The most common mistake in job interviews

This happens way too often.

Q: “Tell me about this recent project on your resume. What was your role, and what did you contribute?”

A: “Well, we built a tool to…”

WHOA, STOP RIGHT THERE.

Any interview response that includes “we” is utterly useless. We’re not interviewing your whole team. We’re interviewing you. Tell us what you did.

Be egotistical! Be self-obsessed! (But don’t lie.)

If you’re only able to talk about what we did, it unfortunately sounds like you didn’t do anything. For example:

BAD: “Our team refactored the order processing system to improve performance.”

GOOD: “I reimplemented an existing Python library for order processing in C++ and added multi-threading to improve performance.”

Great! You’ve just given me a half dozen things to ask about and dive into. The more detail, the better. Don’t be too modest — this is your time to show off. You’ve convinced us you want the job, now convince us you can do it.