Career toolkit: Interviewing

Video transcript:

Hello. Welcome to MIT Career Advising and Professional Development Career Toolkit video series. In this presentation, I’ll be discussing interviewing for a job or internship.

Before we jump into interviewing, I wanted to give you a brief overview of career services and the types of appointments that we offer. So these are a variety of appointments, including resume review, cover letter review, navigating career decisions, support around graduate school applications, seeking advice on internship and job searching, as well as interviewing, networking, and offer negotiation. You can also explore our website for additional resources on all of these topics too.

In order to schedule an appointment, you will log on to Handshake. And from there, you will be able to click career center on this left-hand tab. You’ll then be able to click the Appointments button. And from there, click Schedule a New Appointment. And then, you’ll be able to choose the appointment type that best suits what you’re looking for. Our appointments are typically 30 to 50 minutes in length, depending on the type of appointment. And if you either have an urgent need or are not seeing a time on Handshake that works for you, you can also email us at capd@mit.edu.

So let’s get started for today. Our outline will have three main parts. First, we’ll talk through some common types of interview questions, including tell me about yourself and behavioral questions. We’ll then talk about the STAR method, which is a way of structuring responses to behavioral interview questions. And from there, we’ll talk through some interview preparation tips and how you might use those.

To start off, we’ll talk about, tell me about yourself. This is almost universally the first question of any interview. And the challenge here is that it’s a very broad question, and you also haven’t had a chance to discuss anything else yet with this coming first in the interview.

So to start off, let’s take a step back and consider the purpose of this question. And really, this is a way for you to briefly introduce yourself and your skill set with your target audience in mind, so thinking about what is relevant for this audience to know. And one tip is to remember to keep this brief.

You will be able to go into more detail on your experiences during the interview. And while it can be tempting to include detail here, remember this is an introductory and more overview type of question. And you will have a chance throughout the interview to go into more detail on your experiences. And in approaching answering this question, one way that you can think about structuring your response is to think about it in three main parts. So firstly, to introduce yourself what year you are and what you’re studying at MIT. Then to introduce relevant skills and projects. And really the key point here is that they’re relevant skills and projects. So this should not be your entire resume that you’re listing. Consider which experiences best highlight the skills that make you a good fit for this role specifically. And then another challenge of this question can be figuring out how to end it. And so one way to do that is to conclude by framing your interest or enthusiasm in the role or the company or the field.

Next, we’re going to get into behavioral questions. These are a very common type of interview question for any industry. And a couple ways that you can know that a question is a behavioral question is if it begins with “describe a time or tell me about a time.” And these are situation-based questions assessing the past performance of skills that are relevant to the position you are applying for. And some skills that might be assessed in this way are leadership, teamwork, adaptability, responding to challenges, decision making, creativity, and responding to criticism.

And so examples of how these might be assessed in a behavioral type of question would be something like, tell me about a time you took on a challenge. Describe a time you faced a challenging communication and how you approached this? Tell me about a time you needed to adapt a plan? Describe a time you took on a leadership role?

And so, as I mentioned a couple slides ago, one way of structuring a response to a behavioral interview question is to use something called the STAR method. And this has four main parts which we’ll go over. First situation, task, action, and result. And the percentages here are to give you an idea of about how much of your response you might aim to spend on each of these parts. These are, of course, just a guideline not meant to be any sort of rigid structure. But what I do want you to note here is that the action is going to be the longest part of your response. And that’s really where you’re getting into the core of your response and where you’re directly answering the question.

So we’re going to talk through each of the parts of the STAR method, starting with situation. So the goal for this part is for your interviewer to understand the context of your example. So when did this happen? Where did this happen? Who else was involved? And one thing to remember here is that not every detail is necessary for your audience to understand your example. And so I think one thing that is very common is to be tempted to include a lot of detail here. But remember, this is really setting up that action part of your response, which is the key part, as we said. And so your audience just needs enough information to be able to understand the context of what you did and therefore be able to appreciate it. So you don’t need to include every detail here. And if you’re feeling unsure about whether or not to include a particular detail, consider your audience’s understanding if you left that detail out.

Next is the task. And so the goal here is to concisely state the task you are working on in this example. And going along with that too, it can also be very helpful to state what your role was in this situation. Although, this is a brief part of your response, it is very helpful to state directly and really does help contextualize and give more weight to the action part of your response.

As I mentioned, the action part of your response is the main part. And so this is where you’re really directly answering the question, as I said. So you’re addressing what actions did you take to complete this task or goal? What skills did you use? And then remembering too what was asked in the question. So how can you highlight skills that are addressed in the question specifically? And one thing to be aware of here is to ensure that you are directly speaking on your own contribution or skills and to be aware of the language that you’re using too, particularly using “I” versus “we.” And one thing that can be challenging here is that you might be talking about a situation where you were working as a team, and you naturally would want to use “we” and “our” instead of “I.”

If this is the case, then remember to think about what you yourself contributed to that team effort. Because if you’re speaking all about what the team did collectively and you’re using “we” a lot, it’s really difficult for your audience to assess what you yourself did, are you demonstrating the skills that they’re looking for because they don’t necessarily know what your own individual contribution was to this effort.

