First
and foremost, to be able to interview with confidence, it is important to know yourself. By
conducting self-assessment, you will be able to find out what your selling point is, such as why you
are the best fit for a company. Especially for current students who have no previous work
experience, you may be thinking about where you are going to be or what you are going to be doing
after graduation, and you may have no idea what it is that you want to do. You will get stuck just
vaguely thinking about it, so the first thing you should do is look back before thinking about the
future. You may be able to get some hints from your past experiences and there could be unexpected
discoveries when you self-reflect. It is said that the foundation of job hunting is from
self-assessment. However, self-assessment is not just limited to job hunting. It is the basis for
facing the future.
First, look back on your life and organize your experiences. Go all the way to your childhood and
think about how you came to be the way you are now. You may be able to see how your current
personality and values have been formed through various experiences.
There are various ways to organize your history, and there is no one particular way to go about it.
One idea would be to make a chronology of your life. Detail all the happy and successful
accomplishments, as well as your difficult and challenging experiences from when you were little to
now. Also, understand your family composition and relations, and other environments and experiences
that inspired you to be interested in certain activities and have shaped your character. Be
specific.
When you look back on your experiences, try to always think about why you liked it, why you were
interested, and why you were good at it. By doing so, you will also be able to see your own
strengths and weaknesses. Writing everything out in detail is a way to practice how to be able to
convey your own enthusiasm when job hunting. Be as specific as possible, and think of many examples.
It may seem like work now, but it will prove useful when you are asked these same questions at your
interviews.
Simply stating that you are 120% motivated, you are interested in the job, or that you are good at
something more than others will not be convincing to the recruiter since they don’t know you.
Lessons and teachings are more convincing with a great story or reason to back it up with. Have
stories and examples from your own past experiences to support your interests, so recruiters may
actually visualize and imagine how passionate you are. (Even if it was a trigger at the time of
childhood, it is more persuasive to speak as recently as possible about episodes)
