- You will face rejection (likely a lot). Don't take this personally and don't let it affect your confidence.
- Unless you are an outstanding interviewee, this is like a skill/muscle which you need to develop and practice. Hence ensure that you don't schedule your "dream job/company" early in the process. Keep practicing.
- Always have a beginner / practice mindset. Otherwise, you will accept the first (suboptimal) offer that you get as you will hate the interview rigmarole. Interviewing is annoying / painful. Accept it and work through it.
- Keep applying and talking to companies even after you have started negotiations. There have been companies which have told me that another candidate accepted before me( and hence the position is no longer available) even when they have "granted me time" to make my decision. Similarly companies rescind offers.
- Blowing hot(too many interviews in a short while) and cold (no interviews / interviews for a while) can be debilitating to your confidence. Hence ensure that you have a pipeline of interviews so you are talking to at least 1 company a week.
- Take notes and reflect on your performance in each interview and how you can do better.
I’ve interviewed many candidates and I’ve interviewed many times myself. Having good conversation skills is the single biggest influence on whether a candidate proceeds or not.
Talking is a skill and that really stands out against other candidates.
When I’m interviewing, I’ll usually choose a stronger communicator over a stronger engineer.
Isn't that kind of odd? I've worked with software engineers who are good talkers but their code and problem solving skills leave something to be desired. Meanwhile, I've worked with guys who took a while to get comfortable with in terms of having conversations and yet they were some of the most productive members of the team both in code output and skill.
Ultimately, most of the time I 'talk' with my team members, we're actually writing which is very different from talking due to the async nature of the former.
You don't intentionally choose weak engineers, but a strong engineer working on the wrong thing because they can't communicate effectively is less useful than a slightly less strong engineer who's always doing the thing that's actually needed.
This hold true as pretty much every level. A junior engineer who will never say "No, I don't understand, can you explain that to me again please?" and spends days/weeks writing code that doesn't meet a requirement is less productive than someone who'll talk to you to understand properly before starting to code. A senior engineer or technical cofounder who can't communicate well with customers will be much less effective in solving real customer problems or finding product/market fit.
Being a great engineer isn't just about writing good code, its about writing the right code - and to know what that is you need good communication skills.
You can categorize "humility and willingness to possibly be perceived as dumb" as non-communication skills, but in my mind they are:
A) the most important indicators of likely success on the team
B) very correlated with comfort in speaking
If I can't get you to talk at all when you're uncomfortable, you're unlikely to tell me you don't understand in the often uncomfortable iterating on a feature process.
It's possible to be gregarious AND be unable to ever admit that you lack critical information, which is why interviews, for me, are mostly about asking questions until we get to the point you don't know/don't understand, and see how you work with me from there on.
What a lot of people who get stressed about interviews don't realize, though, is that WHERE PRECISELY you reach your limits is unimportant. It's that you engage thoughtfully, without getting overly defensive, and don't bullshit. Not about whether you got the right answer at any given spot.
You will want to adjust the knob depending on the specific role. You might look for different things in a candidate that will be person #1 on a one person project version person #49 on a 50 person project.
Remember that most of us that are self-taught are pretty good at being person #1 on a one person project. That's what self-teaching teaches us, after all. But, a successful business might not be possible built around one programmer, so as you progress in your career you'll be working on developing the skills to form a cohesive team around you. A lot of this is going to be talking to people, not memorizing some algorithm. (But, many jobs are going to require both, so don't forget all the algorithms while you're in those meetings. At least brush up on them before your interview. A day of prep here can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your career.)
You're right to point out the difference between conversational and writing skills. However, generally engineers tend to overvalue technical skills and undervalue soft skills.
IMO engineering orgs tend to set the bar really high for tech skills and really low for communication skills. Tech skills are easier to test and they feel more "objective" so they get more focus.
And the other side is that people who don't know what they are doing are very bad at talking once you try to solve problems. They might still be great at free form chit chat about technical things, like you'd get in an unstructured interview, but they lack the skills to actually apply the words they use and work through problems. So they will take a lot of space in meetings and chats and make everyone else less productive since they use so many words to say so little.