So even if you were working as a part of a team, there were elements of that that you contributed individually, and so give yourself credit for those and use “I” and make that clear where you use these skills that you’re trying to highlight.

The last piece of the STAR method is the result. This is again, a brief part of your response but important. And so the goal here is to briefly state the results of your actions. And ideally, there were some positive outcome or result of your actions. If you can, it can be really helpful here to discuss quantifiable results. And this can be something to think about when you’re choosing examples that you might speak on, particularly, if you’re maybe torn between two different examples or situations that could work to answer a question, you might go with the one that has more quantifiable or tangible results to speak on.

So to go over an example of what this might look like in response to an interview question, this is an example from our website answering the question, tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership. And so for this situation, what I want you to notice here is that this really is quite brief. There are a lot of other details that could be included here but that really aren’t necessary to contextualize this example.

For the task, you might notice that we know clearly what this person’s task was, what their role was, and also why they have that role or how they got it, that their math teacher asked them to. For the action part, I would just draw your attention to one, that it is truly the longest part of the response. And two, that this question is specifically asking about leadership. And this response really gets at a lot of different facets of this leadership example. This person stayed after school to run review sessions. They created a study guide. They demonstrated problem solving methods. They explained strategies. And they developed new problems. So there are a lot of different skills within that that really describe what this leadership role was.

And then for the result, in this example, there is a quantifiable result. However, even the second half of the response too if, for example, the test results weren’t available yet, even the second part of the response does demonstrate a result and a positive outcome of this task.

Next, we’re going to shift gears a little bit and talk about preparing for a behavioral interview. And for this, two parts to focus on, one is research and then two is practice. So what I mean by research is particularly how you might be able to use the job posting and the company website to prepare and get an idea of what types of behavioral questions or other questions you might expect.

And so this is just an example of a job posting that I found. And so this is the job posting. And one thing that you can do is think about, OK, using this job posting, there are a number of skills that this employer is looking for. And there are also some specific tasks that they’re looking for too.

So what you might do with a job posting like this and in combination too with the company website, which might be a bit more general but can still help, is to actually write your own behavioral questions that are evaluating some of the skills that are highlighted in the job posting and so that this employer is looking for.

You can also use the job posting and cross-reference it with your resume and brainstorm the relevant skills that you use during each experience that you’ve listed on your resume. Another thing you can do is to prepare a to-do list of what you want the interviewer to know about you and what you really want to get to during the interview. And this can help you kind of have a checklist in your head as well during the interview.

And all of these approaches can help you be flexible during an interview, because, of course, you won’t know the questions in advance. And one great thing actually about behavioral interview questions is that you can certainly use an experience to answer a number of different behavioral types of questions.

And to illustrate what I mean by that, we’ll continue with our tutoring or teaching example. So if you were a tutor, you might have demonstrated leadership, creativity, adaptability, overcoming a challenge, collaboration, communication. Any one of those skills could be a behavioral interview question that you could use an example of tutoring to answer.

And just to share a couple other resources for you, our website, which I’ve included below, has a number of resources on interviewing. One of them is this STAR method worksheet, which is where you can brainstorm how you’ve used each of these skills and outline a star response to address each of these skills.

And then, the next step in preparation is to practice. And, I think, for a lot of folks, a first step might be brainstorming and actually writing answers down or writing outlines or notes or things like that. But there truly is a benefit of practicing saying your answers aloud. That is just always something that feels a little bit different and takes a little bit of getting used to.

And one thing you can do as well too is try and practice with a lot of different people. You can schedule appointments through Handshake like I talked about earlier and schedule mock interview appointments with different career advisors to get a sense of how it feels trying to practice interviewing with different people. You can practice with different friends, family, practice with yourself.

But getting used to saying your answers aloud in different situations and with different people can be very helpful. And then during the interview, a couple of tips. One is I think there can be a lot of pressure during an interview to feel like you need to respond to a question immediately but that’s not the case.

You can always take a moment to breathe and think about your answer and just give yourself that time to pause before you jump right into your answer. Another thing to remember is that you are the expert in this situation. So the interview is about you and about what skills you have, what experiences you have, and no one knows more about that than you. So this is a chance for you to demonstrate that to your interviewer.

And this is also an opportunity for you to learn about and evaluate the company too. As much as an interview is for them to assess your fit and the skills that you bring to the role, this is also a chance for you to evaluate them and how you feel about them as a company if you feel like they would be a good fit for you.

Don’t make assumptions about what questions will be asked in the future. So if you have an opportunity to discuss an experience that you want to discuss, then use that chance. Don’t assume that it will definitely come up in the future.

And then lastly, just be aware of time management. So whenever you have an interview invitation, you will typically know how long you will have for that interview, whether it’s 30 minutes or 45 or 60 or something else. And so just to be aware of that for yourself too and demonstrate to your interviewer that self-awareness of how long the interview should be. So to mention to them if you get to a point where the interview might be running over the time allotted to address that with the interviewer and ask about the time.

Thank you all for listening. And please be sure to check out the other videos in our Career Toolkit series as well.