17. What interests you about our product or service?

With this question, the interviewer does not really want listen to every opinion you have. Give them facts. I’m sure your university has a resource where you can look up things like company revenue, company growth, company age, CEO, competition, or anything else that’s helpful.

So if you were to take these numbers and information and get answers from them, it might look like this:

Company revenue and company growth. – if the company is growing (you only want to work for one), say you want to work for a progressive company because your income has increased by x amount and you feel there is a career opportunity there. Come prepared with numbers and all this information on a piece of paper. Simply cut and paste your university logo and corporate logo and you’ll have a simple presentation that your competition won’t.

company age – if the company is young, tell them that you want a small company that has a lot of potential. If the company is older and bigger, tell the interviewer that you feel that at a company like ________, if you work hard, you can make a great career for yourself. Play all aspects in a positive.

executive direction – if you want to reference an article about one of the executives, please bring a printed copy of the article with the points highlighted. By just doing this, you’ve probably done more research on executives than on the person interviewing you. Remember, this person also wants to find your boss. That way, when your boss asks how your interview went, he can present all the material you gave him. This is probably a great experience for the interviewer as well and they want a rationale for why they are hiring you. Give them that justification.

18. Why did you select your college or university?

If you talk about how good your university’s x,yz program is and start talking about your university, they’ll get bored of listening to you. I can promise you one thing about the “real world”. The college degree just becomes something on your resume. I deal with executive level job seekers all the time. I’ve seen Harvard MBA’s who are out of a job (2 in the last 5 months) and I’ve seen people who went to colleges I’ve never heard of become a key player within an organization. If you want some validation of this comment, go to any university’s website and you’ll see people who were able to donate millions to the university because they went out and were successful.

If you had to say things like: (and don’t feel like you have to justify these answers, make them into an affirmation and move on)

“I couldn’t afford college x or y. Simple as that.”

“It was just a draw between x and y university I practically took a leap of faith and it really worked”

“I know you don’t get this answer a lot, nor do I like giving it, but in all honesty when I was coming out of college, two of my friends were going to ________ and I wanted to be far away, but close to home. When I got to school, I worked hard, learned a lot, and in the end, I’m glad that this reason made me go to university.”

“I had a scholarship and how many people can say they got a free education worth over $100,000 while playing _________.”