Disclaimer: this reflects my personal opinions, not those of my employer.

Over the last few years, I have interviewed hundreds of candidates for positions in Software Engineering, Software Engineering Management, Product and Product Marketing Management, Technology Evangelism, and others. It has always bothered me how many people accidentally sabotage themselves, making entirely avoidable mistakes in the early stages of interviews and phone screens, preventing interviewers from getting to know those candidates better, forcing the premature end of the process for them.

I call these mistakes avoidable because not making them is entirely under the interviewee’s control, having nothing to do with aptitude, competence, interviewer having a bad day, or not being fit for a certain position. If you can avoid them (and you can!), then you are already standing out from the crowd, for being able to make your “elevator pitch” in a way that assures interviewers that you’ll be able to handle yourself in a loop with their peers and managers.

Without further ado, this is how you can do better in your job interview:

A short introduction is a short introduction!

Not an invitation for you to read through your resume. So when asked by the interviewer to give “a quick introduction so we can get started”, do just that. Time it to 90 seconds or less. This is about who you are, not (yet) about what you have done. Let’s mock it:

Interviewer: “My name is X, I have been at this company for 5 years, doing X, Y, Z, and prior to this I spent most of my career doing mobile development, now I’m managing this team and am the hiring manager for this position.”

You: “My name is Y, I started in 19xx, when I was born, then went to school, where I learned how to read (…) then I had the opportunity to learn Docker, which I think is the future with Kubernetes, AI, and the Blockchain.”

WRONG. This is what you have done, not who you are.

You: “My name is Y, I’m an Engineer/Marketer/Product person, I’ve graduated from X, been in this market for 5 years, most recently at company Y, and I love being at the intersection of product and engineering, and that’s why I applied for the position”.

Speaking of time

Don’t talk too much, or for too long. If you have been talking for 5-6 minutes without pause, your interviewer is probably already distracted and unable to piece your story together to a coherent whole. Keep answers short and to the point, make pauses, ask if the interviewer has questions, continuously check back to see if the person is still with you. If not, it’s probably time to stop talking.

A couple of extra tips here: if the company interviewing you requires that people take notes about your answers, you can pay attention to when the interviewer has stopped typing. It probably means you are adding nothing to your answer, so change gears. A second cue is that, for video interviews (or live, like in the good ole days), if the person you’re talking to has gone static, not reacting to anything you said, that’s a good sign that you should stop talking.

What’s your motivation?

“Why did you apply for this position?” is considered by many the easiest question in an interview. Well, I have news for you: it isn’t.

There are many ways to answer this question in a way that will immediately raise suspicion in a good interviewer that you don’t know what position you’re applying for, which may be a terminal mistake in a selection process.

Here are some bad answers:

• “Because company X is a great company!” - Yes, it is, but it also might have thousands of job openings, so you’re essentially saying you’d happy to have any of those jobs.
• “Technology is a great sector to be in right now” - A variation on the previous point, it tells nothing about your interest in this position.
• “Because it’s not very hands-on, from the job description” - Even if the position is not hands-on (and those are becoming rare in all sectors), describing your motivation on a negative/lacking/glad-I-don’t-have-to-do-that way sends a bad sign that you are not interested in how things are built, only in the results.

Some good ones:

• “Because the job description says that I would be doing high-impact work with healthcare partners, including leading ones, and that’s something I’m passionate about”
• “I am very passionate about mobile development in Swift and also UX, and looking at your company’s products, I see that you have great care for your user experience, and I’ve been looking for a position where I can excel in both”

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