January to March is a good period for hiring managers in Thailand. It’s time for campus inverview, career fairs, and many fresh graduates to fill in the void after a quiet 2nd half of previous year. In my career, I have made many of the best hires during this golden quarter. But even in these buzzing months, a lot of peoples still come to interviews so unprepared, uninsipred, and aimless. And these are the 1st honors from Chulalongkorn / Thammasart / Kasetsart / etc. Really, you are better than that!

I really want to tell 80% of the new graduates I interview to stop:

• answering to "please introduce yourself" by telling me how many brothers & sisters you have.
• saying "hard working" is your best quality.
• saying you’re not sure what to do yet, and you want this job so you can figure out if you like it.
• saying half-assedly the job is "interesting" when you still have no idea what it is. Ask questions!
• saying you want to do "whatever you want me to do" in the job. We have computers for that.
• saying you’re good with computers, when you’ve never written a line of code or script. "Computer literate" is ok.
• putting "to have good career in a good organization where I can grow in my career" or something to that effect as your "Objective". These are the first lines after your name and address, and you want to make it count!

I interviewed 10 peoples yesterday, and the 2 that will get offers no not have the highest GPA or speaks the best English. But they have personalities and expressed themself and show us who they are. We didn’t mind one of them having an eventual career path lying elsewhere in 5 years time, and we enjoyed the other guy saying he will be an MD of a bank in 10 years.

There are so many interviewing tips available on the internet. Read and study them. It all boiled down to just a few points. If all else fail, think of going into a job interview as going on a first date. Do you think there’ll be a next date by the way your interview goes?

Your whole life isn’t always decided by the first job you do, but in many cases it does. Don’t study hard for 16 years and blow it because you didn’t study for this exam.