What I Learned From My First Job Interview

As I explained yesterday, today I had the opportunity to have my first job interview experience. I was of course nervous right before the interview, (I was even nervous after), but it was overall a great learning experience - which was what I was hoping my first experience would look like. Here’s what I learned:

1 - Keep your confidence.

If you can walk into an interview (or in my case, hop on a Zoom call) with a can-do approach, then that’s going to immensely throughout the conversation. What I noticed in my experience today was that my confident attitude lead me to speak with ease, ask great questions, and also pick myself up if I made a mistake. Keeping the conversation professional, yet personal, was much easier with maintaining that right attitude. Sometimes that’s easier said than done, but I’ve heard it said before that faking confidence is the same thing as having it.

2 - The conversation goes both ways.

You can ask questions too. I did my research on the company ahead of time, which gave me lots of questions to ask about my role and how the company functions. Questions like, “Why are you now seeing the need for this position? What is that saying about your company growth?”, (or even more specific questions about the role), helped me get a better grasp of the duties for the position they’re hiring for. Once these ideas were clear to me, I could then see why the company is growing and in what ways I can benefit their business.

3 - Prepare ahead of time as much as possible.

I had lots of feedback, research time, and advice before this interview. I’m incredibly thankful for it. Knowing beforehand what kind of questions you’ll be asked, how you should answer them, and all of the other details of “interview etiquette” were very beneficial to me and also lead me to feeling confident once the interview began.


After the meeting I was given some feedback on my presence during the interview, and I was told I asked great questions, that I was honest, and showed passion. Even if I don’t get the role, those were the three main ideas that I learned walking away from the meeting and I’ll be applying those to any other similar opportunities in the future.