How To Get To The Job Interview Happy Dance
Yay! You got a job interview invitation. Now how do you prepare to make the best of the opportunity?
This is it. After weeks of rejections, you finally get to the interview stage. Congratulations, you made it to the last 3%.
But now you have to face the interview.
In 40 years, I have experienced interviews as an interviewee and interviewer. I have had some very good interviews and some truly shockingly awful interviews.
Over the years, I have accumulated a set of interview skills and techniques that have allowed me to ace interviews and work with the best organisations in my industry. I am going to share some of these with you in this article.
I have also conducted many interviews in my career to hire engineers to work in my team and organisation. I have gained a lot of experience of what to look for when interviewing candidates for tech jobs. You may be quite surprised at what I am looking for and what I really value in candidates. I am going to provide you with some of the insights I’ve gained in this article.
Prepare 5 Times As Much Information As You Think You Need
When you step into the room with the interviewer/s, you hand control to them. They will be in charge of the pace of the interview, the structure, and the questions. You need to be prepared to answer as many of their questions as you can. The only way to do this is to prepare more information than you will need in the interview.
If you are fully prepared, it does two things:
You will be able to answer more questions with clear, accurate information.
Give you more confidence walking into the interview, knowing that you are fully prepared.
What To Research
Company Information
It is essential that you research the company you are interviewing for. Recent research has found that 47% of recruiters would reject a candidate who had little knowledge about the company they were applying for.
Why is this so important? Well, it tells the interviewer that you have made an effort. You have taken time and used your own initiative outside of what you have been asked to do. It shows that you have started engaging with the company. These are all green ticks from an interviewer’s point of view.
These are the bare essentials to research:
Products/services the company provide — have an idea of cost, who would use it, what the market is, etc.
Who the directors are — At least know the CEO and your immediate VP
What markets are the company operating in
What the turnover and profit of the company were — last reported
Review their social media presence — read the last week's feeds
Job Specification
Read through the job specification very carefully. Note each point and make some notes about whether the point is a strong or weak point for you and prepare a response should you get asked about it.
If it is a strong point for you, prepare a sentence or two about how your strengths align with this point and how the company would benefit from your skills in that area.
If it is a weak point, prepare a mitigating sentence or two that will mitigate the weakness. Something that would explain how you would endeavour to learn or correct the lack.
Answering Questions About You
Interviewers love to ask techies questions about themselves because they know they are going to squirm and struggle to answer them. They are really designed to test how good you are at communicating things that are not directly related to your day-to-day job.
Some example questions are:
Tell me about yourself.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
Why do you want to work for this company?
How did you achieve your greatest accomplishments?
What was your biggest failure and what was your biggest success?
What is your leadership style?
How do you overcome conflicts within a team?
What has been your most meaningful professional accomplishment?
Why did you choose to transition roles?
Some of these are cliches, but believe me, interviewers still ask them! It helps to have a canned answer ready if someone asks any of these questions.
When you create answers try to create a little story or anecdote that highlights a quality you have that will benefit the company.
Answering Questions About Items On Your Resume
Most interviewers will be pre-armed with your resume and will ask you questions about the things that are most relevant to the role they are interviewing for.
This is usually in the format of a behavioural interview, which focuses on situations you have handled in the past because this will give an indicator of how you will handle situations in the future.
There is a standard system that will help you format your answers to these types of questions. It is called the STAR method and stands for SITUATION, TASK, ACTION, RESULT. Construct your answer in the following format:
Situation - Describe the situation from your past.
Task - Explain the task you need to undertake as a result of the Situation
Action - Describe the actions you took to complete the task
Result - What was the result of your actions and what was the benefit? Were there any measurable results?
Write a note of a STAR response for any items on your resume that are relevant to the job you are interviewing for.
Technical Interviews
Technical interviews are undoubtedly the hardest to get through. If you are being interviewed for a subject that can be tested, you will be given a test almost every time.
Having said that, I generally do not put my interviewees through a test, (but don’t tell anyone!). What I do is ask my interviewees technical questions starting with easy and getting increasingly more difficult and detailed. I am probing the limits of their understanding. I believe this is becoming a more popular approach than the formal test.
So, to prepare for these types of questions, create a crib sheet of all the fundamentals of the skill you are interviewing for. Don’t go too deep. Generally, an interviewer will ask you questions about the technology, but just enough to show that you have some understanding.
