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This is Part II in my interview series. If you haven’t read part I, you should make sure to give it a read.

Job Interviews: What To Wear

How do you prepare for an interview? This is a question recently posed to me by a friend. So I thought about the many interviews I have had this year and the mistakes I made and the things I did right.

The first thing to remember about any interview is that you are there to sell yourself. An interview is the most important sales call you can make. You are the product. You are there to convince them that they need to buy you over all the other people coming into that room today. To do so you need to be prepared. You should have spent a significant amount of time preparing for interviews in general and then some time preparing for this interview in particular. In this article I will go over some of the things you should do to prepare for an interview with a specific company.

1. Know the company
   1. Before stepping into that office you need to know everything you can possibly find out about the company you are interviewing with. While you should already have the basics about the company, you need to dig much deeper. Read everything you can find on their website. Skim the annual report. Read all the news releases. After this you should spend some time on google digging for any relevant news about the company. Here are some questions to have in mind.
      1. Have they recently done any large transactions? (mergers, acquisitions, sales, etc…)
      2. What is the state of the company’s industry? (growing, declining, changing)
      3. Who is the company’s major competition? (competitors)
      4. Financial information? Get on google finance or yahoo finance and look at the stock price, and other relevant information. This will also often include analysis of the company by researchers.
      5. Anything else you can find.
2. Know the Position.
   1. Most major corporations have a section of the website that is devoted to explaining most entry level positions with great detail. It often includes daily journals written by people within the positions, video interviews, and detailed descriptions of the position.
   2. You should also do some independent research because these sites often leave out any negatives. Many people you will interview you with want to know you understand the position (both positives and negatives) and you have a realistic expectation of the position. Many college graduates have very unrealistic views of certain jobs. If this comes across in the interview it shows a lack of research (effort) and someone who will likely be unhappy if they received the position.
3. Know Your Audience
   1. If you have the opportunity you should find out as much as possible about the people you will be interviewing with. When you know your audience you can change your message and answers to reflect that. For example, if your interviewer was a college athlete then you know to talk about your involvement and hard work with teams (and hopefully sports) as this is likely something he puts great importance on.
   2. It will also give you topics of conversation if the interview turns to less formal topics. For example, if you the above interviewers alma mater then you can easily make conversation about how their sports team is doing this year.
   3. This same logic above can be applied to any piece of knowledge you can garner about the interviewer. This might be a military background, certain industry experiences, the type of college they attended (ivy versus public), where they’re from (region, city, etc…) or even a hobby. These things will give you clues to what they think is important in a candidate. Try to think about these things before you enter and how you can tailor your answer to this person.
4. Know Yourself
   1. In the next part of this series I will address some of the specific questions you should be prepared for. In this article I will just say that you should be prepared for all of the basic interview questions that you hear in virtually every interview. This requires knowing yourself well (strengths, weaknesses, etc…) and then tailoring these responses about yourself to the type of job and company you are going for.