Lessons learned from my 10-year anniversary
So, you have prepared your interview and are on time at the right place ready for the interview. A face-to-face interview with two interviewers will last about 45 minutes.
It’s essential to answer the questions in a self-confident and concise way. The best is to avoid “high level” generic answers. Most appreciated are answers with a tangible experience: “I did it that way and this was the outcome.”
I usually start the interview with a brief introduction of the interviewers. Next follows an essential question that helps to pitch yourself in 2-3 minutes. It’s important to focus on the courses and experience that are relevant for the internship.
- Please introduce yourself and tell me about your studies and work experience?
Depending on the answer and the resume I ask additional questions like e.g.
- Please explain how your experience matches the position?
- Why have you chosen this field of study?
- What made you come to Germany?
The second part of the interview is to check how well you have prepared for the interview:
- Why are you interested in SAP?
- What are topics that keep SAP customers awake at night currently?
- What do you expect to learn during your internship?
It’s certainly also a good point in time to explain you the team set up and the range of activities you are expected to deliver during the internship.
The third interview phase is dedicated to understand your way of solving challenges a bit better:
- Based on the described internship activities, could you please outline typical challenges in our daily work? How would you handle those?
- How good are your Excel / Powerpoint skills? Please describe an example where you have applied these skills.
- What are your strengths? Please describe a real life challenge where you have applied them.
- What are your weaknesses?
And yes, the internship should be the starting point for your career at SAP. Therefore, I also like to ask at least one question about the realistic next steps after the internship:
- What is your career ambition?
There should always be room for your own questions in an interview. Here is the chance to really position yourself as the top candidate by asking good questions. From my experience the interviewees who have asked the best questions – and yes, they can be tough to answer for us too – are the ones who have shown the steepest learning curve during and after the internship.
Last but not least there are always some formal points to be clarified like e.g.
- When could you start earliest / latest?
- How long could you be part of the team?
I hope that this article helps to prepare yourself for your next internship interview. However, each of us has her/his own individual style of asking questions. There will be surprising questions of course: just take a deep breath and re-phrase it with your own words – voilà, you have won the essential seconds to frame a good answer 😉