These are basically "brilliant jerks" on the soft skill side. They take so much of the space that the people who knows anything don't get much airtime. But if the soft brilliant jerk would just stop talking for a bit the other people would start talking and actually improve communication in the team.
The correct metrics are 1. Strong skillset, and 2. Able to follow instruction (obedient). Every other hot metrics now are pretty much misalign with company goal of earning profit. Purely on your criteria alone "strong communicator" are way down the list while "strong engineer" will be easily top 3 criteria. In a company you only need 1 or 2 strong communicator, usually they will be the head of departments or more likely C leaders. Too many chief and less foot soldiers will be like what happen to Enron where everybody just hop from departments to departments unable to deliver useful productivity. Talk is cheap. Actions speaks louder. Those strong communicators are also the most likely to jump ship and change job for the better within a short time. It will be very detrimental to company having this group of employees. Speaking from over 3 decades of experience in HR.
Engineering skills are easier to teach, particularly if you have an established culture and some senior personal who can spare a couple cycles to onboard new hires.
If you don't, that's a sign the engineering culture needs some TLC. And now that I think of it, in that case good communication may still be a priority factor.
Conversely, the interviews that have gone most well for me were those that were largely just technical conversations. That’s not to say that they were nothing but fluff — the bits of conversation were usually accompanied with plenty of skill testing.
The worst were the ones where the interviewer clearly didn’t want to be there and mostly acted as a cold stone statue firing questions of from a sheet of paper. Incidentally those interviews were usually also the ones with the highest number of hackerrank sorts of questions.
Some additional points since i'm currently interviewing a lot
-Practice leetcode since it will make up 50-60% of the interview process
-Study your resume inside and out, know the whys of what you did not just the whats
-Don't talk too much, sometimes nervousness and anxiety can make itself with a candidate talking too much or too little, both are bad, be concise with your answers but don't ramble on, the more you ramble the more surface area you give the interviewer to poke holes at what you said. Being concise can lead the interviewer towards areas where you are most comfortable answering questions.
-Realize you might be an amazing developer but you only have a couple of hours to show prospective employer what you got, don't be too harsh on yourself if you get rejected, it is impossible to know a person in 3 hours, they are merely going based on their best judgement of you (which is mixed in with actual performance considerations and bias many times) and not the "reality" of you.
“Don’t talk too much”, this so much. Address the question. If you have done that, talking more can only make it worse. If you want to take the discussion further, finish your answer and ask a question to signal that there is something more that might be of interest to the interviewer.
And, if you can do that where you are, put yourself forward to be interviewing. After about 20-30 interviews you’ll find a few nuanced insights, some of them specific to your area.
At least in big tech cities it is in no way a ridiculous thing to say. I interviewed with about 20+ companies based in SF, NYC, Seattle and only one loop didn’t have leetcode equivalent steps
> Practice leetcode since it will make up 50-60% of the interview process
I think this depends on the role. I was interviewing for staff level front end roles a few months ago and didn’t have a single leetcode-style interview. All the coding questions were realistic problems.
i've known senior front engineer who were asked a little of leetcode type problems at big tech. Were you interviewing at big tech companies? Startups are just kinda random in my experience, they all have their own unique processes.
deeply understanding 1 problem per day is better than reading the solutions of a dozen. Solving leetcode via induction could prove valuable, solve a simple case of n = 1, then try to solve n = 2 do you see a pattern? try to solve n = 3 etc... Don't assume anything, don't categorize problems before thinking of patterns, sometimes dp problems are simple greedy problems, don't go into problem solving with bias. Look to build raw problem solving ability more than remembering problems of a certain flavor. understand advantages of linked list vs arrays, understand dictionaries, understand dfs vs bfs (both traverse graphs but what property does bfs have over dfs?), understand heaps, understand general recursion flow for binary trees,
theres no book, and theres no easy way to get good at that stuff, just have to practice problems and learn about better ways of solving problems via new algorithms and data structures you did not know about.
It's very important to realize this. Maybe you feel you nailed it and everyone really liked you but you still didn't get the job. Well, there's other candidates in the pool too and there's a chance one of them was amazing too and you lost the proverbial "coin toss".
There's also a chance you were always the backup option - it happens.
