Job interviews are never easy to get used to, even if you have done them many times.
And if you have to do the interview in a language that is not your mother tongue, it becomes even harder.
If you want to find a Werkstudent position, internship, or full time job in Germany, interviews are something you cannot avoid.
After doing many interviews with German companies, I started to notice some patterns. So I want to share what German job interviews were like for me and what I learned from them.
After graduating from university, I started applying for full time jobs.
One thing I regretted was not starting my job search earlier, before graduation.
I was very tired after finishing my internship, so I wanted to take a little break. But around that time, the economic situation in Germany was getting worse and I noticed that there were fewer job openings for new graduates.
In the end, it took me around six months to find a job.
I wanted to use what I studied at university, so I was mainly looking for positions related to project management.
I studied Business Informatics, but to be honest, I was never very interested in becoming a programmer.
There were people around me who had been coding as a hobby since they were young and were really comfortable with computers. I quickly realized that trying to compete with them in pure coding was probably not the right direction for me.
I was more interested in analysis, research, organization, and supporting projects.
So I decided to move in that direction.
At first, I applied for project management related jobs in Hamburg, where I was living at the time.
Then I started applying all over Germany.
Later, I even applied to jobs outside Germany.
I also expanded the types of roles I was applying for. I applied for positions in data analysis, risk management, IT support, and other related areas.
In total, I applied for around 60 to 70 positions and probably had at least 30 interviews.
After going through so many interviews, one thing I learned was that sometimes the opportunity comes when you are already starting to think, “Is this ever going to work?”
I Started to Notice a Pattern
I interviewed with large companies, medium sized companies, and smaller companies.
After a while, I started to notice that many interviews followed a similar pattern.
In my experience, it was very rare to sit in the same room with other candidates and be compared directly.
Most of the time, there were one or two people from the company interviewing me. Sometimes there were three.
And then there was just me.
If you pass the application stage and get invited to a first interview, I think that is already a good sign.
An interview also takes time for the company.
At least in most of the interviews I had, I did not feel like they invited me just because they were curious to see what kind of person I was.
They usually seemed to have some real interest in my application.
There was one interview where I honestly felt like they might have invited me partly because I was a foreigner and they wanted to see how I would do.
But that was an exception.
Most of the time, I felt that I was treated seriously as a candidate.
What Usually Happened in the First Interview
After Covid, many of the first interviews I had were online, usually through Microsoft Teams.
If you are a foreign candidate, one thing companies often want to check early is your language ability.
If the job is mainly in English, they want to know if you can actually communicate in English at work.
If the job is in German, they want to see if you can understand questions, explain your thoughts, and communicate in German.
Because the interview is online, some people may be tempted to prepare a full script and read it from the screen.
I do not recommend that.
Unless you have practiced it so many times that it really sounds natural, interviewers can usually notice.
One of my former managers especially hated it when candidates were clearly reading prepared answers.
Usually, the interviewers introduced themselves first.
They explained their role, what the team was doing, and then asked me to introduce myself.
I think this first introduction is very important.
Before the interview, I always read the job description carefully and looked for the main skills or keywords they were asking for.
Then I tried to connect those points to my own experience.
For example, if the company was looking for someone with data analysis skills, I tried to find something in my experience that was related to that.
Even if you have never had an actual data analyst job, maybe you collected and analyzed information for a university report.
That is still something you can talk about.
The important thing is not to invent experience you do not have.
It is to understand what you have already done and explain how it connects to the job.
After the introduction, you can often start to feel how the interview is going.
If they seem interested in you, they usually start asking more detailed questions.
If the connection is not really there, sometimes the interview ends much earlier than planned.
That happened to me too.
Questions I Was Asked Again and Again
Many of the questions were about previous projects.
They asked what kind of projects I had worked on, how well I understood the role I was applying for, and what kind of problems I had faced before.
I was often asked about difficult situations.
What happened?
How did I deal with it?
What did I do when there was a conflict between different people involved in a project?
If you already have work experience, it is important to connect your previous job to the position you are applying for now.
Even if your previous job was not exactly the same, there is usually something you can connect.
If you are a new graduate and do not have much work experience, you can still use your university experience.
Maybe you worked on a group project.
Maybe you had to organize something with other students.
Maybe you researched a topic and realized that you enjoyed a certain type of work.
You need to find the connection and explain why that experience made you interested in this role.
