Persuasively Prepare for Any Interview
How to strategically research companies and craft your personal narrative in under 2 hours.
An All Too Familiar Story…
2020 was marked by slapdash preparations of interviews and getting politely shut down at multiple stages of the application process. Like many graduating seniors, I found myself in a plodding cycle of application, interview, and rejection against the backdrop of a pandemic that strained family financial circumstances, froze hires in every sector and threatened a national recession. The cynicism and insecurity I felt with each dead-end attempt left me drained, doubting if I was good enough for any job. And so it went. The months rolled on from August to September to October to November. Still no job offers.
December was the turning point for me and in retrospect, this article was what I needed to understand before finding interview success. The framework I will be sharing in the next few parts of this series is the preparation process I discovered that catalyze my most recent turn in fortune. I received two internship offers in the first week of December and then my first job offer shortly afterwards. The repetition of trial and error certainly helped tremendously, but nothing helped more than finally understanding exactly how to allocate my time in preparing for my interviews. By the end of the year, I was finding success with as little as two hours of preparation before my interview, and you can too.
The Framework
“Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since [people] are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.”
Aristotle
Earlier this year, I didn’t have a strategy that could consistently help me feel as prepared as I could be going into an interview. Trite feedback such as “be confident,” “be yourself” and “you got this” did nothing for me. So, drawn from my own personal trial and error aided by feedback from my career mentors, I iterated on a framework to follow before every interview. Its goal was to guide my thinking and enhance my personal narrative around the elements that mattered to the audience, the interviewer. Inspired by Aristotle’s Modes of Persuasion, my framework was built around Ethos, Pathos, Logos also known as Character, Emotions and Logic.
Specifically, I noticed there were core underlying questions that drove each interview:
- Ethos: Can this candidate be taken seriously for our role?
- Pathos: Is this candidate a cultural fit?
- Logos: Does this candidate have the ability to do the work?
The specific criteria you are judged on vary with each role, but ultimately the plot is the same: An employee is assigned an hour on a day to meet with a random college prospect. The interviewer is given minimal information on you, and they’re asked to evaluate your fit and candidacy for the role without even knowing why or how you made it this far. Some candidates fall by the wayside by not communicating the strength that brought them this far or was unconvincing in their overall performance. This is where I was stuck and instead of playing it by ear, the EPL Framework made me a more compelling candidate by sharpening my personal story and focusing my efforts on what mattered.
Keep Going
Needless to say, this entire situation is anxiety-inducing in the context of what’s at stake. Rather than guessing what your interviewer wants to hear by trying on different personas in each interview, stick with your unique value as a complete candidate. Learn to draw confidence from your preparation, and not your presentation. In the following 3 articles, I will walk you through each component of this framework and guide you through understanding the method you will use to internalize each element of a successful interview.
Don’t give up. As a first-gen, low-income student, it’s my honor to give back after all the help I’ve received; it’s a marathon and not a sprint. Ultimately, finding how to delicately balance confidence, authenticity and your own personal narrative is something that is, in itself, worth pursuing. It is in fact the foundation on which you will build your professional identity, and it’s what you’ll be expected to bring with you on Day One.
Continue to…
- Part 1. 40 Minutes to Develop Character (Ethos) Before Interviews
- Part 2. 40 Minutes to Develop Emotions (Pathos) Before Interviews
- Part 3: 40 Minutes to Develop Logic (Logos) Before Interviews
Special thanks to my friends, mentors and editors: Rui Lin Lin, Benjamin Palmer, Ivy Li, Darrell Huang, Kaitlin Zhang, Belicia Tan, Joyce Zhang, Anthony Gregorio, Dan O’Neil