Lastly, don't give up on the role. I've seen numerous instances where an offer went out and was accepted and then a week later the person backed out because their existing employer gave them a huge package to stay on. It happens. You might get the call then after being rejected.
"Keep applying and talking to companies even after you have started negotiations"
YES. Do not stop until your first day (half kidding). One time I stopped interviewing after accepting an offer...only to find out there were rounds of reference checks (and one of them didn't go well). It was 2-3 weeks of anxious bullshit, but only because I already turned down everything else that was in motion.
Who knows maybe a second company will come through with a better offer.
Just wanted to highlight this because it is a fantastic piece of advice to keep in mind for interviews (and honestly for your career and even crafts or hobbies too). There's a reason doctors and lawyers (for whom the stakes of failure are sometimes measured in lives or years of freedom lost) call what they do "a practice".
1. Mornings only is impossible because a lot of interviewer availability is in the afternoon since for a lot of them, it’s an unproductive task
2. Batching sounds good, but doesn’t work because different companies move at different paces and you almost always can’t batch them. You’d be lucky if you could batch 2 onsites back to back.
3. You may not be able to batch subsequent rounds together because you sometimes may not hear back on time
4. Most important of all, none of this takes into account that you already may be working a demanding job that you cant take time off from that easily
It's very unfortunate to see the parent has been down-voted for linking the Wikipedia page for an article which has over 1,000 citations - mind you citations are a key metric for the credibility of science, for good and for worse.
The science is not debunked by a blog post on nautil.us.
If the author is very sure of their argument then it would be of greater scientific merit for them to review the original data and other data, and report the fact of the data not matching what was reported in the original study, as well as proposing their own hypothesis for future work.
But the author's blog post claims an ad-absurdum proof, while ignoring that their proof doesn't extend to the difference in height between 21 year old males and females, despite that being cited as being an equivalent effect size. It's this kind of thing that means cited scientific work appears in the Wikipedia article, and Nautilus blog posts do not.
Edit: dis-disclosure I have nothing to do with the person who wrote the parent comment, just an observer
While this is an interesting optimization strategy, getting and applying professional feedback for one's interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion.
If you're amazing at interviews, the interviewer will remember you and want to hire you. They will even rave about you to their colleagues... "Hey, this person was awesome, we need to hire them."
Accomplish that special human ability, and you don't have to worry about such micro-optimisations.
> If you're amazing at interviews... Accomplish that special human ability
"It's easy, you just..."
Most of us are not amazing at interviews so telling people to be amazing at interviews isn't too helpful. Interview feedback tends to be pretty sparse. Often you don't hear anything back unless you got the job. Even if you do get a "no" response it will be light on details (and it's usually this way due to legal concerns). It's difficult to improve a skill when there's little or no feedback and what feedback you do get is vague.
And I also am not sure I want to work at a place where being really good at interview skills is what gets people jobs. The correlation between "interviews well" and "collaborative, productive coworker" isn't very strong.
Definitely has not been my experience. People who interview well are generally excellent communicators and communication is of utmost importance when working with a team.
Also, generally being likeable makes a positive impact on people. Teams would much rather someone they feel they can work well with than someone who is going to be a total stick in the mud and drag everyone down.
How are you determining your lack of correlation ? Is there data on this somewhere?
Because I would assume that people who study and prepare for the interview are more likely to be studious and prepared in other aspects of life, including their workplace.
I have worked with a number of people who are really good at interviewing and then continue to focus on impressing important people and climbing ladders, but without being particularly skilled and/or particularly collaborative.
I have also worked with a number of people who are quite bad at interviewing but were excellent colleagues: highly collaborative and technically excellent.
When I create hiring processes, it's the latter people I try to select for. So assorted coworkers aside, the data I have come from those hiring processes. The glibbest and most charming people often do poorly in the pair programming portion; the most awkward often settle down into doing excellent work once you get them in a familiar context.
Some people are great at both, of course, and some people are bad at both. Which should be unsurprising given the number of people recommending a focus on developing interview skills. The whole idea requires that job skill and interview skill are not well correlated.
If you wanted to learn to play the piano, how would you do it? You'd get lessons, or watch videos, or read a book. You'd definitely practice. Treat interviewing the same way.
