My first job interview

Mato Silva
2 min readAug 5, 2021

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The first time I was called in for an interview was in 2018 for a 3 months internship as a manager for e-commerce platforms accounts.

Obviously I searched for evreything I could on the internet about the company, they sold outdoor and sport equipment and they were located inside a shopping center. I used Street View to be sure where it was but I couldn’t see where exactly. So the day before the interview I took the public transport to the store, looked for landmark buildings to stop the bus on time, wrote down how long I needed to walk from the bus stop to the office and so on.

When I got to the mall, I was all sweaty (it was a hot summer). Once in front of the office I observed for about 15 minutes everything that was happening, I looked inside to see how many people there were, the dress code and the products they sold. I tooked mental notes on all of that. Based on what I have seen I decided to leave 10 minutes earlier to be fresh for the interview, wear casual clothes and write down two questions about the products.

On the day of the interview, I saw three other candidates, all of them wearing formal clothes. 5 minutes before the interview the CEO came out of the office and told us that it would be a group interview. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts.

“First of all, you don’t need to come to this office in formal wear, unless you really want to.” Long story short, I got the job!

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