Of course, you will not be able to answer every question perfectly.
Sometimes you may get stuck.
Sometimes you may not even understand the question properly.
That is okay.
Instead of pretending you understood, I think it is much better to ask again.
You can say something like,
“Do you mean this?”
or
“Could you explain the question again in a different way?”
I did this many times.
Especially when you are doing an interview in another language, there is nothing strange about asking someone to repeat or explain something again.
For me, asking one more question and trying to continue the conversation was always better than just saying, “I don’t know.”
Most of my first interviews were around 30 to 45 minutes.
Another thing I learned was that saying you can do everything is not always a good thing.
If you have never done something before, you do not need to pretend that you are already good at it.
It is more important to explain why you applied to this company, why this role interests you, and which part of the job you actually find interesting.
What Changed in the Second Interview
If I passed the first interview and the second interview was the final round, I was often invited to the company.
I usually tried to arrive around five to ten minutes early.
I do not think arriving extremely early is necessary, because the company may not be ready for you yet.
But being late is something I always tried to avoid.
For clothes, I did not feel that I needed to wear a full suit and formal shoes for every interview.
Of course, this can be different in more conservative industries such as banking.
But I tried to avoid very casual clothes and wore something simple and clean, like a blouse or shirt.
I still remember one candidate who came to an interview wearing very noticeable leopard print pants.
Later, I heard people from HR talking quite negatively about the outfit.
So even if clothes are not the most important thing, I think it is still safer to keep them simple for an interview.
If I reached the second interview, I usually took it as a positive sign.
In my experience, by that stage, the number of candidates already seemed much smaller.
So I tried to stay confident, smile, and not show too much nervousness.
Sometimes we started with small talk about the weather or how my journey to the office was.
That also helped me calm down before meeting the team.
In the second interview, there were often more people involved.
Sometimes another manager joined.
Sometimes future team members joined.
Sometimes someone from HR was there too.
I usually had to introduce myself again.
Then different team members asked their own questions.
The questions were often more practical than in the first interview.
They might explain the actual project the team was working on.
They might tell me what I would be expected to do.
Then they would ask if that was what I had imagined the role to be.
Sometimes they also talked about problems the team was currently having and asked how I would deal with them.
For example, they might ask about urgent tasks, communication problems, or working with different people.
Even if you do not have direct experience with the exact situation, I think it helps to know some ways of talking about problem solving.
Instead of only saying, “I am good at solving problems,” it sounds much more convincing if you can explain how you approached a problem.
If you have actually used things like risk management, project management, or agile methods, you can bring them into the conversation when they fit.
It makes your answer more concrete.
The Last Question Is Also Important
Some companies have a third interview, but in my experience this was less common.
Sometimes the third stage can be a test day where you spend some time at the company and see how the team works.
In some cases, they may give you a small task.
But this really depends on the company.
No matter if it was the first or second interview, there was one question I heard almost every time at the end.
“Do you have any questions for us?”
I think this part is important too.
If you already asked many questions during the interview, it is okay if you do not have many left at the end.
But if you did not ask anything during the whole conversation, I think it is better to prepare at least one or two questions.
An interview is not only the company checking you.
You are also trying to understand the company and the job.
If I had already asked all my questions, sometimes I used the end of the interview to summarize what I had understood.
For example, I might say,
“From what you explained today, it sounds like A, B, and C are very important in this role. I have experience with those areas, so I think I could contribute to the team in that way.”
It was a simple way to connect the conversation back to my own experience one more time.
You Do Not Need to Be Perfect
You do not need to be perfect in a job interview.
Interviewers also know that interviews are stressful.
After doing so many interviews, I realized that showing real interest and having a natural conversation was more important than giving a perfect answer to every question.
Not understanding one question does not mean the whole interview is over.
Getting nervous or getting stuck on a sentence does not mean you failed.
I was rejected many times too.
Sometimes I knew as soon as the interview ended that it probably did not go well.
Other times, I thought the interview went really well and still got rejected.
At first, every rejection made me think that I was simply not good enough.
But after going through the process again and again, I started to understand that there are many things you cannot control.
Maybe another candidate had more experience.
Maybe the team felt a better connection with someone else.
Maybe something changed inside the company.
In the end, the things I could control were quite simple.
I could explain my experience as clearly and honestly as possible.
I could listen carefully.
And I could show why I was really interested in the company and the job.
Leave a Reply