I agree, practice is key. Interviewing is a skill, sure some people are good at it, and that's great for them.
I am not good at interviewing. I have very little confidence when interviewing, and I get super nervous. I get better when I warm up, towards the end of the interview. The only way I do better is when I practice a lot, keep a schedule, exercise before the interview, and usually I need a job-support group to help. It's an effort.
IME anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort can get to a level where they're "amazing" from the perspective of regular people - of course there's a huge gap between that and being celebrated as top of the world or something.
So put a lot of effort into something that you hopefully won't have to do very often. I think that's the objection that a lot of us have and why there's a feeling that there's too much emphasis on the interview. I can practice interviewing or I can spend that time learning more about algorithms, math, programming languages, machine learning, etc. It seems like the latter is ultimately time better spent.
"getting and applying professional feedback for one's interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion."
And I specifically addressed that: it's difficult to get any actionable interview feedback because companies tend not to supply much (if any) useful interview feedback probably due to legal concerns.
Yes, I meant to get professional feedback from a good resource, to help one's interview skills. This can also be extended to improving one's communications skills at work.
For resources of people who might be able to help, I would include people like a mentor, hired professional, or trusted friends who are good communicators.
Came to say the same thing. As a candidate you really don't control internal processes and I don't believe you can influence the scheduling much. If they like you (and you like them), everything will happen fast.
I so wish this to be true! But it is not always the case. You as a candidate can power through the interviews(scheduling), get ahead of the line, and indeed influence decision making.
I think this is true to a certain point as it provides signal for high enthusiasm for a given role - huge plus if you meet all the other weightier requirements.
Can you recommend how to go about this? It's the first i've heard of this strategy, and interviews are a big fear of mine. I would have assumed most of these "pay for feedback" things to be scams in one way or another. Thoughts?
I have a side-business providing mock tech interviews with unlimited time for feedback. Contact me if you are interested (including "why is this random guy on HN qualified to provide this kind of service")
For feedback, I would suggest people like a mentor, trusted friend who is a good communicator, or a paid professional resource.
Full disclosure: I provide paid professional career mentorship and coaching. Contact info is in my profile.
I know some people are opposed to hiring a paid resource, yet when I hired someone for myself, my career abilities and achievements increased much faster than before. And I still meet with a professional mentor regularly.
Of course, both the compatibility and quality of the resource matter, so by all means talk with a few people until you find the right match for you.
If CEOs, actors, athletes, and other pros hire someone to help, why shouldn't you?
The whole point of micro optimizations is to show interviewers your "best", if i did leetcode type problems after i eat lunch, i'm slow and my brain is foggy.
It's pretty tough to follow these rules. Mornings only gives you half the time. All rounds at once and as soon as possible would also mean you got in touch with all the recruiters at once and they got back to you promptly.
In practice you more likely to see a steady drip as you ramp up your search. Some recruiters get back fast, some slowly. There's no real way you can control this other than giving some feedback as you progress so that firms that you like will hurry up a bit and firms that are your backup can be held a bit.
Yes these ideas are all certainly valid concepts about interviewing. But it would be nearly impossible to optimize for all of them.
Furthermore, some really are impossible. For example #2 is to schedule interviews in cohorts. I tried to follow this in my most recent job hunt and it is truly impossible. The problem is that some jobs I would go through a phone screen and hear back later that day or the next morning in order to schedule another interview. Some companies will wait a week to get back to you. Others are 3-4 days. As just one example, I interviewed with a large tech company and they were the first ones to actually offer me an initial interview. I went through 3 stages of interviews with them and had the 4th stage scheduled when I canceled because i had already received multiple job offers from other companies, which I had applied to several weeks after them.
In tech a lot of these are easier because you have a lot more power over the interview process if your job skill is one of the in-demand ones. In my interview process I really could bend most of the companies to meet my needs and to move faster than they planned for. But that is a fortunate position to be in. I am watching my sister go through job interviews right now for HR related jobs and the process is completely different. I was going through a 3-4 stage interview process in 1.5-2 weeks. My sister was waiting 2-3 weeks between individual interview stages. In my interviews I could tell people that I want to accept an offer in 2 weeks, so they need to speed up and they would do it for me. If my sister said that in her HR interviews, they would simply disqualify her.
