The first job interview

Most advice about interviews is about what to say. The more useful advice is about what to prepare before you say anything.

An interview is not a test of character, although it feels like one. It is a short attempt by a stranger to answer three questions: can this person do the work, will they actually do it, and will the rest of us be able to work with them. Almost every question asked is a version of one of those three.

That makes preparation concrete. For the first question, have two examples ready in which you did something similar, even if the setting was school rather than work. For the second, be able to say why this particular place, not any place — a person who has looked at what the organisation does is rare enough to be memorable. For the third, there is nothing to prepare except arriving on time and listening to the end of a sentence before replying.

Two small things matter more than they should. Bring a question of your own, because having none suggests you have not thought about the job. And when you do not know something, say so and say what you would do to find out, which is a far better answer than an invented one. Interviewers have heard a great many invented answers.

Nobody is good at their first interview. The point of the first one is mostly to make the second one less strange.