Your First Job Interview: What to Expect and How to Prepare

Interviewers do not expect a graduate to know everything. They want to see that you understand the role, can learn, and can explain your thinking clearly.

Questions you are likely to hear

• Tell me about yourself.
• Why do you want this job, and why our company?
• Tell me about a project or a time you worked in a team.
• Describe a problem you solved.
• What would you do if you did not know how to finish a task?
• Do you have any questions for us?

Answer with a simple structure

For stories, use situation, action, result. Spend one sentence on the situation, most of your answer on what you did, and end with what happened. Keep each answer to about one to two minutes.

Prepare three stories

Pick three real experiences, for example a project, a group task and a difficult moment. Most behavioural questions can be answered with one of them. Practise telling each story out loud until it feels natural, not memorised.

Research the company

Read the job ad twice, look at the company website and recent news, and be ready to say in one sentence what the company does and why the role interests you.

Questions to ask them

• What would success look like in the first three months?
• How does the team support new joiners?
• What are the next steps in the process?

The day before

Check the time, place or video link, test your camera and microphone for online interviews, prepare a copy of your CV, and sleep. After the interview, send a short thank-you message the same day.