So count your blessings if you are in tech. Sure, we get to complain about take-home interview projects and technical interviews. But we can get jobs within weeks (or even a week) that pay 2-4 times what other people are getting after months-long interview processes. So consider ourselves fortunate.
It really depends. I've seen things go pretty quick in other industries, like my wife, who works in marketing. At most she usually has a call, a psychological test of some sort, and a long onsite. She's also had some that were about as long as mine, but on average it's relatively short.
And she never has to grind or prepare beyond making sure her portfolio is ready. They don't ask her to prove her InDesign or Powerpoint or HTML or even tech skills (one job she had to lead a tech initiative to lead the department into evaluating and then switching to new proposal management software that was HTML template driven, and then basically be tech support for a bunch of salespeople that didn't want to invest the time to learn how to use it).
I'd rather go through her process than mine, quite frankly. Although she has found it more difficult than I have to find a company willing to pay her what she's making now, as her salary has gotten pretty high for her field, and she often has to sell them more on what she can bring to the table since she's had experience with so many large accounts in the past.
Meanwhile I could move to SV and double my salary easily, so I'm nowhere near the top, just the top of the ranges for all the recruiters in my region that contact me (I could probably find something in the area that's about $50k higher, I'm guessing, but no one is advertising it, most are advertising about $30k less than I'm making right now). And yet my process always seems to be long and painful.
> You should avoid scheduling interviews post-lunch
Interesting opinion when weighed against studies like PNAS' famous parole decision study that found morning and right after lunch were the most favorable rulings: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
No, hunger is an important cause of the result. The anticipated effects of hunger are the reason that open-and-shut cases are scheduled right before lunch.
The problem is that the researchers were eager to conclude that hunger can influence case outcomes, and unable to consider the possibility that hunger can influence case scheduling.
Schedule it right before lunch and finish early. The interviewer will have a positive imprint of you in their lizard brain since you gave them earlier access to their food. Plus your interview will be followed up with the dopamine and please of their meal/break, which might boost their memory of you as well.
this is exactly opposite of what you should do, if the study is to be believed:
"They found that the likelihood of a favourable ruling peaked at the beginning of the day, steadily declining over time from a probability of about 65% to nearly zero, before spiking back up to about 65% after a break for a meal or snack."
I disagree with not scheduling before holidays. If I like a candidate I'm not going to forget about that just because of a holiday.
The first person that makes a good impression almost always has an advantage IMO. The hiring manager will remember that person, and human psychology makes your memory of that interview better than it actually was. So for someone to unseat you they have to do significantly better. (And obviously the reverse goes if you are among the last to interview). I think recency bias would only into play if the first couple successful candidates reject their offers or something.
Most important is to get your resume in early though. After spending that first weekend with the mind-numbing task of sifting through hundreds of resumes, a hiring manager is only going to look at new ones if absolutely nothing works out from the first batch.
As an American, I totally feel the same. But working with some of my European counterparts, they can just totally disappear for a month or two when they vacation, like into a black hole. They just take vacations more seriously. If one of them was a decider for a hiring decision, we definitely wouldn't hear back from them until after. Not anything good or bad about it, it's just a different culture.
On a tangent, I'm an American and I disappear for a month when I take vacation. It probably has something to do with the fact that I was born in Europe or with getting tired of half-assing vacations and getting burned out. I'd like for 'black hole' vacations to be normalized in the American workplace. I'm doing my part!
I'm an American and do this too. Also, I don't take work home. I leave my laptop at work. It's a signal I do on purpose and I regularly talk about my life balance priorities. I don't mind working long hours during projects or busy times but I like to keep it in the office. So long as it's infrequent, couple times a year, something may totally blow up and I'll just go into the office on the weekend. If I'm out of town or not physically able to make it, well that means I can't physically pull out my laptop and dive into my work regardless of my location. I consider that a "not my problem" situation. I've found, if you give in to the instant responsiveness and availability, it becomes expectation. I'm mid-career and have done that, but at this point I go into jobs setting my terms and don't mind telling a C level or BOD member they can wait until I get back in the office. I don't even do that usually because I just don't respond outside of regular hours. It's not for everyone, and I may someday alter this, but I find it suites me at the moment. I have a young child and I'm not jumping on calls/emails/texting during our already limited time together. It works just fine but if I were to do this at a junior level it would have been career suicide. My experience is what has given me the leverage to demand my work style.
