Former Apple employee reveals the key job interview technique she used to stand out from everyone else
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: Fix The Mask/Drazen Zigic
A former employee at Apple has shared the one quality which she believes 'blew them away' and secured her a job.
Sabrina Paseman was an engineer at Apple, but when she'd first received the offer, she said that she was surprised.
That was because she had graduated in biological engineering not mechanical engineering, which is what she was hired to do at Apple.
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According to the company's job creation website, Apple employs around 80,000 people.
This ranges from the engineering side of things including software and product design, as well as the things you need to make a business tick such as accounting, marketing, and HR management.
But despite majoring in an entirely different field, she thinks that there was one aspect of her interview which gave her the edge during her application.
She claims that this was her ability to show that she was capable of solving problems - even though she had majored in a different kind of engineering.
"People just want problem solvers in all aspects of all fields," Paseman told Business Insider, adding: "So that would be my advice for anyone starting out in product design."
Paseman says that she believes this 'blew them away' - thereby securing her the position. But how exactly did this work in practice?
Well, instead of explaining about her previous experiences, Paseman brought in a model of a medical device that she had been working on.
Then she set about saying what she would do differently for her next design in order to improve on it.
She explained: "I said, 'These are the things that I did, and this is what I would do differently.'
"And I showed them my thought process [and] iterations. And I think the fact that I brought tangible things to them and I was able to elaborate on what was good and what was bad about them, that itself made them want to hire me."
And while that principle can be more acutely applied in engineering, Paseman believes that it can apply to any discipline.
She said: "Just showing that whenever you encounter a problem that you don't necessarily know how to solve, you have a really open mindset of, 'Okay, there's something wrong here.
"Let's try to dive down into details and figure out what's wrong'."
The end goal for Paseman, however, was to create simplicity in design.
"I learned that good design comes from simple design," she explained. "And simple design can only be achieved by really fully understanding the problem."
Paseman left Apple to work on a project called 'Fix the Mask', which is aimed at making face masks more effective at preventing the spread of viruses.