“I’m glad job interviews are over Zoom now. Last time I applied for a job, I walked door-to-door with my luggage handing out CVs.”
That was the opening line a guy I helped prep for a senior interview ended up using. The moment he said it, the interviewer leaned forward and started asking him what he meant, and the rest of the conversation had somewhere interesting to go.
It was not the line he had rehearsed. The version he had prepared was a chronological walk through his CV, which is how most of us are taught to introduce ourselves at interviews. The problem with that version is that it covers the same ground his resume already covers, so the interviewer has no reason to look up from the page.
The line he ended up using came from a story he had been carrying for ten years without knowing it was useful. A decade ago, he had sent out eighty job applications from Malaysia and received exactly one invitation to interview. So he borrowed money from his father and flew to Singapore. To make the most of the trip, he walked door-to-door through the Woodlands industrial estate where his interview was scheduled, dragging his suitcase behind him and handing out paper resumes to whoever would take them. Most companies turned him away at the guard house, and his resume died there. As luck would have it, one security guard waved him through. He handed his CV to the receptionist for a position that was not even advertised, because the previous engineer had quit the week before. The director interviewed him on the spot, and he was hired before he left the building.
A story like that changes how the person opposite you is listening. The interviewer goes from grading you against a checklist to relating to you as a person, and hiring panels advocate for the candidates they remember.
So if your job interviewer looked bored, here is the uncomfortable bit. The problem was you.
Everyone gets the same three questions. Tell me about yourself. Why are you suited for the role. Any questions for us. The candidates who walk out frustrated are the ones who did not prepare anything specific to say, so the questions felt flat and they never got the chance to show their best material. The candidates who walk out with the offer had the same three questions put to them, and turned each one into a chance to be remembered. Here is what I have found works for each.
Start “Tell me about yourself” with a story, not your CV
The way I got to the walk-in story with the guy above was not by digging through his CV. I asked him to shortlist three stories from his career that he would be excited to tell at a dinner party, without looking at any notes. Doing it without notes is the part that matters, because the stories you can pull from memory under pressure are the ones with enough emotional weight to carry an interview room as well. We took the strongest of the three, compressed it into a ten-second opening, and built the rest of his introduction around the questions we knew it would prompt the interviewer to ask.
The stories that work are the ones with a small twist the listener did not see coming. Like the way the original mala ice cream pairs salt and chilli with caramel, or the way my cousin swears by dipping McDonald’s fries into a sundae. Two sensations that should not go together, except they do, and now you cannot stop thinking about it. That is the reaction you want when you finish your opening sentence.
Here is one I remember from a SUSS student I taught.
“I am a year four business analytics undergrad. When I quit my full-time job to chase internships, everyone thought I was crazy. In hindsight, it was the best decision I have ever made.”
Three sentences, with the plot twist sitting in the middle. You immediately want to know which job, why he quit, and what made it the best decision. He has handed the interviewer a thread to pull, which is exactly what an interviewer wants, because their job in the next forty minutes is to understand you beyond your CV.
You need both the story and the twist. Without the twist, even a personal story falls flat. A student introduced himself as “a year two business student who used to volunteer as a rugby coach, which grew my passion for teaching and developing others.” It sounds like progress over a plain job title, because there is a hobby attached. It still does not work, because being a coach to teaching others is a straight line. The listener can see the conclusion coming before the sentence ends, so there is nothing for them to ask about. Quitting a full-time job to chase internships is a question mark, and the listener has to ask the next question to resolve it. That is the same reason you keep watching a series that ends each episode on a cliffhanger and lose interest in the one that wraps everything up.
Prove you are suited for the role with one specific example
By the end of the prep session, the same guy I was teaching had an answer that started like this. “I won the Best Employee Award the year I almost got our product pulled off the shelves.”
That is not the answer he started with. The first time we ran through this question, what came out was, “I have strong crisis management experience, I have managed stakeholders across multiple regions, and I have a proven track record of delivery.” Every word was true. Every word was also indistinguishable from whatever the candidate after him was about to say. So I stopped him and asked him to give me one specific moment behind the words “crisis management.”
