Today I will attempt to make my fellow students aware of how to deal with various stages of an interview and come out successfully. Most of these are my personal views and maybe highly biased or at times not of much importance to certain fields. Do read with a neutral point of view and make the best use of your own judgement. This is more a story of my life and not a manual to success.
Let’s get started with a brief introduction about who I am and where I am coming from.
I am Arun Pai, B.E Chemical Engineer from MIT Manipal. I have faced a total of 4 interviews till date, and will be sharing my views on how you can tackle similar situations. These are interview tips based on my experiences and not some mantras that gaurantee success.
Firstly the prerequisites, learn both aptitude and verbal reasoning well, you can use books by R S Aggarwal or Arun Sharma for these.
Language:
I would suggest take up an IELTS prep book to improve your English. There is absolutely no substitute to having good English skills. If you feel you are weak at this, there are certain steps you can use to tackle this head on and improve your English in a short duration.
First start speaking with your friends not in your local language but only in English, this will give you confidence and improve your speaking skills.
Second, stop using short form texting on social media and speak in proper sentences and use formal tone as much as possible. Don’t ” hey dude, wasssup, whatcya upto tonight”, Instead say “hello, what are you doing now, do you have any plans for tonight” and so on. This will make you feel less like a handicap when put in situations where you have to write a formal letter or during a formal communication session and so on.
Also remember a tip given to budding journalists is also applicable to everyone. Write an essay everyday of about 500 words on any given topic, do this every day and see how your vocabulary improves.
Confidence:
Now this is the biggest interview killer for everybody. There are bound to be nerves all the time and sometimes they get the worst of you. Don’t worry, keep calm, when you clear all the rounds and end up in the interview, you have nothing to lose. Its a no loss situation, at worst you wont get the job. Anyway you did not have one at the beginning of the interview, so you’re not losing much! So whats to worry about? Go in, be confident keep a calm posture and speak to the interviewer in a confident way. And remember its all for you to win, so be rest assured the best that you give in the interview the better chances you have of securing the job.
Resume:
Keep it to one single side page, just keep the basics, personal info, education details, skills, past work details, references. get it checked with someone who has experience. Do Proof Read.
They should ask you questions, not get an overall inference from the résumé itself. Keep them asking for more, you should ask questions yourself, it shows your interests and your willingness to learn.
Simple Hr Questions:
Tell me about yourself?
Its the easiest question yet the hardest one of them all to answer. And no they aren’t asking this to marry you, so don’t go blabbering on and on about your family dogs etc. Keep a simple format for this, I call it the EES format, Education Employment and Skills format. Give your most recent education, recent work that you did and skills that are only and only relevant to the job profile at hand.
Sample answer, “Hello, I am Arun Pai. I am from Manipal, I have recently graduated in BE Chemical from MIT Manipal. Recently I worked on XYZ. My skill sets that are in line with the job profile at hand are abc. I thank you for giving me this opportunity to speak about me.”
Do not ever falter on this question, its very easy, keep it brief yet interesting.
Always go to an interview dressed well, keep a formal look and be confident.
Know the job profile, description well. Quora and Glassdoor are by far the best means to know about the company recruitment process and the questions asked in them, as every company has a different process.
NEVER lose an opportunity to be employed! Saying this, I would suggest all of you to sit for MRCs (TCS, IBM, Accenture) too. Reason being, there is actually no harm in it and its better to have a backup of some kind. Keep looking for off campus opportunities even if you are placed. There are always better opportunities waiting outside.
Don’t ever let a rejection get to you always keep trying and improving your skill sets and expanding it. Don’t be embarrassed by failure or let it affect you, embrace failure let its experience give you more confidence to not be demotivated.
Trust me guys, failure can always be a great teacher and help you more to succeed in life than anything else. Why do i say so? I am a guy who once had 13 backlogs at once, have had a year back, and then gone on to publish 5 papers in national conferences, one internationally published paper, my final semester project got a funding of 50k from Manipal University and I have had 2 job offers one from Infosys and another from Amazon.
So if with the past I had I could be successful, there is nothing holding you guys from succeeding, so go ahead, prepare well, be confident and go succeed in the Interviews!
Remember as always Cracking Interviews can be fun.
About the Author: Arun D Pai is an MIT Manipal Alumnus batch of 2015. He graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Chemical engineering.
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