Selling Myself in Job Interviews

In the past six months, I’ve been on the hunt for internship opportunities for this summer. I have had numerous interviews with several companies and some of those interviews went very well while others went not so well. When looking at these interviews my approach at the beginning of this process was more so to simply be myself and hope they like me and if it’s meant to be it’s meant to be but if it’s not it’s not. With this approach, I was not very successful. In the interviews, I was mostly just telling the interviewer about myself but where I was lacking was I wasn’t asking good questions about them. I needed to change my approach to looking at interviews as a test and sharing and asking questions that make me look like a better candidate for their job. I did this by asking good questions about their company to show my interest in working for them, asking questions about what they share with me to show I’m listening and taking in what they are saying, and when they asked questions about me share things about myself that align with what they are looking for in an employee. Another tactic I found very successful in interviews is truly trying to connect on a personal level with the interviewer and dig into their interests, their experiences, and why and how they got where they are. This tactic caused interviews to be more relaxing on both ends and helped both parties leave the interview with a good feeling. The final tactic that I figured out was looking to see if the companies were a good fit for me and my goals and asking questions according to that. I would do this by asking questions about what the company has done for the interviewers and share my goals to show confidence in that I have a plan for my future.