Everyone who’s tried to look for a job in the past few years know how crazy the market is; it’s changed so much since the pandemic started. More and more interview stages are being added, and hiring companies can afford to be pickier due to the larger number of people looking for and applying to new jobs.
Fortunately, one thing remains relatively predictable and standard in the hiring process: the first stage interview. This interview is sometimes also called a screening call. It’s often conducted by an HR person or talent acquisition person at the company.
A typical tech interview process can look like this:
A 30 mins first interview/screening call, usually with HR/TA.
A 30-60 mins hiring manager interview. The hiring manager is normally the head of the department/team that is hiring for this role. This could be a Head of Product, an Engineering Manager, a Director of Sales, or in smaller companies this can already be the CEO.
An in-depth case study or technical stage to assess the candidate’s expertise in the field. For engineering roles, this could be a live coding challenge or a take home test. For non-engineering roles, this could be a presentation stage where the candidate prepares in advance and presents in front of multiple interviewers.
A final stage interview. This could also be called a culture fit interview. Usually candidates are scheduled to speak to either potential teammates with similar seniority levels or adjacent job roles, or other leadership-level people who have veto power (C-levels, heads or directors).
Depending on the company and role, the actual interview process could have a few more or less stages. Some stages could be all scheduled in one day to make scheduling easier. For example, Amazon has 4 stages on paper but the last stage is the final interview loop that consists of another 4 separate interviews.
Let’s zoom in onto the first interview/screening call. Given that this is the first time the company is speaking to you, and that the interviewer is likely an HR or TA person that doesn’t have expertise in your field, the conversation will be less technical and more high level.
Here’s a typical agenda with example questions for the first interview:
Greetings and small talk
“Tell me about yourself”
Career experience overview
Follow-up questions about your relevant experiences
Behavioral questions
“What was the biggest challenge in your career as a…?”
“What was your biggest achievement?”
“Tell me about a time that you displayed leadership skills.”
“Tell me about a time that you facilitated great teamwork.”
Checking logistics such as location, visa, hours, salary expectations
Questions for the interviewer
30 mins is actually not a lot of time to go through all these agenda items. If your first interview is only scheduled for 20-25 mins, this likely means the interviewer won’t go so much in-depth and is only checking the basics.
You might say, I have answered all the questions above but I’m still not passing enough first interviews, what was wrong?
Well, answering the questions is one thing; answering the questions well is another thing. More importantly, the real decision for the interviewer is “Did this person impress me more than most other candidates?”. The goal is not to provide answers, the goal is to impress the interviewer.
In your answers, the interviewer will be looking for these things:
Motivation
Relevant skills and experiences that show you can do the job really well
A friendly future colleague
This is beyond “I want this job”. The interviewer should see that you’re genuinely interested in the company, this position, that you’ve done research on the company, you read the company website or the blog, and you have a good understanding of the kinds of challenges. Obviously we all need a job to pay rent and this company might not even be our top choice. But does the interviewer need to know that? Absolutely not. All you need to do is act like they’re your favorite company in the world.
Sometimes the interviewer might ask “Why are you interested in this job with us?”. Provide an answer that is unique to the company. If you swap out the company name in your answer with a different company, say Google, and if that answer is still coherent, your answer might not be good enough.
Even if the interviewer didn’t ask the question, you should make sure to bring up how much you’re interested and how you’ve done your research. They won’t assume you tick the box if they didn’t ask and you didn’t say.
The most common thing I see candidates do when asked about previous experiences and skills is to just list a number of things they did in the past, chronologically. This is not enough to show that you’re a better candidates than most.
For these questions, you should make sure to prepare and maybe rehearse your answers before. Choose the experiences and example projects most similar to what the job requires. If the job description mentioned certain tech stack, make sure to mention those same tech stack. Don’t worry if the HR person understands your industry jargon — they are often asked by the hiring manager to spot those jargon — flaunt your expertise in the field.
The behavioral questions like “What was your biggest achievement” are meant to invoke specific stories and examples from your relevant experiences. Simple answers like “I led this project” are not enough. Bring stories that are structured in the good ol’ STAR format: Situation, Task, Action, Result.
Here’s an example from Harvard Business Review on using the STAR method to answer “Tell me about a time you failed”:
Situation: As a sales representative, I was tasked with closing a major deal with a potential client. I had been working on this deal for several months and was confident that I had built a strong rapport with the client.
Task: My goal was to secure the deal, which would ensure that I met and exceeded my quarterly sales quota.
Action: I prepared a detailed proposal outlining the benefits of our product and tailored it to the client’s specific needs. Then, I met with the client’s decision-makers. During the meeting and presentation, the client raised several challenges that I didn’t anticipate and was unable to overcome.
Result: Despite my best efforts to follow up with the client after the meeting and provide answers to their challenges, I was unable to close the deal. It was a major setback, but I learned valuable lessons about negotiation and overcoming objections.
(Takeaways): I also learned that sales is a team effort. Since then, I have always presented my pitch to my colleagues and manager first and asked them to poke holes in it to help me anticipate and overcome any challenges. I hope to find the same level of collaboration on your team because I truly believe one person’s win is a team win.
In reality, I expect you as a candidate to be even more specific. For example, what was the size of the deal? What kind of customer was it? What was the quarterly sales quota? Why were you still unable to close the deal and what did the client say? Since the failure question is kinda negative, you’ll want to end on a high note to leave a good impression. If I were the candidate, I’d also add examples of later successes thanks to the lessons learned in this failure to show I’ve grown.
Sometimes you might get questions that you haven’t prepared for specifically. This is why a story bank is needed: recall multiple stories that could showcase your skills and structure them in the STAR format. You can even write them down in a story bank. This is important because many blank out in the middle of the interview. Or sometimes it’s just been so long that you can’t remember every single anecdote.
Don’t underestimate the power of being really nice! At the end of the day, interviewing is a conversation between two people. There’s no way the interview can be absolutely objective, and in practice it often is down to whether the other person likes you or not. Of course, they could like or dislike us for reasons outside of our control, but presenting ourselves as nice and friendly will give them less reasons to say no.
I know a lot of jobseekers use Gen AI tools in the interview process. It might be that English is not their first language or they’re not used to talking about themselves. However, I would strongly caution you against using Gen AI tools like ChatGPT.
Despite some companies having clear interview guidelines that allow candidates to use AI tools, if it’s not explicitly stated then it’s still considered cheating. I’ve heard plenty of nightmare stories where the candidate is caught using ChatGPT to generate answers live in the interview, and the interviewer catching on because they saw the reflection of the ChatGPT interface int he reflection of the candidate’s glasses (in case you’re wondering — that candidate was rejected).
Interviews are like exams. Prepare for them like you would for exams. Once you’re familiar with the typical structure, created your story bank, structure those answers, and even practice with family or friends beforehand.
If you want to see examples of what a good interview looks like, I strongly recommend checking out this mock interview video where the candidate answered behavioral questions well.
Additionally, check out Exponent’s YouTube channel. They interview people who currently work at Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and conduct mock interviews with them. This video is a good example to the “What is your proudest project” question with a software engineer.
Good luck and go nail those interviews!
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.