By Lakshmi.Buukki 2026-03-02 17:15:31
Interviews are basically two people lying to each other about the role itself and your skills, counting the seconds until they run out of "important" things to talk about. Most conversations and interviews can be discussed in fifteen minutes tops. They kind of already know a newly grad without experience doesn't have much to fall back on, conversation-wise, so it's just as awkward as them asking you to "tell me about a time where you had to...". It's more about making the person like you (Charisma) and seeing if you are a fit for their team. With that being said, all you can be is yourself, and if the interviewer simply doesn't like you, there's no way to fake it, you just wont get hired. So your job should be to be as natural as possible during interviews and try to convince the interviewer to like you. That goes a lot further than using fake LinkedIn catch phrases to impress people, it doesn't work.
I used to work in HR and I would see people with the personality of a rock getting roles, and couldn't understand how. It wasn't their skills either. So either they knew someone and got the plug, or they put on their game face and aced the interview, and interviewer liked them and went with it. On the other hand, I have seen people with the best skills just not get the role because the interviewer didn't feel like the incumbent "meshed" well. They were either cocky, jerks, or just were "too" qualified and they talked themselves out of jobs. It's super political and almost insulting how many jobs are gotten just off vibes and nothing to do with actual skills.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Since I did work for a very big company, I can also tell you that at least 30% of the roles are totally made up. Like they lead to nowhere. They're either never filled, refreshed and never interviewed for (right now my company website shows 7 listings from April 2025 that will never get filled), or created to bypass the hiring process entirely. Some interviews people get are totally hoaxed to buy time until they can "hire" their internal candidate they REALLY made the role up for (for a pay bump, easy way to circumvent the off-season promotion cycle). So don't get upset if you ace an interview and get ghosted, and then hear back 8 weeks later they chose someone else. They chose someone else well before the role was posted, but in order to pretend to be "Fair" in the job search process, they posted a role and got external candidates to apply. This looks better than just giving the role to an internal candidate, because people can claim they only got the role due to favoritism. I'm not making this up, because it's exactly how I got a pay raise when the company couldn't offer me a promotion. They made up a job in the next tier of my current role, included my entire job description in it, interviewed a half dozen people (including me), then said "well, you're the best qualified for the job, you're hired!". Don't want you to get miffed if you start landing interviews but never get the job. It's really a dirty game and you just need to know how to play it. GL fam
edit - by the way, if you asked a weird or dumb question, something that will absolutely soften the mood is to smile and acknowledge "hey im nervous, that was kind of a dumb question LOL". You'll break the tension easily and the interviewer will respect how human you are and willing to own up to a silly gaffe. It says a lot about the kind of person you are (not taking yourself too seriously, willing to admit mistakes). It's way more valuable than talking like a computer and pretending to be Mr. Perfect, i'll tell you...
