<p>People over-emphasize how they look “on paper”, and they don’t think enough about how they come across in-person. I recently helped a friend of mine interview for a job at Google and I knew fairly quickly that he wasn’t going to get the job.</p>
<p>This friend is a smart guy who went to a prestigious school (not an Ivy but among US News top 20) , and like a lot of smart, young guys from elite universities, he seemed to have a weird sense of entitlement and arrogance that I quickly found annoying. Interesting enough, I never really noticed this in him because we rarely talked “shop” before. He seemed to think that he knew it all already despite the fact that he had less than 2 years of experience in the industry, and he didn’t want to listen to advice from some lowly public school graduate. If he didn’t like a technical question I asked him, he became surly and complained about the question. If I couldn’t understand some of his sloppily written answers, he attributed it to my own ignorance, rather than his inability to explain things clearly. Worst of all, I didn’t really understand WHY he wanted to work at Google so bad. He didn’t seem to care about what he would be doing there. It seemed like he just wanted to work at Google for the bragging rights, which is probably how he selected schools, too. No surprise that he didn’t get an offer.</p>