- Sep 9, 2024
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Hi @ashwright and huge congrats on getting to the interview stage 🥳 🥳 I am sure you will nail it! My best advice for you to avoid sounding robotic is to not memorize your answers during your preparation. Instead, I think you should simply aim to remember how to link key competencies/motivations with aspects of a wide set of your experiences, and then to practice as much as you can coming up with good answers on the spot. This way, you will develop the most important interviewing skill of all: an ability to express your thought in articulate manner even if you have not considered the issue in the past. I believe this is essential because (i) no matter how much you prepare, it is unlikely that every single question you will be asked will be one you have memorized an answer for; (ii) even if they are, it is unlikely the exact form and framing of every question fits the specific phrasing you have memorized; and (iii) even if you are extremely lucky in this regard as well and everything fits perfectly, given the nerves you will naturally be experiencing during the interview, it is likely you will inadvertently deviate from your pre-prepared 'optimal' answer, which might then make you overthink the issue and end up derailing your entire performance.Hi guys! Didn't expect to be returning so soon but I am happy to say I am back with some questions
I am happy to report that I have been invited to my first ever(!!!!) interview. It's for an in-house legal internship - perfect for me as I need to build up my practical experience. I'm expecting why us/you/this internship questions, as well as 'talk about a relevant news story'. I'm pretty prepared, but am still working on what to say for a strong 'why this internship' answer.
Nerves are kicking in but I am trying to keep calm by keeping prepared. I'd appreciate any advice on approaching interviews - I worry about staying calm, remembering what to say, and not sounding like a scared parrot! As always, I would really appreciate any advice ☺
More generally, to keep calm on the day, I have two central pieces of advice: to focus on doing well, not on being perfect, and to aim to speak at a slower pace. I have explained these two tips in a lot more depth in a previous post, I will quote it bellow:
My top tip would be to focus on doing well and not on being perfect. Many people go to ACs thinking they need to blow away the partners and the recruiters to succeed, but I think this is the wrong attitude to have. First of all, while your achievements and skills might be impressive for this stage, it is quite unlikely you will manage to overly impress anyone no matter how hard you try - you will know a lot less about any given commercial law subject than lawyer in the firm. Secondly, this attitude will make you feel even more stressed than you would normally be and will therefore likely impact your performance. If you will be assessed for a total time of a few hours, it is impossible to be perfect in every moment. When you notice an imperfection in an answer, the right reaction is to acknowledge it but then to move past it and make the best of the rest. Instead, the overly perfectionistic candidates tend to stress about it a lot more than they should, and in attempting to fix the initial mistake they do a lot more harm to their progression chances. People with this mindset thus often end up creating negative feedback loops for themselves: they make a small error, then they begin overthinking it, which decreases their self-confidence, which impacts their next answer, which in turn further intensifies their anxiety; a series of events which can end up completely derailing one's performance.
To avoid this, instead of aiming to excel everywhere, I would simply aim to perform well - to do a good job on every task and score well on every relevant assessment criterion. This boils down to using your preparation to make decent substantive points and communicate them in a clear and confident manner. If you manage to do this you will have performed better than the majority of candidates and in most cases should be enough to get you progressed - it did for me 4/4 times. If you reframe your task in this way, I think you should feel a lot less anxious about it: while perhaps it is difficult to convince yourself that you will pull of an extraordinary performance, you should feel a lot more confident in being able to respond sensibly to tasks and to cover all your bases well.
A final piece of advice I have for calming down on the day and to avoid blanking out is to take your time:
Finally, know that just by getting to the AC you have proven yourself to be one of the very best candidates out of a huge pool, which means you have all it takes to succeed! Best of luck
- Firstly, taking your time before starting your answer. Instead of just jumping into a response the instance the interviewer stops speaking (which is a very natural temptation) take 3-4 seconds to think about and structure your answer. This will significantly decrease the number of times you find yourself blanking out mid-answer or having difficulty finding the right way to end a sentence.
- Secondly, if you have difficulty with finding sensible points for a question, it is perfectly acceptable to request some thinking time - just say 'May I please take a minute to consider my answer?'. In the unlikely case you do not find anything after that, explain that you are unsure what to say; but also walk the interviewer through your thought process of your best guess.
- Thirdly, aim to speak more slowly. When you are anxious, your hear rate goes up and you naturally start speaking at a higher pace, which is problematic in that this simply means taking less time to think as you answer. This naturally reduces how articulate and confident you seem, especially since speaking quickly more often leads you to losing your chain of thought or expressing yourself in unclear language. As such, try to slow down. Also, use strategic 2-3 second pauses in your speech to add emphasis to points and to get valuable thinking time as you are moving between the different parts of your answer.
!