I'd imagine if a hiring manager is doing that though, they'd not schedule interviews straddling the gap.
The whole article is kind of weird though. The interviewee doesn't really have that much flexibility in scheduling interviews. Unless it's for a company with centralized recruiting that's always hiring, in which case when you schedule makes no difference at all.
While interview success "can" depend on these, along with 100s of other factors, these are most likely not the principal contributing factors to interview success on average. So, sure, if you've got the principal factors figured out, optimize to this level, but if not, your energy will be far better spent elsewhere (e.g. understanding the most likely asked questions for a company, and the framework they evaluate on, ensuring you're communicating well (verbal & non-verbal) )
meh kind of another fluff content marketing piece making unsubstantiated generalizations, but to raise brand awareness about a PM rather than a vc firm etc.
> Just like you interview with multiple companies and choose between multiple offers, companies also interview multiple candidates for the same role. Duh. So if you are interviewing with a company, assume that you are interviewing with a pool of candidates.
Sure, but here is an opposite take, maybe you should delay your interview rounds as long as possible. Hiring managers can be hesitant to extend an offer before having fully explored their options. If your candidacy is evaluated at the end of the cohort the hiring manager might feel more pressure to extend an offer to keep their headcount.
An interview is decided in the first several seconds. First impressions are a real thing. Most interviewers will decide based on how you look, act, and talk whether you are going to pass the interview, and they will confirmation bias you into their predetermined decision. Of course with an amazing interview performance you can switch a predetermined no into a yes, and with a very poor interview you can turn a predetermined yes into a no. Why do you think the first question most interviewers ask is something vague and useless like "tell me about yourself"? That question is the real interview.
There is also the reality that when companies need to fill a role, and when first start interviewing they will set the bar way too high and reject some perfectly qualified candidates. After the interview process has dragged on for some time they will eventually decide that enough is enough and will hire the next candidate that shows basic competence (or just hire someone's friend).
BTW, one solution to this I recall being suggested by Eric Schmidt is to use a hiring committee among other things
> An interview is decided in the first several seconds.
I've hired hundreds of people and this is just not true. A first impression matters a bit, sure - but it has hardly any effect on the decision.
> There is also the reality that when companies need to fill a role, and when first start interviewing they will set the bar way too high and reject some perfectly qualified candidates
This is a very poor hiring practice. You should what you're looking for and what you are willing to pay for it. And then you should recruit a candidate pool that meets this criteria and go from there.
Hiring is literally the most important job a manager has in any fast growing company. It should be taken very seriously and systematically.
> I've hired hundreds of people and this is just not true. A first impression matters a bit, sure - but it has hardly any effect on the decision.
The thing about confirmation biases are that they are at the subconscious level and you likely wouldn't be able to detect them. It's possible that you have an impartial and immune to confirmation bias interview process, but it's also possible that you are indeed deciding (skewing) most of your interviews in the first several seconds.
> Hiring is literally the most important job a manager has in any fast growing company. It should be taken very seriously and systematically
I agree. Which is why, if it is found that hiring committees are more effective, and your company isn't using them, then are you taking them seriously? The same with bonuses and promotions. These should not be decided by a single person (manager).
> it's also possible that you are indeed deciding (skewing) most of your interviews in the first several seconds.
Not the original commenter, but I've had interviews where I was feeling pretty negative about a candidate in the first 5-10 minutes, but ultimately recommended them (sometimes even quite enthusiastically).
Given that empirical evidence to the contrary, it seems like a pretty incredible claim to insist that I'm deciding primarily based on the first few seconds. Do you actually have anything to back up your claim? That would suggest that, for instance, performance on a coding exercise has absolutely no bearing on my recommendation, since it usually takes a few minutes to get the coding rolling.