What they are more interested in is your attitude to answering the question and the way you behave when they ask you difficult questions.
During questions, it is important to explain your thought process because this is the most valuable aspect of the question. It tells them a lot about you. By answering this way you can also sometimes get the interviewer to answer the question for you or at least give you some hints! Techie interviewers love to show their knowledge! (I am guilty of this too).
They will probably want to test the limit of your knowledge, so they will ask you questions that you may not reasonably be able to answer. The important thing is to stay calm and admit you don’t know the answer. Don’t bullshit! You will get caught out!
If you attempt to answer the question. Tell them you don’t know the answer, but a possible approach is... Then explore a few possible solutions, explain the approach and follow them through to their conclusion. Maybe this works, maybe it doesn’t. This is MUCH better than just saying I can't do it or I don't know. It is exactly the attitude they are looking for.
Programming Interviews
Most programming interviews involve a test. They love tests!
There are two types of test:
A language feature test — questions about the syntax and structures used in the tested language. The usual format is a list of questions. You write the responses.
A coding test — you are set up a coding project for you to complete. They will take the code you produce and run it through a series of tests.
The way to prepare for the language feature test is to create a crib sheet for the language. It is important that you create the crib sheet and not just download it! The reason is that the process of creating the crib sheet will lodge the information in your brain.
Next, compile a list of standard interview questions for the language with answers. Before the interview, ask a friend to ask you all the questions from the list. There are plenty of sites on the Internet that provide these questions, just search for ‘language + interview questions’.
Interview Conduct
Dress
According to research, 71% of employers would not employ someone who doesn’t follow the appropriate dress code. This code is probably not written down, you just need to fit in.
Most people think you need to turn up in an interview suit. Well, that’s the way it used to be, but things have changed. Now just dress to look like you fit into the company. You want to look like you already work there. The interviewers should get the impression that you are already part of the team.
If you are doing a video interview, the way you dress is just as important. You should be smart, I recommend something with a collar and fairly smart. Something that you would wear if you went to the office.
First Contact
The first 10 minutes of first contact with the interviewer is the most important. The key things when first meeting the interviewer are:
When they first walk into the room and introduce themselves, stand up and shake their hand. The handshake should be firm and match the grip that they have where possible. This sounds weird, but they need to feel through the handshake that you are matching them. Research has shown that 30% of hiring managers identified bad handshakes as a prominent reason why candidates might leave a bad impression. Why is this so important? It is because it indicates your confidence level.
If you are doing a video interview, there is no handshake. The equivalent is how you present yourself on the screen and how you get on to the conference. Make sure you have taken some time to make sure your microphone and speaker settings all work prior to the meeting. You don’t want to be frantically fiddling with settings when you first enter the conference.
Try to make sure you are sitting upright looking straight into the camera and that you are framed correctly.
Trust me there is nothing more irritating than trying to interview someone slouching back on a sofa, with their mobile phone held on their chest so you get a view up their nostrils!
Small Talk
This is a difficult thing for people to get comfortable with. It can be quite horrible to feel like you need to fill the silence while the interviewer is getting organised to start the interview.
Using small talk can make everyone feel at ease and create a feeling of continuity and flow in the interview meeting.
Having a few small talk starter questions can help. I find that it is really good to start with a compliment. Here are a few starter compliments for starters:
This is a lovely [office/city/building], you must love working here.
[company you are interviewing for] has an amazing reputation in the industry. My friends recommended me to apply to you.
Everyone seems so friendly here.
You have the best [plants/coffee/furniture] I have experienced.
A few small talk statements to get you started:
It is [fantastic/terrible/weird] weather we are having at the moment.
[company you are interviewing for] seems to be doing very well at the moment. It must be difficult to keep up.
Sports is a good starter, but only if the interviewer is a sports fan. You can ask but be prepared to drop it if they don’t follow sports.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately the interview will be decided by the interviewers based on your technical knowledge and whether they think you will fit in with the organisation.
People are emotional beings. We all have emotional biases, which means we make decisions with the emotional part of our brain first and then justify our decisions with the logical part of our brain.
Interviewers are exactly the same, they look at the way you present yourself and make an emotional decision about you. They then go on to justify their decision by testing you both technically and by asking ‘fit’ questions.
Hopefully, the information I’ve given in this article will help you an edge to get past the emotional brain questions.
The rest is up to you.
Good luck.
Happy dance time!