I also feel like I'm not very good at in-person interviews because I'm not very good on-the-spot. I mitigated this by using a variation of "The Briefcase Technique" which I learned from Ramit Sethi.
The company I interviewed with is in the SAAS email space, so to get their attention I created a mini web app combining SMTP and web technologies. This took me about 3-4 hours tops. I was trying to demonstrate a few things:
1. I can code
2. I can work with technologies relevant to their company
That landed me the phone interview, which got me the on-site interview. For the on-site interview, I prepared a 1-page mini white-paper outlining some ideas I thought would be useful to their company. The idea was to show that I could bring value to the company.
I ended up getting the offer, as well as another offer using a similar technique.
Think about what the company's problems might be, how you can solve them, and how to communicate that to them. Work around your weaknesses instead of trying to brute-force it.
I got my last two jobs this way minus the white paper. For the last one I learned Rails and made an app using the technologies listed in the job description, threw it up on Github, spent a lot of time on the cover letter, and voila.
They also asked me lots of computer science oriented questions in the interview, and for most of them I just said, straight up, "I don't have a formal CS education, so I don't know, but here's how I think that works."
So many people try to stand out by doing some variation on the standard resume + cover letter routine, so it's relatively easy to stand out if you do literally anything else.
The company I interviewed with is in the SAAS email space, so to get their attention I created a mini web app combining SMTP and web technologies. This took me about 3-4 hours tops. I was trying to demonstrate a few things:
1. I can code 2. I can work with technologies relevant to their company
That landed me the phone interview, which got me the on-site interview. For the on-site interview, I prepared a 1-page mini white-paper outlining some ideas I thought would be useful to their company. The idea was to show that I could bring value to the company.
I ended up getting the offer, as well as another offer using a similar technique.
Think about what the company's problems might be, how you can solve them, and how to communicate that to them. Work around your weaknesses instead of trying to brute-force it.