How to Get an Interviewer to Like You: Reflection and Tips

By Aashika Anantharaman 

I found the practice interview sessions on Thursday helpful not only because I learnt more about how to perform during the actual interview process but also because we got to meet some extremely interesting people and interact with them afterwards thereby working on our conversational skills with outside of the interview. 

There were 3 interviewers allotted to each student and each mock interview was 15 minutes long. At first I thought it would be hard to come up with information about myself to coherently talk about for 15 minutes, but my first interviewer made it seem like 15 minutes was not enough to convey everything she wanted to know about me. Being much younger than the other two interviewers, I guessed she was able to relate to my experiences more and ask me questions that really prompted me to talk a lot. Everyone seemed pretty nervous for their first interviews, some, like me were talking extremely fast and colloquially while some were freaked out by the number of awkward silences in their interviews where they completely blanked out.

 I think we can all agree that the second interviews went much better than the first. In my case it felt more like a conversation than an interview and the conversation flowed much better because I was warmed up and had organized my thoughts having already said them out loud during the first interview. The third was by far the best for almost every one of us. The practice really did help us gain a better understanding of what we struggled with and what went well, and we could revise this each time. We also learnt that it is better to adapt depending on the type of person who is interviewing you, for example if an interviewer doesn't have very much to ask you and is quieter, it makes sense to ask them questions about their experiences at the college and engage them in the conversation as well.

We also talked about how some of us may have struggled with getting a message across to the interviewer, for example we could tell them about where we have lived and how the experience was but still not show them 'who we are'. Through discussion I think most of us agreed that it was better to tell them about our qualities and then back them up with evidence, how they developed and why they are important to us.

Most questions that we were asked were about the activities we're interested in, what we want them to know about us, qualities we think we possess that will be useful in university, and where we have lived etc. It was tricky narrating these things about us but keeping in mind that it was not the actual facts about ourselves that the interviewer was interested in but how those facts form the kind of people we are today and our opinions and stands on different issues. The most important piece of advice I took back from yesterday was to 'be genuine', the initial speaker, an interviewer from the University of Pennsylvania who is also experienced in interviewing job applicants, said that he can always tell when a person is exaggerating or not being genuine and that that is extremely off putting.

I also realized that it is important to establish a good rapport with the person who is interviewing you, for example while the last interviewer could relate to me and liked me because she too was introverted and quiet, the second interviewer felt I was not confident enough and did not understand why I wasn't more bold and comfortable. It is in my experience important to adapt and in a sense mirror the personality of the interviewer in order for them to be able to like you easily.