A confirmation bias is not a conclusion, it's a skewing/filtering of how you see something. Read the book "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins. The way your brain works fundamentally is that it makes predictions and assumes that the prediction is what will happen (the book explains this better). That's why in my original comment I said " Of course with an amazing interview performance you can switch a predetermined no into a yes, and with a very poor interview you can turn a predetermined yes into a no."
I don't know what line of work you are in, but this is decidedly not true in mine. It's skewed toward candidates making an excellent first impression but then failing, instead of the other way around.
Gotcha. I think I was mostly objecting to the first several words of your comment saying an interview is decided in the first several seconds :-)
I'm familiar with that feeling though. I've had several interviews where I really (subjectively) liked the candidate, and really wanted them to succeed - but having a prepared interview plan ended up doing its job and helped determine that the candidate was not a good match for the role.
Certainly both phenomena you describe are real, but we do try to keep them in check, especially because 'first impression' is heavily influenced by class, sex, race, physical appearance, nationality, etc.
The biggest one that I always forget: don't schedule somewhere you really care about first. I make this mistake when I look because it's the place i'm really interested in that convinces me to start looking in the first place. But then I'm super rusty and do worse than everywhere else.
Yes this is very important. If possible (and people have already said this is hard), having an interview you don't care about shortly before one you do care about is a great way to warm up. Especially if it's been a while. Some time ago, I switched careers and did a bunch of temporally close interviews. Once I got going, overall I was performing as good as I could, because I'd lost a lot of the anxiety and was practiced and comfortable. Now, if I do a one-of, I'm nervous, and I'm trying to explain myself out loud for the first time, it comes out much worse.
“Mornings are the best time to schedule interviews as both you and the interviewer are fresh in their heads and there is no mental fatigue.”
I get night owls generally get the short end of the stick. However, we are practically half the population. It’s a strange kind of irk to have someone tell me what hours I’m most productive at.
This works well for a junior eng working in a big company where your absence may not be noticed that much. Once you get to senior/principle level working on critical projects (you'll know based on the refreshers/comp). It's really hard to pull these off.
The biggest issue is to maintain balance. Once I am checked out of the job, then moving on the new company is the only way out. So, one becomes a bit desperate especially if the management kinda knows that you're not giving your best anymore.
Holidays/Q4 is one of the best times to interview, since you get breathing space from your work and get more free time to schedule interviews right before holidays and then, post holidays you're ready to kick off your new job.
I am pretty heavily involved with interviewing and here is my take for what it's worth:
- Yes try to schedule ASAP, although it gets so complicated lining up availability I don't think it is possible to aim for mornings vs afternoons.
- Try to read between the lines in the job listing. How does it align with the company's goals/growth? What aspects seem important? Try to focus on that. Example: I noticed company ABC is hiring a few hardware engineers for the first time. I would highlight how I can work independantly and my skills in building a new hardware team
- Be enthusiastic about things besides the tech stack. I am surprised how many people I interview who don't seem to care much about the job beyond if we use Java vs Python.
When interviewing remotely, move further away from the camera so you don’t appear as a floating head. Showing more of your torso allows you to use your more of your body to communicate.
The #1 Rule of Thumb I've read and used is: try to be as close to last as possible. The point being, you want to be fresh in their minds. Going early is not the way to do that.
Some places are interviewing for a single open role, conduct all interviews and then make a decision from that candidate pool. Being towards the end might be an advantage in that case.
Other places open up several new roles, and conduct rolling interviews until all are filled. In this case I would rather get in early and compete for one of N positions instead of competing for the final one. With several similar roles open they could also decide which fits you the best and make the offer based on that. When there is only one junior position still open, that might be the only option.
Well, yeah. It works for A role. It wouldn't make sense to wait too long if there was a bunch. That said, at some point there's a decision to be made. The older their memory of you at that point, the more forgettable you are.
I think these are good points. Some of these really speak to the subjectivity of interviewing.
I'm currently interviewing for software development roles and it just seems like a lot of luck is involved, good or bad. Uber ghosted me a week ago after the recruiter missed our appointment. A few weeks before that, I completed a week long 'test project' and haven't heard back from them.
For such a technical field, there's too much bullshit involved in finding a job.
