Almost every professional opportunity you will ever have starts with an interview. Some are rigorous and carefully structured. Others are relaxed and have no structure at all. The question, whatever the context, stays the same: how do you tell your story, in two, three or forty minutes, in a way that makes the person across from you want to work with you?

The answer, as usual in difficult fields, is that there is no exact recipe. There are, however, a few principles that, once you understand them, might radically change the way you approach interviews.

One: Package your experiences into a coherent story

The premise behind this idea is that people remember facts with difficulty or, rather, they remember stories far more easily. Compare the following two scenarios. A potential employer asks you to summarise your experiences so far. Carefully and thoughtfully, you tell them, point by point, all the things you have done:

"I studied mathematics in university, I competed in swimming at a high level, I worked at a startup in the health-tech field and I worked in finance."

The list can be impressive in itself. But the conclusion the person across from you reaches is simple: that you are someone with an impressive list of experiences. Now think about the version where you tell them a story about yourself:

"I have always been driven by the desire to outdo myself, to identify my limits and to figure out how to push past them. At first, that translated into competitive swimming; I had the slowest times on the team and I decided I wanted to make it onto the podium. Then I turned toward academic performance. My thinking was unstructured and chaotic, so I chose mathematics, hoping it would sharpen those weaknesses, and after a lot of work I qualified for the national olympiad. When I later got to university, I aimed for the goal that seemed hardest to reach; once again, that is how, after a lot of effort, I ended up working in finance."

After this answer, the person you are talking to has understood more than a personality-free list: they have understood your most important value (perseverance), how that value evolved over time and what its practical applications were (swimming, mathematics, finance). You said almost nothing new; all you did was package a series of separate events into a story with a clear narrative thread. The more authentic this story is, and the more compatible it is with the values of the institution you want to be part of, the greater your chances of success.

Two: Show that you are curious and eager to learn

Every employer knows you will not be a superstar at your job from day one. Especially if the responsibilities are complicated, there will be a settling-in period in which you learn new methods, absorb knowledge and adapt to the company. So the employer will optimise for one essential trait: curiosity. Are you passionate about finding out new things? Do you enjoy digging into the details and going deep on the subjects that interest you?

The interviewer might ask you, seemingly at random, what your favourite band is. You answer, without thinking too much about it: "I like Oasis."

They are not doing this necessarily because they like Oasis, but in order to test your curiosity. If you know how to answer, they draw a valuable conclusion about you: namely that, when you are passionate about something, you are willing to research it down to the smallest details, to find out things most people do not know and to follow your curiosity wherever it takes you.

Three: Aim to react positively to difficult questions

Every interview will try to push you out of your comfort zone; otherwise, employers would have no way of figuring out how you react to unpredictable situations, how you adapt to constant change and how you work under pressure. No matter how prepared you are, a good interviewer will try to take you into territory where you do not know quite as much. In this territory, everything you have read or learned so far might no longer be all that useful. But this is exactly where someone's character shows best. If you panic or get scared, you will give a generic answer, lacking inspiration and perhaps even wrong. What should you do instead?

1. Admit that the scenario the employer is presenting is one you have not faced before.
2. Go back to the basic principles that govern the world, action/reaction, cause/effect, and try to find a logical answer.
3. Think out loud; your thought process matters more than the final answer.

Reaching the correct answer is not all that important. What counts for the interviewer is the way you think, the steps you take in your reasoning and the creativity with which you approach the problem.