What You Must Pitch to Your Interviewers

	Pre-college years	College years	Post-college years
Common perception			Very important (as job application process)
Real impact	Very important (development of maturity and explorative abilities)	Important	Important

Most people consider interviews as part of the post-college job application process, and believe that preparing shortly before the process would be adequate. However, the real impact is the opposite. The outcome of an interview is not determined by how one eloquently speaks. It is determined by a wide range of abilities, including explorative abilities, that were formed through the pre-college years. That is, an interview is not the start, as it is the point at which years of accumulated ways of thinking and acting become visible.

Since employers cannot fully know an applicant during the first encounter, they seek to identify during the interview whether the applicant can handle problems of uncertainty. The most positive signal for this judgment is maturity. Maturity is a combination of how the applicant views problems, exercises the ability to think or make judgments, coordinates competing interests, and designs and executes transactions with others to achieve results.

So, the powerful applicants do not list skills. Instead, they explain, through specific experiences, what problems they identified, who the stakeholders were, how the applicant persuaded others, and what outcomes the applicant achieved for the employer. Such abilities cannot be acquired overnight after college. Habits and training that begin through the pre-college years are demonstrated during the college years, and become evident in the interviews.