The round of interviews I just completed, everyone I talked to sent me a link to their calendar and asked me to pick my own time to meet. Even for the longer onsite interviews I provided times I was available and they scheduled within those.
I don’t know if that’s just a remote thing or what.
My driver's ed teacher gave me three pieces of advice:
1. Don't schedule your driving test right before lunch.
2. Don't schedule your driving test on a Friday afternoon.
3. Don't schedule your driving test on your birthday.
The first two were about not getting the interviewer at a time when they really have somewhere else they want to be. The last one was because it sucks if you schedule it on your sixteenth birthday and fail.
> Schedule subsequent interview rounds close to each other
Pre-covid, if you were not from the bay area, this happened naturally. You just tell the companies that you are traveling in the bay area in a given time frame and would like to schedule your interviews in that period. Not sure if post-covid it has become simpler.
Ah, I see! I guess this is more relevant to covid/post-covid times then due to the virtual nature of interviews. I did all my interviewing in the second half of 2020, and I had majority of interviews taking 3-4 weeks, which was a lot! I was even rejected a couple of times as the company just hired someone else and I hadn't even finished my interviews :/
But for the most part, you want to interview as soon as they can and if they have multiple rounds (phone, meet a manager, meet the team) you want to do them as quickly as reasonably possible. They have a position open, they want to fill it, if they hire you quickly, there will be no more competition. They don't want to interview any more people than they have to, so if you're right for the job, they'll hire you fairly quickly. If they aren't willing to schedule your interview fairly quickly, they aren't particularly motivated to fill the position (or have other candidates that they consider higher priority) and might not be worth your time.
When interviewing, remember that the interview is a two way street. Try to figure out what the job really is (the hr who posted position and phone screen people likely know much less about the actual job than the interviewers). If after finding out the details, you are genuinely interested in what they do and what you would do in the position, it'll keep the tone positive, even if you struggle. An underqualified, but motivated, candidate is much more interesting than a highly qualified but apathetic candidate.
Also, by keeping the interview as a conversation (trying to figure out if/how their questions relate to what they job is), you might get glimpses of feedback on how you're doing that you will almost certainly never get directly. This should help get you an idea of if it is going to be a good place to work or not.
If possible, show usages rather than tell qualifications. Rather than saying you can do X, tell a 10 second elevator pitch style story about how you've done it before. Try to have something to say about anything on your resume. They should come out confident that anything you claimed on it was actually you, not just "your team".
If they ask about something you are weak in, admit it, and try to see how they use it and try to offer related experience that shows you understand and are willing and able to learn it. They don't really expect to find a candidate that knows everything, but if you can demonstrate that you are familiar with the space enough to learn it, they'll be more willing to give you a pass.
If you totally fail at the interview but are genuinely interested and show the ability to learn it, you still have a chance. If you show disinterest or get defensive (rather than motivated) when challenged, they won't want to hire you.
If it isn't a good fit in your mind and you'd be looking for something better the day you start, be honest with yourself and them, thank them for their time and let them know that it isn't what you thought it was. A gracious interviewee who doesn't waste their time, may get called back if they have a position that better matches your interests (perhaps even if that interviewer moves to another company). If you accept a job and leave it fairly quickly, that's a big red flag and future employers will likely check that company for references.
- You will face rejection (likely a lot). Don't take this personally and don't let it affect your confidence.
- Unless you are an outstanding interviewee, this is like a skill/muscle which you need to develop and practice. Hence ensure that you don't schedule your "dream job/company" early in the process. Keep practicing.
- Always have a beginner / practice mindset. Otherwise, you will accept the first (suboptimal) offer that you get as you will hate the interview rigmarole. Interviewing is annoying / painful. Accept it and work through it.
- Keep applying and talking to companies even after you have started negotiations. There have been companies which have told me that another candidate accepted before me( and hence the position is no longer available) even when they have "granted me time" to make my decision. Similarly companies rescind offers.
- Blowing hot(too many interviews in a short while) and cold (no interviews / interviews for a while) can be debilitating to your confidence. Hence ensure that you have a pipeline of interviews so you are talking to at least 1 company a week.
- Take notes and reflect on your performance in each interview and how you can do better.