One student had sent out a hundred applications, landed five interviews, and gotten no offers. The first thing she said when she came to me was still: “Is my resume not good enough? Should I rewrite it?”
I started by asking her to walk me through her applications and interviews. Once companies are willing to interview you, you can’t keep putting all your time into your resume. What’s worth reviewing is which round things ended in, what you were asked, how you answered, and whether you got any feedback.
In the same way, getting few interviews isn’t necessarily only about your resume. Whether the roles fit, whether the company is still hiring, whether you meet the graduation-year and work-authorization requirements, and whether you applied too late can all affect the result.
By clarity, I mean knowing as accurately as you can where you’re stuck. Confidence means that once you understand the requirements and have prepared, you dare to apply, and you dare to talk about what you can do. You need to build both together. Telling yourself to “believe in yourself” without figuring out the problem doesn’t help much. Having the right abilities and never daring to go for it is a real shame too.
This chapter has three parts. Part 1 is about diagnosing the problem. The second part covers how a resume turns facts into evidence, and the third covers how to explain that evidence in an interview so people can understand and remember your judgment.
Keep a simple record of your recent applications: company, role, date applied, which resume version you used, how you applied, what feedback you got, and where your interviews stopped. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it should show what actually happened.
| What you’re seeing | Check first | What you can do next |
|---|---|---|
| Almost no interview invitations | Role fit, basic eligibility, timing, application channel, and whether your resume shows relevant experience | Pick a few specific job descriptions and ask someone who knows the field to look at them alongside your resume. Don’t just hand over a resume and ask, “Is this good?” |
| You pass the first screen but keep getting stuck on one type of technical question | How your knowledge, problem-solving process, explanation, and performance under time pressure each hold up | Identify the specific question types you can’t do, practice explaining your reasoning, then test yourself on similar questions |
| The technical part is fine, but you can’t explain your experience or handle behavioral questions clearly | Whether you understood the question, whether your example fits, and whether your actions and judgment are specific | Go back to what really happened, fill in details, reorganize, and have someone press you with follow-ups |
| You reach the final rounds several times but aren’t hired | Role fit, recurring problems in your answers, and changes in the hiring itself | Ask for feedback and compare how you did across interviews. Don’t throw out all your preparation because of one rejection |
Say two applications got no response: one was for a program whose graduation year you clearly didn’t match, and the other was for a role you qualified for. They don’t tell you the same thing about your resume. Or say you’ve gotten stuck several interviews in a row when asked “Why did you do the project this way?” That’s a recurring problem worth focusing on.
After a rejection, you can politely ask HR or the interviewer whether they’d be willing to share feedback. Make the question specific: “So I can prepare better in the future, is there an area you think I should strengthen?” They may not be able to answer, but asking is more useful than assuming there’s no feedback to be had. If you don’t hear back, keep adjusting based on your own review, and don’t keep chasing one person for a verdict.
Know Who You Are Before You Look for Fit
A lot of people prepare in this order: see a job description, study what it wants, then work hard to shape themselves into someone who fits. With every new role, they generate a fresh self-introduction, a new “why,” and a new set of behavioral answers. Each answer sounds complete on its own, but put together, they don’t sound like the same person.
I prefer to start with the person. First go through your important past experiences: what you did, why you did it, how you judged the situation then, what problems you ran into, and what you moved forward in the end. Then look for the traits and choices that keep showing up across them. Only after that do you ask which side of yourself to bring forward for this particular role.
One of my students was preparing for a Strategy Analyst role at Capital One and a Product Manager role at an insurance company at the same time. Answering for the first, she said she liked work where she could be part of the analysis and also push a product forward and see ideas come to life. The next day, preparing for the PM interview, she started searching for a motivation from scratch. I asked her why yesterday’s line had disappeared. Caring about whether an idea gets implemented was her own career preference. It could connect two different roles. She didn’t need to invent a new person for every interview.
Behavioral questions work the same way. For many entry-level students, putting together five to eight stories with real substance is usually more useful than writing a separate answer for each of twenty or thirty questions. Keep the facts and core judgments consistent, and shift the emphasis for challenge, teamwork, leadership, or a particular industry.
Communication Is More Than English
These days I break communication down into four things: judgment, value translation, audience awareness, and compression.
| Ability | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Judgment | In this experience, what actually had substance, what changed the outcome, and which part was my contribution? |
| Value translation | Who did my technical work, analysis, or coordination help in the end, and what problem did it solve for them? |
| Audience awareness | For an engineer, a hiring manager, a client, or an investor, what information matters most to that person? |
| Compression | If the interviewer remembers only one thing, what do I want it to be? |
Many students think their communication problem is that their English isn’t good enough, when in fact they wouldn’t know what matters most even in their own language. Others have done complex research but think, “Isn’t this what everyone in the lab does?” Or they can only say how much their model’s accuracy improved, without saying what errors it reduced, whose time it saved, or what decision it supported. You can keep working on the language, but first you need to know what’s worth saying.