto or tag lines), goes a long way to help us reflect on the context and have the right mindset for going to the interview.
2. Practice! With Artificial Intelligence nowadays, another piece of research to try is common interview questions for internships in specific areas. Read through them. Try them. Reflect on them. Try to answer them with a buddy, a sibling, the mirror. Feel how the words flow out of your mouth until you get comfortable to talk about those things. It is unlikely the exact same questions would come up, but having practiced talking about different questions and answers helps untie our tongues, help us to think on our feet, and help us take it in stride when we are caught off guard. Also, invariably all interviews will open space for questions. Practice to ask what you are genuinely curious about, specially where it comes to the industry, the company, and most of all, what the internship itself entails.
3. Keep calm… It sounds uncomfortable to meet someone for the first time, even more so in the circumstances of an interview, where there is an inevitable power imbalance between the parts. The tip that helped me the most came in the form of reminding myself all the time that it is just another human being on the other side of that table or of that phone or of that video camera – a more experienced one, one that has a need that I might be able to fulfill – to help calm my nerves. Knowing that the other side might be just as uncomfortable as I am also helps – and after having interviewed more than one thousand people over my career, I can still say there is a component of discomfort every time a new conversation with a complete stranger begins.
4. Be present. It is easy – and tempting – to get distracted by some thought in our own heads. But being present – looking the interviewer in the eye, observing their body language, being really fully present in the moment – helps the surge of energy and connection we need to keep grounded during the pivotal moments we have together. Most interviews last between thirty and sixty minutes, depending on the company. Knowing the situation is time bound also normally helps to control the stress and the anxiety, it is not something that will last for hours on end. So for those moments, being fully grounded, present and focused on our interviewer ensures our ability to better listen and better respond.
5. Be yourself. It should be the only way to be, in the long run. It might not get us that specific position, but who wants any job or internship for which we need to pretend to be someone else to succeed? (unless, of course, your job is being an actor, where pretending to be someone else IS the job!). The temptation to adjust our answers to satisfy an interviewer might be big, and it might help get us the job, but it will not help us succeed in that job, because we cannot consistently pretend to be something we are not day in day out. We are interviewing not to get an internship, but to succeed on that internship. There is a difference, and that can only be achieved by being authentic. Interviewers are experienced. They might be fooled – I was fooled about 5 times from more than one thousand interviews I did. The likelihood of us being the one who get to fool the interviewer is low anyway, and the consequences are big – we might get the job but will fail miserably on it because we were not actually a fit – we just pretended to be…
And a final tip… Approach every interview as if it was the first… Because between you and that specific interviewer, it likely is!
You got this!
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