3 Step Guide to Make a Great First Impression on your Interview (inc. videos)

According to a study by Princeton, humans make a judgement about the person they’re meeting in less than one second. At a cocktail party, this is no more than a fun fact, but at a job interview this becomes infinitely more important.

Making a great first impression on your job interview can make the rest of your interview a breeze or turn it into a painful uphill battle. 

When I was applying to jobs I went on an interview marathon. I did over 100 interviews in the span of a few months. 

Over the course of those interviews, I noticed a remarkable pattern.

👉 If I “connected” with the interviewer within the first 2 minutes, typically the rest of the interview would go incredibly well.

I also noticed that if I stumbled during the first few minutes, no matter what I did for the next 25 minutes, I could never recover from that poor first impression.

So, this naturally sparked the question…

How can I make a great first impression on every interview?

I began experimenting and I found that there were three factors that determined how well my first impression went:

1. My Visual Setup

2. My Opening Greeting

3. My “Tell Me About Yourself” Answer

In this post, I’ll walk you through each of these “first impression” makers and show you exactly how you can master each one to guarantee you make a great first impression on your next job interview.

So, let’s jump right in!

Step #1: Making a Great First Impression Visually

Many interviews these days are done over video calls, which presents a unique set of problems we never really had to deal with before. 

When I first started going through the interview gauntlet, I would do my interviews the way most of us do, at my desk in my room.

This meant that I had terrible overhead lighting accentuating the bags under my eyes. I was looking down at my interviewer on my laptop. And, to top things off, all my “quirky” knick-knacks in the background were distracting my interviewers.

These things were ruining my first impression before I even opened my mouth.

Luckily, I had something that not many other job candidates have: a background in Hollywood. 

That’s right, several years ago I had tried to make it “big” in Hollywood and, while I had since left that world behind, I had picked up a few tricks.

So, using my filmmaking knowledge, I created my own little blockbuster setup in my small 6x8’ San Francisco room. In my Interview Course, which you can get for free when you become a member, I go over how to do this in a lot of detail.

Here’s a short sample:

The 3 most important things to keep in mind when answering the “tell me about yourself” question are:

1. Keep it short - your answer should take no more than 3 minutes

2. Keep it recent - share only your most recent and relevant experience, not your whole work history

3. End with a question - make sure to toss the conversation back to your dance partner with a thoughtful question rather than ending on “so...yeah.”

Takeaways & Next Steps

If you’ve failed to make a good first impression on your job interview, don’t be too hard on yourself, we all have!

The most important thing is to learn from your mistakes and improve for the next interview.

If you’re in a time crunch and you want to get a job sooner rather than later, one of the best ways to shortcut the learning process is by taking our Interviewing for Introverts course.

The interviewing course takes you through all the steps of the interview process and even provides real world examples to help you practice before the big day.

Best of all, the course is included for free when you become a member, so check it out and see how other members have used it to land their roles in record time.