He thought for a while, then took me back to a Monday morning two weeks before a regulatory deadline. His packaging team had flagged that the artwork on the box was wrong. He went down to the floor and looked at the actual carton himself, and they were right. The standard timeline to fix packaging artwork at his company was six to eight months. He had two weeks. If he missed the deadline, the product would be pulled in a recall that would have cost the business tens of millions. He spent the rest of that day with his team, going step by step through the artwork process, asking which steps could be skipped, which could be solved by throwing money at them, and which had to stay regardless. He walked into his director’s office that evening with three options and a recommendation. They picked one. He ran it. The product shipped on time, and the Best Employee Award followed the year after.
That is the same claim as “strong crisis management experience.” If you start with the reason, you are asking the interviewer to take the label on trust. If you start with a story, the reason it proves you are right for the role is obvious to anyone listening, because the story itself contains the evidence. The interviewer arrives at the label by themselves, which is what makes them believe it.
So before you walk into the room, shortlist three stories from your career that show you doing the job they are about to hire you for, and work that into your answer.
Use your final question to find out what the job is really like
By the time you get to the closing question, you have spent forty minutes letting the interviewer choose what to talk about. This is the one part of the conversation where you get to choose, and most people throw it away.
The same guy I had been preparing for the big tech interview taught me a closing question I have used ever since. Years ago, at a different interview, he had asked the VP across the table, “Assuming today is my first day, finish this sentence. Whatever you do, please do not ___.” The VP thought for a moment, then said, “Do not bang the table. Do not lose your temper.” That sentence became the operating principle he carried through the whole role. It told him more about how the team actually worked than anything in the official parts of the interview process.
That question works because it forces the interviewer off the script. Most candidates use the closing question to do the opposite, asking something that makes them look smart instead of something they actually want to know. He had almost fallen into that trap himself in our prep session, when he told me he was planning to close his upcoming interview by asking the hiring manager what the company’s five-year plan looked like. I asked him whether he wanted to know the answer. He paused, then admitted he did not. He had picked the question because it sounded like the kind of thing a good candidate was supposed to ask.
The cost of asking a question you do not care about shows up in two places. The first is that you cannot fake genuine interest while the answer is being given, so your body language gives you away halfway through. The interviewer can usually tell when their answer is bouncing off you. The second cost is that the question itself was not one the interviewer cared about either, so the answer comes back as a polished surface version of the truth. You walk out without leaving an impression, and without learning anything real about the person or the place.
The fix is to use your closing questions on the two things you actually need to know before accepting an offer. What is this place going to be like to work in, and what is this specific person going to be like to work for.
The “please do not ___” question is the one I now use for the place. The good ones think for a second and tell you something honest. The panicked ones tell you something honest in a different way. Either way, you walk out with information you could not have got from the job description.
For the person, my favourite is to ask the interviewer about a moment they were proud of. If the proud moment is something they personally pulled off, you are dealing with someone ambitious about themselves. If it is something the team did, you are dealing with someone ambitious about the group, which is usually better for you. If it is a moment they coached someone through a hard problem, you have found a rare one, and the job is worth taking for that alone.
The reason both questions work is that nobody can fluff a story the way they can fluff a topline claim. Ask about culture or leadership style and you will get the careers page back. Ask for a specific scene and they have to actually remember something real.
It’s not them, it’s you.
The thread running through all three stages is the same. The candidates who land the offer are not the ones who got the best interview questions. They are the ones who gave the kind of answers that turned ordinary questions into interesting ones.
This came out from one-on-one prep work I do with people interviewing for senior roles. I shared some of this at a workshop for Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) on “The Art of Networking” with Joyce Seidl-Tan Tian Zhiyuan Anton Jia Bao Wong Pheng Xiang Aaron Cheah Jarel Yam Wei Hao Yap.
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