Always be Prepared

It is important to prepare for each and every interview or meeting that you go to. The questions might be repetitious as you continue to have informational interviews and continue to go on job interviews, but the answers will vary from time to time. It's important to have some standard answers that you can recycle, but some of the details should change depending on the job; you always want to customize your answers to questions depending on the job or organization.

If you're in an informational interview you will probably still be asked, "Tell me about yourself." This is when you should respond with your elevator speech, a thirty to sixty second description of you who are professionally. This elevator speech will pretty much be standard, though when you go on job interviews you can try to tailor it a bit to the job description.

There are some standard interview questions that you will begin to learn as you interview. You can also do some research on these on the internet. Begin to have some standard examples for these questions, create a general outline that you can keep, but before you go on an interview use your outline and make your responses more relevant to the job for which you are interviewing. For example, if you are really proud of a project you worked on professionally, you can always use that project for the "Tell me about a time you were successful," question, but highlight different aspects for different interviews.

No matter which answers you recycle, and which you use for the first time, you should always be prepared with experiences that you know for a fact you will highlight during an interview. Make sure the experiences you want to talk about are the ones that are most relevant to the job at hand. Go through your resume ahead of time, and create an outline as to how your experiences directly tie into the job description. This will help you to more fluidly answer the questions.