Interviewing with Confidence as a New Grad

Job interviews are hard. You're being evaluated on how well you can sell yourself for 30 to 60 minutes, often by a stranger, sometimes through a screen. And as a new grad, it can feel like all the other candidates have more to talk about their professional experience than you do. But trust us, they don't. They just have had more practice telling their stories. Interviewing is a skill, not a personality trait, and like any skill, it gets dramatically better with preparation and repetition. Here's how to put yourself ahead of the candidate pool.

1. Build a Company Research Note Before You Apply

The best candidates know more about the company than the average interviewer expects. That gives you a free leg up immediately. For every company you're seriously interested in, create a single research note in Notability that lives in one place. Things to capture:

• What the company actually does (in plain English, in your own words)
• Recent news, press releases, funding rounds, or product launches
• The interviewer's background if you know who you'll meet
• The company's stated values and missions, and how it connects to your own values 
• Two or three thoughtful questions you'd want to ask at the end about the company or position

You can even import the company’s recent blog articles, thought leadership LinkedIn posts, or recent press releases as PDFs or screenshots and annotate them directly in Notability. Highlight the parts that resonate with you (and the parts you may have questions about). This kind of preparation comes through in your interview responses, without you ever quoting the company’s materials directly.

2. Turn Your College Experience into Stories

As mentioned, the biggest gap between strong and weak new grad interviews isn’t a lack of experience. It’s the storytelling in your responses. Most behavioral questions can be answered with the STAR method:

For each one, build a quick research note in Notability covering:

• Situation: Briefly set the scene or context.
• Task: What were you responsible for?
• Action: What did you specifically do? (Use "I," not "we.")
• Result: What happened? Use numbers to measure the outcome.

Before your interview, build a STAR story library. Craft stories using the STAR method from coursework, group projects, internships, clubs, part-time jobs, sports, volunteer work, and side projects. You're looking for moments where you:

• Led something
• Failed at something and learned
• Persuaded someone to change their mind
• Solved a problem under pressure
• Worked through conflict
• Hit a deadline or a number

You can aim for crafting three to five stories. Each one should be one or two sentences per STAR section, written out in a note so you can review the night before your interview. Once you have them, you can mix and match to answer almost any behavioral question interviewers throw at you.

3. Practice Out Loud (and Listen Back)

Here's a humbling, yet beneficial, experiment: answer the quintessential interview question, “Tell me about yourself,” out loud, record yourself in Notability, and play it back. The first time you hear yourself, you'll probably wince. By the fifth time you practice answering this question, you'll have a 60-second answer you can deliver in your sleep.

Audio practice catches things that silent rehearsal misses, such as filler words, sentences that trail off, or answers that sound smooth in your head but rambly out loud. If you can record yourself answering five or six common questions and listen back, you'll be in the top 10% of new grad interviewees.

4. Prep a Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet for the Day Of

You don't want to walk into an interview rereading a 1,500-word research note. Build a one-page summary you can glance at in the ten minutes before your interview:

• The company in one sentence
• The role in one sentence
• Three things you specifically admire about the company or team
• Your two or three best STAR stories
• Three smart questions to ask

For video interviews, keep this cheat sheet open in Notability on a second screen or beside your laptop. For in-person, pull it up on your phone on the mobile Notability app in the lobby. The point isn't to read from it, but to anchor your brain before you walk in.

5. Debrief After Every Interview

Within an hour of finishing your interview, before the details fade, sit down and add to your note about the company:

• Every question you remember being asked (great for practicing future questions you may be asked)
• What you said and how you think it landed
• What you wish you'd said instead
• Anything specific the interviewer mentioned about themselves, the role, or the company
• Your gut read on the team and company culture and fit

This debrief is gold for two reasons. First, it makes the thank-you note we’ll mention in the next section specific and memorable. Second, it builds a personal interview database. After three or four interviews, you'll see patterns about what type of questions keep coming up. All this work will make your answers get sharper.

If you're doing many interviews in parallel, keep a folder per company within Notability. When the third-round invite comes a week later, you can pull up everything in ten seconds: your STAR stories tailored to them, your research notes, and your debrief from round one.

6. Send a Thank-You Note That Sounds Like You

Thank-you notes are truly a lost art. Most candidates don't even send them these days. And the ones who do usually end up sending the same template. A personal, human message that calls out specific details from your interview stands out significantly.

Within 24 hours, send a brief email that:

• Thanks the interviewer for their time
• References one specific thing from the conversation
• Restates your interest in plain language
• Doesn't oversell

Four sentences is plenty. The goal isn't to write a masterpiece, but to remind the interviewer that you exist, prove you were paying attention, and reinforce that you're someone they'd want to work with.

The Takeaway

Once again, you don't need a decade of experience to interview well. What you primarily need is good preparation, stories using the STAR method, and the discipline to learn from every conversation.

Many people say that searching for a job is a full-time job in itself. We recommend treating your job search like a project. Build research notes for each company, practice your stories out loud, debrief afterward, and follow up like a human. Do this for your next ten interviews and you'll be unrecognizable from where you started.

The candidates who land the offers definitely aren’t the most polished on day one. They're the ones who got a little bit better with every interview, and kept comprehensive notes to make that growth possible.

Good luck with your interview prep, you got this!